The Cape Cod Baseball League is the most revered collegiate summer baseball league in the country. Officially established in 1923, the league has seen over 1,250 former players go on to make it to Major League Baseball. Included in that number are Hall of Famers Frank Thomas and Craig Biggio as well as current superstars Aaron Judge and Paul Skenes. Seventeen former Cape League players were selected in the first round of the 2025 MLB Draft and the Cape Cod of Commerce estimates that one in every six major league players are Cape League alums. Despite a long history of success, some long-time observers have noticed a downturn in the quality of play that could alter the league’s place in the landscape of college baseball.
“It’s dying. The league is dying. It’s very, very sad,” said Erin Gillooly, the head athletic trainer and housing director for the Bourne Braves. “ I’ve been doing this for 18 years, and it’s not the same league that it was when I started. The talent this year was way down from what it used to be.” Factors including but not limited to NIL deals, the transfer portal, and an increase in the amount of money being invested into college baseball have impacted how willing coaches are to send their players to the Cape League and summer leagues in general.
Jamie Shevchik has been the manager of the Brewster Whitecaps for 11 years and the head coach at Keystone College since 2002. In his time with the Whitecaps, he has worked with major leaguers such as the Dodgers’ Will Smith and the Athletics’ Brent Rooker. Shevchik says it’s not the league changing, but rather the circumstances surrounding it.
“The league is still the same, it’s still the best amateur summer league in the world. Everything else around the Cape League has changed,” Shevchik said. “It used to be about the kids and what the kids needed to get an opportunity to play professional baseball. Now there’s a sense that it’s about protecting the investments of the college baseball programs.”
In early September 2025, Louisiana State University head coach Jay Johnson became the highest paid college baseball coach in the country with a year one salary of $3.05 million, according to a report from Baseball America. That just barely edged out the $3 million salary of Tennessee’s Tony Vitello. With the increased investment into winning, there’s also a growing desire to protect that spending and maintain the health and control of players.
“If you’re from a mid-major school and you’re sitting in the same dugout as a kid from Texas, and both players are really good, and the kid from Texas is making $400,000 a year in NIL money and you’re paying a mid-major $50,000 a year to go to school. You can’t help that mid-major kid from saying that I want more.” Shevchik also mentioned the trend of coaches leaving schools at “an alarming rate” for higher paying positions and noted that a player can’t be faulted for wanting to do the same.
Justin Willis played three seasons for the University of Connecticut and is the program’s all-time career leader in saves. The former Vanderbilt transfer also pitched two seasons in the New England Collegiate Baseball League and one in the Cape League. Willis transferred to UConn the same year that the college transfer portal rules were changed to allow athletes to transfer once without having to sit out a year to be eligible.
“Some of the guys that ended up being my teammates at UConn were like, ‘Yeah, [UConn Pitching Coach/Recruiting Coordinator Joshua MacDonald] was basically telling us, “Hey, keep getting this kid’s ear.”’ Now they don’t have to do that,” Willis said. College coaches have become a more prevalent presence at Cape League games in recent years, and the purpose of their visits has changed since the revisions to the portal.
“Six years ago, the only time a head coach at a Power Five or Power Four showed up on the Cape was to watch their current players play in the best summer league in the world,” Shevchik said. “Now they show up for one of two reasons. They show up to watch their player and protect that player and convince that player to stay at school, or they show up to try to get the next transfer.” Shevchik also mentioned that there has been an evolution of the demographic that is coming to scout the players on the Cape. What was once 25 MLB scouts ten years ago became a mix of scouts and advisors and finally a mix of scouts, advisors, agents and college coaches.
“We’ve taken away the commitment in college baseball, the loyalty in college baseball, and it’s trickling down to the Cape League,” Shevchik said. “You’re not getting the full scope of what the talent in (college) baseball is, right? Like, LSU won a national championship. I think there is only maybe three players that came out to the Cape after the World Series.”
LSU, who won the NCAA College World Series for the second time in three seasons in 2025, sent just six players who will feature on their 2026 roster to the Cape this past summer, not far off from Shevchik’s estimate. Only two out of the four pitchers had an innings total in the double digits. One of the two batters appeared in four games before going home. Three of the six players were gone by July 7 and only one stuck around until the end of the regular season. Shevchik says that part of the problem is the increased role of advisors who act as agents for the players. Advisors are not only advising their players to seek money in the portal and to talk to college coaches at the games, but also to just avoid summer ball as a whole in fear of potential injury.
“I don’t necessarily think the younger kids are gonna notice the talent drop off because, to them, they’re all their heroes. But when you get older and you get to those 10, 11, 12-year-old kids that want to play baseball, they’re gonna know that we don’t have the LSU stud, or the Mississippi State shortstop,” Gillooly said.
Another factor is that some players are disinterested in traveling far from home after spending four to five months on campus away from home. Burnout contributes to players wanting to use summer to recover. Willis noted that some players are unhappy with the conditions faced in summer ball, he also talked about the importance of the discomfort and how it’s the closest mimic to professional baseball and the lower levels of the minor leagues.
“You’re taking miserable bus rides with the same guys every day. You’re in, for the most part, pretty small towns. You kind of just got to figure it out and go about your days and figure out, okay, how quick can I get on my routine, what works, and do it with a brand-new team and a brand-new coach and people who don’t know you,” Willis said. Shevchik echoed the importance of discomfort in summer ball and talked about how scouts use it to determine how a player will react to the next level.
“You can’t replace competition. When somebody’s holding a baseball 60 feet six inches away from you, there’s no way that you can replicate that anywhere else in the world other than on the field,” Shevchik said. “Part of development is failing.”
Shevchik also talked about how the scouts on the Cape are evaluating players who they already know can be good players outside of their baseball talent. There is a major focus on their maturity and character.
“In my tenure, I don’t know if you can single handedly pick out one player that I’ve had that has been through the Cape League for a significant amount of time that went back to their college and had a worse year from the year before,” Shevchik said. While Shevchik believes the Cape will always receive high quality athletes, the aspect he is more concerned about is the involvement of the community. He mentioned his concern about host families in particular and the shrinking ability to form connections with players who aren’t interested in staying for a full season.
“It used to be that host families couldn’t wait to host kids because they’d develop those kids,” Shevchik said. “They attend weddings, they become so close that, you know, they go to visit them in college. So now they’re a host family, and you have six kids throughout the summer, you don’t have time to form that bond, that relationship. Why would you even want to do it? Now you’re just a glorified bread and breakfast. If the Cape League starts losing the host families because of this, then the league be in some serious jeopardy.”
Despite these concerns, Gillooly says that the potential problem is mitigated by the differing desires of host families. She says what is important is working with Bourne manager Scott Landers to figure out which players fit into each category and trying to make the best housing matches possible.
“ I genuinely believe that the reason Bourne wins so consistently,” said Gillooly. “It’s not necessarily because (Landers) gets the best talent, but because the players want to be there and want to stay. We don’t get that mass exodus at the end of July with players being over it and wanting to go home. Our players love their host family, they love our town, they love our community.” Former Bourne general manager Darin Weeks also talked about how big of an impact the team has on the Bourn community, and vice versa.
“When you look at a team like in a town like Chatham that has a lot of money and a lot of tourists, you know, you sort of feel like (towns like) Bourne and Wareham, they get the short of the stick a little bit,” said Weeks. “So, to see a team do well, it’s a real pride that we can really put a great product on the field that can deliver a championship to a town like Bourne.”
Weeks, who worked for Bourne from 2007 to 2024, also shared a story in which he recounted an older gentleman who ran into a former Bourne player who had returned to take in a game. That player had since reached the major leagues. The older man had no idea that he had become a major leaguer and just thought of him as a Bourne Brave.
“They’re not a Yankee or a Red Sox,” Weeks said. “It’s a funny dynamic sometimes. They just embrace the players as their own. They wear Bourne across their jersey and not Braves because we want to represent a town.”
The Cape League is in a transition period that has no set end point. To some insiders, the league is struggling to maintain its footing in the ever-changing landscape of college baseball and transfer portal. Still, it seems that the locals who share a community with these teams will keep the league alive through the connections they make with the players, whatever schools they may come from.
“We feel that you get a unique experience at the Cape Cod Baseball League; it’s baseball at its purest form,” Weeks said.