Ivy League Aggies

On February 16, the grandstands of Blue Bell Park were decorated with a cloak of red, white and blue bunting, a piece of Americana which serves to signal it is opening day for baseball.

The same day, the Aggies’ starting lineup was decorated with a little bit of ivy.

The preseason buzz around Aggieland rightfully centered around sophomore sensation Jace LaViolette, freshman phenom Gavin Grahovac and All-American transfer Braden Montgomery. But A&M’s opening day lineup also featured a pair of former All-Ivy League players who have proved to be an integral part in the head-turning campaign.

Penciled into the leadoff spot was Jackson Appel, a catcher who enjoyed a four-year playing career with the Penn Quakers. Batting cleanup and playing in left field was two-year Columbia standout Hayden Schott. The pair have helped Texas A&M produce one of the best starts in school history. After two months, the Aggies are 25-3 overall, including a 17-0 start.

Appel has played in 26 games, including 20 starts. He is batting .338 with 15 runs, six doubles, one triple, three home runs and 15 RBI.

“Jackson has a real professional approach as a hitter,” assistant coach Michael Earley said. “He works good counts. He has some power with a lot of doubles and can hit it out of the park. He’s just really a complete hitter and a big asset in our lineup.”

Meanwhile Schott has started all 28 games, also seeing action at designated hitter along with his time in the outfield. He is batting .297 with 19 runs, six doubles, three home runs and 25 RBI. He wasted no time delivering Olsen Magic with a walk-off single in a 10-inning win against Rhode Island.

“When Hayden is at his best, he can be a complete hitter,” Earley said. “He is great at situational hitting. He really works the count. He’s really good at working the gaps for doubles.”

For Appel and Schott, the transfer process has a much different vibe than for others experiencing the Division I move. The Ivy League does not allow graduate students to participate in athletics. Both players hit the portal prior to their final season in the Northeast and had coaches eager to help them find a good landing spot.

“I owe just about everything I’ve done in college baseball to my coaches at Columbia,” Schott said. “Head coach Brett Boretti and assistant Dan Tischler, who is now at Boston College, are the reason I am where I am. The fact they were fully supportive of me coming here is such a weight off my shoulders. It’s kind of like them blessing me to come here.”

“We all text each other,” Appel said. “There’s a bunch of guys doing good. We have two guys playing each other this weekend so there’s a lot of smack talk in the group chat about facing each other. But everybody at Penn has been very supportive of us at our new schools.”

The pair had the opportunity to play after their Ivy League days because redshirt years resulting from Covid. The pandemic took away baseball on the front end, but is offering more on the back end.

At Penn, Appel made just one appearance, without an at-bat, when things were shut down just eight games into the 2020 campaign. The Quakers’ 2021 ledger included just 14 games without leaving Philadelphia, including nine games against a La Salle squad being cut after season. Despite the dearth of baseball in 2021, Appel had no thoughts of leaving.

“I wanted to make sure I got my education there,” Appel said. “I loved it. I made a lot of great friends there.”

Schott redshirted his 2019 freshman year at Cypress College in Southern California and then Covid ended 2020 after just 19 games. He transferred to Columbia where the Lions never embarked on a 2021 season.

With the pandemic in the rearview mirror. The pair burst on the scene in 2022, both taking home All-Ivy League recognition. 

Appel claimed second-team all-league distinction as a catcher. He batted .346 with 48 runs, nine doubles, seven home runs, 29 RBI and six stolen bases as he led the Quakers to a 33-15 overall record and 17-4 mark in conference play. 

Not to be outdone, Schott was a unanimous first-team all-league choice. He hit .320 with 44 runs, 18 doubles, 12 home runs and 55 RBI for the Lions. Columbia matched Penn’s 17-4 mark in the Ivy League and posted a 32-18 overall record.

The 2022 Ivy League champion was decided in a best-of-three series between the top two teams – Appel’s Penn and Schott’s Columbia. The Quakers took the opening game, but Schott accounted for two runs and three hits in the next two games as Columbia stormed back to win the title and NCAA Tournament bid. The Lions made noise at the Blacksburg Regional with two wins over then-No. 14 Gonzaga before being eliminated by host Virginia Tech.

Despite getting the upper hand at the 2022 Ivy League Championship Series, Schott doesn’t have much opportunity to brag about it with Appel.

“We got them in 2022 and were champions,” Schott said. “But they got us the next year. We kind of have an agreement. I won’t bring mine up if you don’t bring up yours.”

In 2023, the Ivy League moved to a four-team double elimination tournament. Penn outscored Columbia by a combined tally of 26-14 to sweep the three-game regular-season finale series before topping the Lions 10-6 to start a run through the league tournament.

“It’s pretty cool that we both got an Ivy League title and got to play in a regional at our old schools,” Appel said. “We were definitely the two best teams those two years.”

Both players knew they were coming to Texas A&M prior to their last Ivy League seasons, making their commitments on the tail end of 2022. 

Following the 2022 season, the Aggies were tasked with filling the void left by Troy Claunch behind the plate. After an anticipated transfer catcher had a change of heart, the Maroon & White entered that fall with then-17-year-old freshman Max Kaufer and junior college transfers Hank Bard and JD Gregson battling for the role. The staff knew no matter how the catchers fared in 2023 they wanted to add a veteran backstop. 

The Aggie coaches also envisioned needing outfielders with the impending departure of Brett Minnich and Jordan Thompson following the 2023 season. Associate head coach Nolan Cain identified Appel and Schott as high-quality prospect to fill the roster spots. Their talent level not only factors into what is now regarded as the top transfer class in the country, but it also helped make the process of landing the other outstanding players that much easier.

“They went in the portal as grad transfers in the fall,” Cain said. “The transfer portal after the season is crazy. It’s like 45 days of just pandemonium. We knew with what we would probably lose following the ’23 season that we would probably add six or seven guys at least. So when Hayden and Jackson became available early, we were like, why wouldn’t we just go ahead and get this done now. It definitely made the rest of the transfer process easier for us, because instead of trying to work on six or seven guys that next summer we were just working on four or five.”

Like the Oak Ridge Boys, the Ivy League tells graduate school athletes, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” For Appel, the choice was to go home. A native of Houston, who prepped at Memorial High School, he did not have many offers in places in the south. When the offer came from Penn, it was an opportunity to continue his baseball career at a premier academic institution it was an opportunity he could pass up.

No stranger to Blue Bell Park, Appel came to some games in elementary and middle school and his high school career had a year crossover with Christian Roa, so he came to see his former teammate pitch a few games for the Aggies.

Appel and his Quaker teammates made their own Olsen Magic in their opening series of 2022. In Coach Schlossnagle’s second series as the A&M head coach, Penn took two of three from the Aggies. In the opener, Appel scored the winning run in the eighth inning of a 2-1 victory. After Texas A&M evened the series, Penn scored five runs in the ninth inning of the finale to escape Aggieland with an 8-5 victory.

“That was awesome,” Appel said. “Coming off Covid, that was sort of our first real series playing in two years. That was our chance to show what we had going up there. And I guess maybe that was a good wake up call for Texas A&M because they went on to have a special year that year.”

For Schott, playing at Texas A&M was more of a leap of faith. He grew up in Newport Beach, California, watching Big West Conference baseball and then prepped at Culver Military Academy. By chance, he spent played 2021 summer ball with Aggies Jordan Thompson and Trevor Werner on the Walnut Creek Crawdads of the California Collegiate League.

“I stayed in touch with them after that season,” Schott said. “When I was in the portal, they were very positive about Texas A&M and the coaching staff. I trusted them from being around them that summer, so when they were telling me about the great team culture that Coach Schlossnagle builds I knew it was real.”

With their decisions made, Appel and Schott were able to concentrate on just playing baseball their final year in the Ivy League.

“It was fun to watch them play all last year,” Cain said. “They played their games early out there, so we’d be able to watch them play. And during the season their twitter handle would be like, “Hayden Schott, Number 22, Columbia Baseball, Texas A&M 2024.”

The duo didn’t take a step back in 2023. They again landed on the All-Ivy League. This time Appel was the first-teamer while Schott was named to the second team. Schott hit .33 with 45 runs, 16 doubles, two triples, 11 home runs and 31 RBI. Appel batted .300 with 50 runs, 13 doubles, five triples, four home runs and 41 RBI as Penn rolled to a 34-16 season and the aforementioned Ivy League title. 

Penn came one game away from a Super Regional appearance in 2023 sparked by a night to remember from Appel in the opening game against regional host Auburn. He batted 3-for-4 with a two-run home run in an 11-inning, 6-3, victory over the Tigers. Appel followed with a two-hit performance against Samford the next day in a 5-4 victory before the Quakers lost a pair of games to regional champion Southern Miss.

While their interactions during their two years in the Ivy League were limited to Schott’s at-bats with Appel playing catcher, they have formed fast friendship in Aggieland where they are roommates along with Jace LaViolette, Evan Aschenbeck and Troy Wansing.

“We have a lot of fun at that house,” Appel said. “It’s funny because our teams were rivals the last three years we’ve been playing and now we’re living together and like best friends.”

Among other things, the duo bonds over their disdain for Harvard.

“We both don’t like Harvard,” Schott said. “The Harvard guys are just something else. I don’t think I’ll ever like Harvard.”

Thanks to the world of social media, fans can see their friendship in action with the emergence of an off-day ritual. The pair spearheads a group of Aggies who take to Olsen Field for a bit of fungo golf, a game where the players hit their way to various targets throughout Blue Bell Park.

“We had been doing it forever, but one day we decided we should film it,” Schott said. “It started out on TikTok, but decided we needed to get it on Twitter to show people what we do. We have a great filmer, Bruce Landry, who captures all the action.”

The impact the pair has made has been huge. With the Aggies’ returning catchers combining to hit .198 in 2023, Appel’s bat was a sight for sore eyes. Meanwhile Schott has added length to the lineup as an outfielder and designated hitter that doesn’t allow pitchers to breath after working through the explosive minefield of Grahovac, LaViolette, Montgomery, Michigan transfer Ted Burton and Appel.

Texas A&M is off to a 6-3 SEC start with series victories over Mississippi State and Auburn. Appel is hitting .324 in league series with five runs, three doubles, one triple, one home run and five RBI. Schott is hitting .267 with six runs, one home run and three RBI.

In addition to his bat, Appel has proved to be a solid defensive catcher. He handles a pitching staff that leads the nation with six shutouts.

“He’s a super calm presence,” Cain said. “He’s super intelligent and he’s a really talented receiver. He’s got really good hands. He’s solid all the way around. He’s a really good throw, has a really good transfer and he’s a good blocker.”

Appel is taking advantage of the resources Texas A&M to improve his game and his prospects as a pro.

“I’ve gained some weight and some strength,” Appel said. “I’ve really been able to put on and keep some of that weight which I think is helping me so far throughout the year with not only the power numbers, but just staying healthy and not wearing out.”

While their ability to compete in the SEC may be news to the casual observer, it didn’t surprise the Aggie coaching staff.

“You have to give credit to their coaches,” Schlossnagle said. “The coaches at Columbia and Penn did an awesome job. These guys know how to play. They’re obviously smart, but baseball-wise they’re really intellectual. They’ve been around the block and then they came here, and they have all the resources of an SEC school and they get even better as players.”

NOTE: Season statistics reflect games completed prior to April 2nd.