Ben Upton completed his playing career at Mercer University in 2017, but he was far from done with college baseball. With the help of Dimitri Kourtis, a fellow Mercer baseball alum, he started the 11.7 Podcast and accompanying website, 11point7.com [reporter Jack DeLongchamps rounds out the three-man team]. After trudging through COVID and its challenges along with the rest of us, 11.7 has continued to pick up steam, climbing past 50,000 Twitter followers and thousands of podcast downloads. Upton and his team are now into merchandise sales, video editing, the ever-popular mid-major power rankings and even college baseball gambling.
Ben Upton: I grew up right outside of Houston, and I remember my first game I ever went to, a 1999 Super Regional between Rice and Louisiana Lafayette in the Astrodome. Those guys might as well have been the Astros. My dad saw how much I enjoyed it, so that’s what we did every weekend. We’d go to mostly Rice games because we lived 25 minutes down the road. They were a national champion in 2003 and a real contender basically throughout Wayne Graham’s whole career.
Inside Pitch: So we could just talk about Townsend, Neimann, Aardsma and Joe Savery…
BU: Oh yeah. I remember telling my dad when I was 12 or 13 years old, “I just want to play division one college baseball, I don’t care about playing pro ball.” I was the kid that was in high school on Friday in computer class looking up the old “D1 Scoreboard” and Warren Nolan to see pitching matchups and try to figure out who this Tim Lincecum was with a mid-90s fastball and a 1.25 ERA and he’s how tall?
IP: And that passion carried all the way through your playing career at Mercer…
BU: It was getting better with the evolution of the internet, but there still wasn’t a lot of mid-major college baseball coverage on the national landscape. I remember always being so excited when Kendall Rogers would mention something about us or the Southern Conference. Honestly, I wondered how many other schools out there were just like Mercer.
But I love to talk college baseball, write about it, bring up different viewpoints and put a twist on it to resonate with casual fans or people that maybe want to get into the sport that don’t quite understand the landscape. And I love our very loyal following that is always trying to push us to do more.
They’ve helped us develop new season-long awards, and we have an expanded subscriber base that essentially becomes part of the team, receiving exclusive content, submitting podcast questions, and joining along for live shows.
We also started a weekend series pick’em contest where we select six series a week, keep standings and the winner gets to go on a trip with us to Vegas for the College World Series.
IP: How did you pull that off?
BU: We are only a three-man team, so we do have to turn sponsors away just because we can’t have somebody paying us to do something that doesn’t align with what we’re trying to do. But as it turned out, Circa Resorts and Sportsbook aligned really well with us.
IP: How do you navigate the extremely delicate college baseball gambling conversation?
BU: It’s something we talk a ton about, and really dissected when we made the decision to build a significant part of our brand around gambling. Now we make it very clear to coaches, players, really anybody and everybody, including our audience: we’re not pushing gambling stuff onto current players or coaches, period. And we stopped doing podcast interviews with them for that reason. We can’t be talking about betting lines and then kick it to an interview with a current coach—bad look.
But for better or worse, college baseball gambling is out there. It’s a niche that somebody is going to have a significant presence within eventually, so why not us? No one is out there arguing that gambling isn’t helping drive a new crowd to college baseball, right? And anytime there’s a new crowd of people and they’re looking for a place to go, you want to be able to capture that. The things you have to do on social media to separate yourself from the next guy…
IP: Rat race.
BU: Exactly.
IP: How long does Kyle Lewis [2016 Golden Spikes winner, 11th overall pick in 2016 MLB Draft, 2020 AL Rookie of the Year] stay at Mercer if he was a freshman in 2023?
BU: I was his roommate actually, and it’s safe to say he would’ve had some unbelievable opportunities after his All-American sophomore year. Of course I would never speak for him, but he’s basically a free agent making easy six figures, playing at a higher collegiate level and boosting his draft stock and signing bonus. Great for him obviously, but tough for the game.
IP: How fun is the Mid-Major Top 25?
BU: That’s by far my favorite thing to do, and I know it's Dimitri's favorite thing to do as well. We have our “special sauce,” a mixture of strength of schedule, winning games, and a big eyeball test from us. I have three TVs in one room and a laptop and a phone, and I usually have four to five games up at a time, and Dimitri’s the same way. And it’s crazy; every Sunday night when we release it, fans, players, coaches are calling, texting, DM’ing. There are a lot of intangibles and it’s not a complete numbers-based formula, right?
IP: What fan base gives you the most hell?
BU: Southern Miss, Louisiana-Lafayette and probably East Carolina, but all for different reasons. And to be clear, these are three of the best programs with the best fanbases in all of college baseball, without a doubt. But it doesn't matter what you say about them, there are going to be positives and negatives flying all around. But half of them give us hell because they’re upset about being ranked too low and the other half are, “We’re not a mid-major, quit calling us a mid-major!”
We do have to draw the line at “non-Power Five” versus (what used to be) “Power Five,” because that’s just the most black and white thing we can do. Of course, schools like those guys, UC Santa Barbara and Dallas Baptist are better than many—if not most—of those big-name schools.
IP: What’s it like dealing with current coaches, given your position?
BU: The coaches are awesome. They obviously know that when they’re talking with us that we are on their side. We’re not out to break any news, we just want to showcase these programs and their renovations, construction projects, new uniforms, and more.
They’re busting it every day, fighting an uphill battle, especially at most of these setups. And they want to make sure that their programs are painted in the right light, and we love that. We’re all former ballplayers and that goes a long way, but once they know we’re never going to turn our backs on them or make them look bad or anything like that, it allows us to just have positive vibes everywhere.