Bob Babb, left, shakes hands with then-Lynchburg head coach Lucas Jones before the final game of the 2023 Division III World Series. 2023 d3photography.com photo by Steve Frommell

By Patrick Coleman 
D3sports.com 

Bob Babb doesn't expect – or want – a collection of rocking chairs, or other memorabilia. 

But the longtime baseball coach at Johns Hopkins will have one last run as the head coach of the Blue Jays. He announced to his team this evening, June 10, that the 2025 season will be his last at JHU. 

As for going-away presents from appreciative colleagues, don’t hold your breath.

“I don’t think that that will happen,” Babb said by phone earlier this week.. 

What will happen, however, is that the active Division III baseball coach with the most career wins, one who has been at Johns Hopkins since May of 1980, mere years after Division III was founded, will be calling it a career next year.

One year removed from pushing Lynchburg to three games in the Division III Championship Series, the Blue Jays won 35 games this year, making Babb 1,302-478-16 as a head coach, a .729 winning percentage. Johns Hopkins bowed out in the super regional round, losing two games to then-No. 1 Endicott to get eliminated.

“I gave a lot of thought as to how I would do this, but I’ll turn 70 in February, I just had my first grandson, and I thought, ‘every good thing has to come to an end sometime,’ and I thought this was the right time,” Babb said.

“I have a number of seniors this year who actually started as freshmen, and we should have one of the best teams I’ve ever had this coming year, so everything seems to be pointing to that being the time to call it quits.” 

Under Babb, the Blue Jays have achieved national prominence, and have reached the Division III World Series six times: in 1989, 2008, 2010, 2019, 2021 and 2023. In 2023, they lost by one run in the Division III Championship Series final, while in 2008 they were famously one strike away from winning the title after they forced a decisive second game against Trinity (Conn.), handing the Bantams their only loss of the season.

The field on campus is already named for Babb, and has been for some time been called Babb Field at Stromberg Stadium. Short of getting the city of Baltimore to somehow rename a section of West University Parkway, the street which runs outside the right-field fence, There’s not much that JHU can do to further honor him. Letting him go out on his own terms, and announce on his own time, is a good start. 

“It’s been a special time for me, no doubt about it,” Babb said.

Having a year to prepare means that there is also opportunity to schedule other ways to recognize the longtime head coach. The program is scheduling an old-timers’ game this fall, giving decades’ worth of alumni an opportunity to return to the Homewood Campus in Baltimore. 

“More than anything, I just want to try to reconnect with a lot of people. It’s very important to me and our program. It’s going to be another year where we are out working to win as many games as we can, but I think there will certainly be a lot of extra stuff going on that probably won’t affect them too much but will be pleasant to me.”

Winning as many games as they can certainly sounds possible. Johns Hopkins has hopes of sending Babb out with Walnut and Bronze for the first time, and Babb has high hopes for his team of Blue Jays as well. 

“We have our full pitching staff back, we have our infield back, we have our catcher back, we have our left fielder and our right fielder back, and we’ll have transfers coming in which we’ll add, so we have the talent, I think, to win a national championship.

“But as you know, there’s so much luck in baseball. You can hit a lot of line drives right at people, or hit a lot of flares that aren’t at people.”