By Merv Moore
Sports Director & Head Baseball Coach
Let’s get one thing straight right from the start: I’m a selfish coach.
I didn’t leave Europe—dismayed by part-time baseball and the endless behind-the-scenes BS with housewives as “clueless” club presidents—to come to Bohol and hold hands. I was proud of what we built in Switzerland. When I arrived in 1993, Swiss baseball was a joke. Six years later, the national team was a legitimate B-Pool contender. We did that in a part-time environment, which is baseball purgatory for a coach with ambition.
But ambition, if you’re honest about it, is just another word for selfishness. I want to test myself in a full-time environment. I want to know if I can develop top teenage baseball prospects.
And that’s why I’m arriving in Bohol next month with funds and a dream. Because I believe, with every fiber of my being, that the Philippines is the world’s forgotten “hot” spot for undiscovered baseball talent.
Look at the history books. The only reason this country is behind Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in baseball is money. Pure and simple. When everything was equal at the first Asian Baseball Championship in 1954, the Philippines won the tournament. Over 17,000 Filipinos packed the stands to watch that championship game. Seventeen thousand! That fire is still here. It’s just been starved of fuel.
I see the parallels with the Dominican Republic every single day. In the DR, MLB has invested hundreds of millions of dollars. They’ve built academies, they’ve created a pipeline. The result? A tiny Caribbean nation produces more big leaguers than almost anywhere else on earth. Why? Because the athlete is the same: raw, hungry, and mentally tough.
And that’s where my selfishness meets something bigger.
I laugh when people say golf is the hardest game. Please. That little ball is not moving. In baseball, you fail as a hitter 70 to 75 percent of the time. If you can’t handle failure, if you can’t walk to the plate with the weight of a 0-for-15 slump on your shoulders and still believe the next pitch is getting crushed, you will never succeed. The mental aspect is everything.
I majored in Psychology in college, and I’ve spent my career applying it. I’ve coached kids all over the world, and I’ve never seen mental toughness like I see in young Filipino athletes. They’ve been described as the happiest poor people in the world, and there’s a painful truth in that. They have a fighting spirit inside them—a “diskarte”—that is uniquely Filipino. It’s a resilience you can’t teach.
It’s easy to win when your roster overflows with talent. Any coach can do that. The real job, the fun job, is development. It’s taking a kid with potential and showing him how to become elite. When a young kid experiences success for the first time—when he strikes out a batter or hits a line drive because of something you taught him—that’s when the magic happens. That’s when they start believing. And when they believe, they become unbreakable.
So yes, I’m selfish. I feel a twinge of guilt because my grand plan is as much about my own ego as it is about their futures. I want to know if I have what it takes to develop a legitimate MLB superstar. I want to see if I can build a pipeline not just to the MLB, but to the NPB, the KBO, and the CPBL. I want to prove that this forgotten baseball nation can produce elite prospects.
But here’s the thing about selfishness: it can be a hell of a motivator. Because to satisfy my own ambition, I have to give everything to them. Me and Lerma have dedicated our lives to providing these kids opportunities—academic and athletic—that can literally change their futures. My selfish goal of finding out if I can develop a superstar is the very thing that will drive me to make sure every single kid in this program gets a chance.
By 2028, the Coconuts will have several All-Star teams ready to compete in Manila. And when we step on that field, people will start to notice. They’ll see the talent. They’ll see the mental toughness. And they’ll wonder where it came from.
I’ll know. It came from a bunch of mentally tough kids and one selfish coach who just couldn’t wait to get started.
I cannot wait to start training these kids. The results won’t take long.
