When he was in his prime, Mo Vaughn intimidated opposing pitchers.
Now the Boca Raton man is towering over players on his 8-Under Boca Raton Pawsox baseball team.
Vaughn, who played 13 seasons with the Boston Red Sox, Anaheim Angels and the New York Mets, batted .293 for his career with 328 home runs and 1,064 RBIs.
He was a three-time All-Star and American League MVP in 1995 when he also was the AL RBI leader and won the Silver Slugger Award. He was inducted into the Sox Hall of Fame in 2008.
Nicknamed the “Hit Dog,” he hopes to craft future baseball players. After starting out with his son Lee’s T-Ball team, he has formed the Mo Vaughn baseball academy on the Boca Raton/Delray Beach line. His son went from playing a nine-game recreational baseball season to a 97-game travel season last year.
“Through my son Lee playing T-Ball and some other things, I started my own travel team,” Vaughn said. “I now have three teams, the 8U team and also an 11U and 12U team. In line with that, I have the Mo Vaughn Baseball Academy.
“It’s kind of funny,” he said. “We had the T-Ball team, and then I picked an All-Star team and we wound up coming in second in the state tournament. But we didn’t practice because it rained, and I was so frustrated with that that I decided to acquire a space and turned that into a 40×90 batting cage and facility.”
Vaughn said the initial thought was the facility would ensure that his team never missed practice due to inclement weather. That morphed into clinics for pitching, defense, hitting, advanced defense and another for general skills. The clinics, for children ages 5 to 12, run from Mondays to Saturdays from 4 to 7 p.m.
“The whole idea was from coaching the 7U team, now 8U was that nobody really works hard with the young kids,” said Vaughn, whose 8U team will take the field in an upcoming Labor Day tournament. “I wanted to make sure that wasn’t the case. The earlier you start them, the less bad habits you have to break.
“This year, the 8U team competed in the USSSA (United States Specialty Sports Association) World Series in Alabama and came in second place,” Vaughn said. “They did very well. These young guys are like sponges and if you show them something early enough, they can get it. If you create great work habits and great work ethics, then you got something. I am back in the game at that level and I love that part of it. It’s been great for me and I am where I need to be.”
Vaughn admits a select few players could become Major League Baseball players, but he is hoping to teach them life lessons.
“I am not here to babysit,” he said. “We do things that are functional that you can take to the field. We are here to teach you the right way with the right technique and baseball is all about reps. There is no magic formula here. If you learn it right the first time and you continually do it, that’s how you get better at it.”
Among the most gratifying things that have happened to Vaughn since he came full circle back to coaching is watching the improvement in the players. When he took over the 7U team last August, it made steady progress to reach the World Series.
“That’s the best part of it,” Vaughn said. “We as coaches have to have the solution. When they aren’t swinging well, they know. We don’t need to remind them of that, we need to give them the solution to get them going.
“Baseball is a long haul,” he said. “It is a long, hard haul of a process and you have to be consistent or you can get frustrated. I remember going to the big leagues and there were things I was not prepared for because nobody coached me. I can teach them from the experiences I had.”
Vaughn said baseball can break you if you are not mentally prepared. He said players will struggle and players will fail.
“How you deal with that will determine how much success you have in this game,” he said.
Visit MoVaughnBaseballAcademy.com.
