Meet Jake Hanley’s Toughest Critic: Himself

Jake Hanley sat in a conference room at Mason High School in southwest Ohio with his parents and head baseball coach Curt Bly for a meeting that lasted less than an hour.

Hanley was in eighth grade. Already well over six feet, he swallowed the chair he sat in. He was already bigger, stronger and better than just about everyone he played with or against.

As they discussed Hanley’s future and whether he would stay at Mason or explore private school options, Bly asked a simple question: What were Hanley’s goals for his freshman year?

Hanley didn’t hesitate. He said he hoped to make the junior varsity team. Bly, bluntly, told him he should probably set his expectations a bit higher. 

Hanley grinned. His dad, Todd, laughed. 

“His humility, I think, outweighed his understanding of who he could be as a player,” Bly said.

As a freshman, Hanley made the varsity team. He started right away, splitting time between first base, the corner outfield and designated hitter, and hit in the middle of the lineup from the beginning of his high school career.

But the gap Bly saw that day in that conference — between what Hanley was and what he allowed himself to believe he was — has never fully gone away.

Over five years later, not much about Hanley’s reality has changed. 

The same eighth grader who once hoped to simply make a junior varsity roster as a freshman is now the reigning Big Ten Freshman of the Year — a .328 hitter through his first two seasons at Indiana, approaching 100 career RBIs, a fixture in the middle of the lineup and a surefire 2027 MLB Draft pick.

Hanley understands all of that. He just doesn’t always let himself live in it.

For Hanley, success has never been something to settle into. It’s something to chase. Something to maintain. Something he doesn’t always let himself hold onto.

“I was brought up in a household where success is expected in school and sports and life,” Hanley said.

That mindset didn’t start in Bloomington. 

Hanley remembers sitting in a sixth-grade classroom, staring down at a history test he had just gotten back. 

He got a “B.”

At the time, it didn’t register any differently than Shakespearean tragedy. Not in his mind. Not in that moment. He started tearing up at his desk, unable to separate the grade from something worse.

Later, his mom told him he’d be fine. That he’d survive what, at the time, felt like something much bigger than it was.

Growing up, those moments weren’t uncommon.

There were at-bats in T-ball where frustration spilled over. A helmet thrown. Tears after getting out. Even as the biggest kid on the field or the strongest player in the lineup, there was never an allowance to coast. Not from himself, and certainly not from his parents.

There were car rides home that weren’t always quiet. Conversations that, at the time, didn’t always feel easy. But looking back, Hanley understands what his parents were building.

“They’ve always been super, I wouldn’t say hard on me, but they’ve always pushed me to be better,” Hanley said. “They knew what they were doing, and they set me up well. I can’t thank them enough for doing that.”

“I might have hated them sometimes when I was 12.”

That environment shaped him. The work, the edge, the expectation. But it also created something harder to manage. In a game where failure comes more frequently than success, that failure wasn’t allowed.

By the time Hanley arrived at Mason High School, there was no hiding what he was. Bly knew it before Hanley ever played a game.

He had seen him in middle school — a long, wiry kid, moving differently than everyone else, the ball coming off his bat with a sound that didn’t match his age. It wasn’t just louder. It was cleaner. More pure.

Still, there was a moment early on that removed any doubt.

It came on opening day of the 2021 season. It was a 50 degree afternoon in late March as Mason — the largest high school in Ohio — took on Archbishop Moeller, one of the top programs in the state.

Hanley, a freshman, stepped into the box for his first varsity at-bat. He wasted no time lacing a standup double to right-center field. Bly believes it may have come on the first pitch.

There was no reaction or celebration. No pause to take it in. Hanley simply removed his elbow guard and got ready to run the bases, as if it were expected.

From that point on, the lineup card never really changed. Hanley started immediately, hit in the heart of the order for four years and produced at a level that often outpaced the competition around him.

But even as the results stacked up, the internal standard never changed. 

“He has tremendously high expectations and expects himself to be successful,” Bly said. “That’s always been him.”

In high school, it didn’t show up in the way most people might expect. There was no chasing numbers. No fixation on home run totals or stat lines. The pressure Hanley carried was quieter, more internal, more centered on impact, on winning, on whether he had done enough to help his team win.

And when he felt like he hadn’t, he felt it.

Even as one of the most physically gifted players on the field — a “man child,” as Bly described him — Hanley never allowed himself to operate that way. He showed up and worked the same way every day. 

“It was never, ever a tough thing to coach Jake Hanley,” Bly said.

That consistency made him easy to trust. It also made him harder on himself than most.

For as dominant as Hanley was, and is, at the plate, there was another version of him that, for a long time, looked just as — if not more — certain.

On the mound, Hanley was overpowering.

As a senior at Mason, he pitched in three postseason games en route to a state title — two one-hitters and one no-hitter, with double-digit strikeouts in each outing.

The most memorable performance came in the state semifinals against Perrysburg.

Hanley hurled seven shutout innings and allowed one hit. In the top of the seventh, he drove in the lone run of the game to, quite literally, send Mason to the state championship game nearly single-handedly.

Bly called it a culmination of a high school career in which Hanley cemented himself as “probably the greatest player that’s ever played at Mason.”

Still, between the 21 outs recorded without allowing a run and the double-digit strikeouts, one moment sticks with Hanley more than anything else.

The lone blemish.

He remembers the lone hit he surrendered like it was yesterday, a single to center field in the fourth inning that “wasn’t hit very hard.”

That’s always been Hanley. The one moment that didn’t go right tends to linger more than everything that did.

By the time Hanley’s high school career came to a close, the next step had long since been decided.

Hanley had been in contact with Indiana head coach Jeff Mercer since he was in middle school. They often talked about family, about life and, at times, Hanley’s performances on the basketball court.

By the time Hanley committed in the fall of his sophomore year, the decision felt less like a leap of faith and more like a continuation — a place where he already understood the expectations and the people behind them. 

Out of high school, there was a real argument to be made that Hanley’s future wasn’t in the batter’s box. Even when he arrived at Indiana, that idea didn’t completely go away.

Hanley pitched during the fall of his freshman season in Bloomington. His fastball climbed into the mid-90s, touching around 96 miles an hour.

To some, it felt obvious. To Hanley, it didn’t.

Part of it was practical. There simply wasn’t enough time in the day to develop multiple facets of the game at once at the level he expected from himself.

Bullpens meant missed reps at first base. Time on the mound meant less time in the cage. And slowly, Hanley felt it. Not in what he was doing, but in what he wasn’t.

Halfway through the fall, Hanley went to Mercer, after a conversation with hitting coach Zach Weatherford, and told him he wanted to focus on hitting.

At first, it wasn’t permanent. The plan was to revisit pitching later.

They never did.

Because the deeper reality was harder to ignore. Part of it, Mercer came to understand, wasn’t just about time or workload. There was a level of uncertainty on the mound, too.

Even with a mid-90s fastball, Hanley wasn’t entirely convinced he could be as good on the mound as he needed to be. Pitching, as Mercer saw it, also came with a different kind of cost. A different kind of risk. A shorter window.

Choosing to pitch at the collegiate level isn’t just about ability. It’s about durability. It’s about health. It’s about, in many ways, making a bet on how long your arm is going to hold up. 

Hanley chose the path that gave him more control over his future. One built on consistency and certainty. 

He chose to hit.

The results immediately justified the decision. Hanley didn’t just find a role at Indiana. He became the middle of it.

As a true freshman, he hit .333 with 14 home runs and 52 RBIs, starting every game at first base and helping anchor the lineup almost immediately. 

But success, for Hanley, has never eliminated the pressure. If anything, it sharpens it.

The start of Hanley’s sophomore season didn’t come as easily. Through the first seven games of the season, the production lagged. The swings felt close, but not clean. The timing was just a tick off.

Hitting .172 entering a midweek road game at Xavier in late February, Hanley walked into the visitors dugout and saw his name moved down to the six hole.

There was no pushback. Just acceptance. Because for Hanley, the standard doesn’t change. Not when things are going well, and not when they aren’t.

“I figured it was coming,” Hanley said. “To be honest, I was playing pretty bad. It was completely warranted.”

His first at-bat that afternoon ended the same way far too many had early in the season. A strikeout.

For a player wired the way Hanley is, those moments don’t just pass. They can linger. 

“There are times where I’ll just tell him, you’re a human on Earth,” Mercer said. “There are times where you do have to kind of pull him aside and be like, as long as you’re doing everything you can, that’s all you can do.”

But that day didn’t stay that way.

Hanley finished the afternoon with three hits and three RBIs, pushing his average back above .230 — a number that has steadily climbed since.

MORE: From a different spot in the lineup, Jake Hanley finds his swing in win over Xavier

Nevertheless, those reminders from coaches and teammates are still sometimes necessary.

There was a moment during the 2025 season, a first inning strikeout against Penn State left-hander and future 12th-round MLB Draft pick Ryan DeSanto, that helped change Hanley’s mental approach.

After striking out, Hanley walked back to the dugout, frustrated.

Former Hoosier outfielder Devin Taylor met him there. He put an arm around Hanley and told him something Hanley still thinks about. 

Taylor told him the strikeout didn’t matter. He told him to go get the next one.

In his next at-bat, Hanley drove a double to left-center, bringing in two runs. In that moment, Hanley felt a release. 

Something that had followed him for years — the weight of failure and missed opportunities — started to loosen.

“After that, it was like I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders,” Hanley said.

That weight is still there. That doesn’t go away. But it’s different now. More controlled. More understood.

For as long as Hanley has held himself to a standard that rarely allowed for failure, he’s also began to understand something else.

“Now, it’s just — a play happens, you forget about it, move on, and good things are ahead.”

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