Baseball: Corey the crusher
In freshman season, Corey Collins grows into offensive force for Georgia
Corey Collins stepped into the left-handed batter’s box at Foley Field and readied himself for the next pitch.
As many lefty sluggers do, the freshman faced a shift with three defenders on the right side of the infield. He tried three times to spoil the shift, fouling a trio of balls off down the left field line.
The next pitch from Lipscomb’s pitcher sizzled in over the outside part of the plate. Collins extended and roped a line drive off the wall in left, cruising into second with a double.
College freshmen aren’t supposed to be able to do that. It illustrates Collins’ approach he trusts so much at the plate, a mentality that has led to him being Georgia’s best all-around hitter through the first month of the season.
That mindset predates his days in Athens. Dating back to his childhood, the people around Collins have always known he would be special.
Figuring things out
Collins grew up around Philadelphia. His father C.J. gave hitting lessons at a facility. He spent plenty of time there in his early days picking up the nuances of the game.
The Collins family moved to Georgia when Corey was still young, and he began playing travel baseball for the Georgia Jackets. While playing for the Jackets in the seventh grade, Collins drew the attention of North Gwinnett High School coach Ryan Moity, who saw the young star on video.
“His swing is really pure,” Moity said about what stood about the first time he saw Collins. “It’s really natural and it hasn’t changed much, honestly, since then. Obviously, he didn’t have much to change.”
The pair met for the first time when Collins came to North Gwinnett as a rising freshman. He looked the part physically, with a beautiful left-handed swing that players three-and-four years older than him would kill for.
However, the coaches were most impressed by Collins’ confidence and leadership. He came onto a team that had three senior leaders that are now playing college baseball — South Carolina’s Parker Coyne, Georgia Tech’s Jake Brace and North Georgia’s Cade Heil.
That core group had been eliminated early in the playoffs the season before. They knew that to get to the next level, they needed to embrace whoever would help them win games, regardless of age.
Enter Collins.
“He fell right in with them, and they welcomed him with open arms in the leadership part of it,” Moity said. “He would take juniors and seniors on the side when they were struggling at the plate as a freshman and mentor them and tutor them on mentality stuff, not just physical stuff. It was those things that you knew right away, he’s just different.”
Putting the team on his back
Collins split time as a freshman between catching, right field and first base. He primarily caught the next two seasons before playing first base in 2020 while recovering from surgery.
Early on in his career, he spent his at-bats hunting perfect pitches. If a ball missed the plate by even a fraction, he didn't swing. That can lead to strikeouts in high school baseball, where umpires often have more generous strike zones.
“‘I don’t just hammer strikes,’” Moity said of Collins’ evolving mindset. “He started to get pitched around as a sophomore and especially as a junior. He realized his plate coverage. He started hitting balls that weren’t strikes out of the ballpark.”
Collins is a rare breed, a hitter against whom pitchers have no place to hide. If they miss a spot, he’ll make them pay.
Even pitches that are usually unhittable aren’t safe. Once, Collins took a hand off his bat and asked for time from the umpire as the pitcher started to throw. The umpire ignored him, leaving Collins facing a fastball with one hand on the bat.
“The pitch was like midflight,” Moity said. “He put his second hand on the bat, ball was at his neck, it was probably an 86 mile an hour fastball, and he swung and hit if 400 feet onto the football field. It was unbelievable.”
From day one, Collins earned the respect of his teammates with his work ethic. Moity said he always showed up early and stayed late at the school to hit. In fact, the coach spent plenty of nights and weekends throwing to Collins at North Gwinnett’s field. When the coach couldn’t make it, Collins went alone and hit off a tee.
“Other people started to do the same thing,” Moity said. “In his freshman, sophomore, junior years before we got canceled his senior year, he got more and more people following him in there. Those three years, we hit like .365 as a team and won a lot of games. We were 30-plus wins in those three years he was here, each year. That’s a big part of it.”
In the batting cages, Collins constantly found something to work on. While most high school hitters go through the motions and move on to something else, North Gwinnett’s best player always made adjustments in the cage, waiting to apply it in the game.
That work showed up almost immediately in his high school career. As a sophomore against rival Lanier High School, Collins came to the plate against current LSU pitcher Zachary Murray with his team down 5-2. The left-hander took a two-strike 90 mile-per-hour fastball the other way, lining it over the left field fence for a game-tying homer.
“That’s our cross-town rival,” Moity said. “It was one of our biggest crowds of the year, five, six, 700 people. For him to do that as a sophomore, that’s one that sticks out to me.”
That clutch moment, reminiscent of his recent opposite-field double at Georgia, shows Collins’ approach. He knows what he wants to do, and he has the skills to spoil good pitches until the opponent makes a mistake. Collins waits until he gets an outside fastball to take to left field, or he reels in the pitcher until he receives an inside fastball to advance a runner.
Along with the technical side of the game, Collins also has awe-inspiring power. Moity recalled one batting practice session where he decided to throw until his slugger didn’t hit a ball out of the year.
Eleven consecutive home runs later, the coaching staff stood there with mouths agape.
“They’re out of any high school field,” Moity said. “It ain’t pop-ups, he’s driving the ball 400 feet. He would hit balls over the lights here. It was just fun to watch.”
Collins’ hard work culminated in a monster junior season. While batting .483, he belted a school-record 16 home runs and drove in 50 runs. He never stopped striving for perfection, Moity said, and that allowed him to torture opponents all season long.
Early on in their relationship, Collins told Moity he’d always dreamed of playing SEC baseball. The coach had once been sure that’s the path his star would take, but as he garnered more and more attention from pro scouts heading into his senior season, he became unsure.
“I will tell you that I got called every night by multiple teams for months,” Moity said. “It was every day, very, very detailed conversations. I can only imagine that he was at the top of a lot of people’s boards.”
Then, the Covid-19 pandemic struck. The 2020 MLB Draft contained just five rounds, and Collins was not taken.
That decision reaffirmed what had once been a certainty. Collins would realize his dream of playing SEC baseball, heading to Athens to play for the home-state Bulldogs.
A different stage
Ryan Webb has seen a lot during his time as a collegiate pitcher.
Heading into his senior season in 2021, he looked to be a lock for Georgia’s weekend rotation. During fall practices, however, he kept having problems with one particular freshman from Gwinnett County.
“(Collins) is a very balanced hitter,” Webb said. “He doesn’t really expose himself a whole lot in his at-bats, and he’s very calm. He’ll have a bad out, he’ll come in and he’ll be joking around in the dugout. He’s just very loose, but the moment he goes back in that box you know that he’s going to put a hurt on a baseball.”
Collins showed in the fall that he wasn’t an ordinary freshman. In two separate scrimmages, he went 3-for-3 at the plate.
When his first college spring rolled around, the freshman found himself hitting fifth as the designated hitter in the first game of the season against Evansville. In his debut, Collins went 3-for-4 and blasted his first career home run.
“We all knew that Corey’s going to be a middle of the order hitter, there’s no question about it,” Georgia coach Scott Stricklin said after that game. “Just as a freshman sometimes, you don’t want to put him in that three-hole to begin with. He’s going to hit in the middle of the order, no question about it.”
Collins batted cleanup the next game, and then slid into the three spot in the order for the next nine games. He has started all 16 games so far this season, one of only two Bulldogs with that distinction.
That’s impressive enough for a freshman. But Collins isn’t shooting to just be a lineup regular. He wants to be one of the best players on the field, and his stats are reflecting that through a month of college baseball.
“Now, he’s doing it on a different stage,” Moity said. “It’s the same player, he’s just growing up.”
Heading into SEC play, Collins leads the Bulldogs with four home runs and 16 RBI. He’s also third on the team with a .364 batting average, showing he’s an extremely well-rounded hitter.
Like most freshmen, he went through a bit of a slump early. He went 6-for-24 during a two-week stretch against Gardner-Webb and North Florida.
Staying cool as always, Collins didn’t panic. He figured it out, made adjustments and followed the slump with back-to-back 3-for-5 games. As Moity said, baseball is a game filled with failure. Collins knows that, and it allows him to rebound from rough outings.
“Sometimes you just get beat. I think that’s just what happened,” Collins said. “They were making really good pitches and I would swing at bad ones. I’ve just got to keep going. There’s always another at-bat, there’s always another swing. I just saw it that way. I looked at my swing, there was nothing really wrong mechanically. It was just more pitch selection and everything.”
Collins is doing things freshmen aren’t supposed to do. They’re not supposed to immediately slide into the heart of the order, and they definitely are not supposed to be arguably the best all-around hitter on an SEC team through one month of play.
Then again, Collins is used to performing above what his age might suggest, just like that double off the left field wall. He’s a man beyond his years, and he’s the pure hitter at the center of Georgia’s lineup for the foreseeable future.
“If I know him right now, his goal is in three years to be the number one pick,” Moity said. “That’s just who he is. He’s going every day to try to be the best player in the country so that he goes first. He’s never told me that, but that’s why he plays every day. That’s just his mentality. That’s just who he is.”