OLD WESTBURY, N.Y. — The Frank Catalanotto era of NYIT baseball started with a Twitter DM.

But first we have to go back to 2010. Catalanotto, who was drafted out of Smithtown High School on Long Island and played 14 years in the majors, spent the last few months of his career with his hometown New York Mets. There, he met ESPN beat reporter Adam Rubin and followed him on Twitter. By the All-Star break, Catalanotto was out of baseball, retiring with a .291/.357/.445 slash line and $22 million in career earnings. Rubin, meanwhile, was amassing one of the largest followings in sports media with his thorough coverage of Mets minutiae.

It was a relentless job, and after 15 years on the beat, Rubin was already burned out and looking for something else when ESPN declined to renew his contract in 2017. He decided to leave journalism altogether but stay in sports, becoming the assistant athletic director for strategic communications at the New York Institute of Technology, a small school known for its emphasis on applied scientific research.

It’s a fancy title for what is in fact a one-man media and media relations department. Rubin is the school’s SID, but he also runs the HDMI cables to the center field camera before each baseball game, and takes photos of the graduating members of the team and their family for Senior Day, and writes recaps for each game, and profiles for each player, and does this all for 17 sports.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (AP) — Joey Bart already looks like a big league hitter in his first major league camp, especially when the San Francisco Giants catcher sends a misguided pitch soaring over the centerfield fence.

The same with White Sox shortstop Nick Madrigal every time he makes a spinning stab deep in the hole, or Tigers pitcher Casey Mize when he leaves an unsuspecting batter befuddled, or the four young arms the Royals selected among the first 40 picks of last year’s amateur draft.

All have a couple things in common: They played college baseball rather than turning pro out of high school, and they are all expected to help their clubs sooner than later.