Nelly Taylor & Stanley Tucker

What does that mean when you're drafted together? Does the Red Sox draft class come together? Do you guys go through kind of that introductory stuff together?

Uh, yeah.

You know, we get drafted.

We're still at wherever we're at.

We're at home or whatever.

And then they fly us out into the spring training facility.

And that's kind of our first time seeing each other, first time meeting each other.

I still remember Nelly walking in in all black, you know, black fit, ready to go.

But I think from that moment on, the first day we saw each other, me, Nellie, Christian, Christian Campbell, we all got pretty tight.

And ever since then, it's been a pretty good relationship.

So you both came up through college through junior colleges.

What do you think is maybe some misconceptions about playing baseball at a junior college?

That is not good baseball or that the competition is less.

I would say my first year coming out of high school, I struggled a little bit and didn't do as good as I thought I would do just because I had that same mindset of like, oh, I expect to do so good.

But with COVID happening, that left a lot of guys, you know, giving them back an extra year.

So it was like, You're playing against older guys that really aren't sophomores, but eligibility-wise, they are sophomores.

So you're playing against older guys, and now the JUCO rules, and it's such an advantage on guys developing and wanting to get drafted after doing one year compared to going to a Division I school.

like a big SEC you gotta do three years whereas if you go Juco you can do one year and be done get drafted the next year so I'll say the competition level for me is like one misconception about it

yeah I think for me I love I love the Juco route, the school that I went to, New Mexico Junior College out in Hobbs.

They do it right.

And just going there, playing against, I think that was my first introduction to international players.

We had a lot of international players.

And just being able to go out there and compete with guys from all over the world, I think that was just eye-opening for me.

Not only just going into college and competing against the older guys and great competition at the time, but Just that international aspect of playing against and with people from Dominican Republic and Italy and Australia, all of that, it was pretty cool.

Honestly, it was a step above, of course, like I said, high school.