Forged by FAU - Todd Moser
12/13/2020
“FAU was very good to me. There [are] such good people over there. And trust in the coaching staff and how they treat their players and what they want to do as a program, they’re one of the best coaching staffs in the country, by far.Said Todd Moser
Todd Moser had clear reasons to come to FAU in 1998. Chief among them: his strong relationship with then-assistant and now head coach John McCormack, and the Boca Raton campus’ close proximity to Broward County, where he and his family resided.
The Owls being an offensive juggernaut was a bonus.
“It was one of those things where they were scoring 12 runs a game,” Moser said, “[so] I could give up 11 and win.”
Moser, a transfer from the State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota, knew he was entering a good situation at FAU. But he didn’t know how good.
In 1999, Moser’s senior season, he found out. FAU won a NCAA record-tying 34 straight games. Moser led the nation with a 2.34 ERA, went 15-0, struck out 130 and earned NCAA All-American honors. To this day, the left-hander is FAU’s record holder in single-season wins and strikeouts and he is a member of both the FAU Athletics Hall of Fame and the FAU Baseball Hall of Fame.
“It was pretty surreal,” Moser said of the 1999 season, one in which his Owls bested his brother’s 29-game win streak at UCF (1995). “That was, honestly, the best team I ever played with, team-wise.”
At FAU, Moser played alongside teammates he considered family and won at the highest level. He also learned a skill that defined his life for the next decade-plus. Pitching coach Bob Deutschman taught Moser how to throw a changeup, something Moser says “really took my game to the next level and helped me tremendously at the next level.”
Moser’s immaculate senior season vaulted him to that next level. The Florida Marlins selected Moser in the 14th round of the 1999 MLB June Amateur Draft, his first step in an eventual 12-year professional career.
A former five-time minor-league All-Star, Moser pitched in the Marlins, St. Louis Cardinals and Cleveland Indians organizations. He also competed in Taiwan, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
“I got to see some amazing places, I got to travel the world,” Moser said, “just because I could throw a baseball hard.”
Moser retired in 2010 and got into coaching shortly after. His former FAU teammate, Mick Celli, thought he’d make a good pitching instructor and found him an opportunity.
Coaching quickly became a fixture in Moser’s life. He is currently the head of baseball operations at Delray Beach’s ELEV8 Baseball Academy, an institution where he and other former professionals train high school players with collegiate aspirations. His players compete against other baseball academies, junior colleges and colleges, a tougher competition level than the one they’d have in high school.
“I want every kid to live out his dream,” said Moser, who worked his way from pitching coach to head coach to his current position at ELEV8. “Every kid wants to play professional baseball. If they’re here, that’s the goal. They’re not here just to have fun. Those days are over. Those days are 10 years old in rec ball. This is a grind. They’ve got to understand that baseball, it’s a grunt sport. You have to work your [butt] off. If you don’t have that desire, if you don’t have that will to go ahead and understand that there’s another guy out there working five, six hours a day you need to be working just as hard as him or harder to get to the next level. For them to get that and understand it and put it into practice and achieve their dreams, it’s the most rewarding part of the whole job.”
Long before Moser helped others earn athletic scholarships, Florida Atlantic University gave him one of his own. Moser says he was “very fortunate” for that opportunity.
Moser says his athletic scholarship allowed him to focus on baseball and academics as opposed to paying for school. It empowered him to be the standout pitcher his coaches believed he could be. And it allowed Moser’s family to travel to all his games.
That scholarship and Moser’s experience at FAU still resonate with him.
“FAU was very good to me,” Moser said. “There [are] such good people over there. And trust in the coaching staff and how they treat their players and what they want to do as a program, they’re one of the best coaching staffs in the country, by far.”
“Pound for pound,” he added, “I wouldn’t want to play anywhere else.”