You don’t usually want to be the subject of a Babb note.

It’s not that the sage figure dissecting your failings expresses himself with any particular fury. It’s that Bob Babb is unsparing, even now, after 46 years of critiquing Johns Hopkins baseball players.

“He’s an honest guy,” said Shawn Steuerer, an All-America third baseman on Babb’s current Hopkins team. “Maybe you won the game, but there’s always stuff to get better on … with the goal that, as competition gets tighter and these things start to matter more, we put ourselves in a better spot. He doesn’t want you too comfortable after going on a win streak.”

Babb notes, delivered after every game (1,840 of them since 1980) and practice, say plenty about their namesake. They’re studied, straightforward and just as rigorous when the team is winning — which Hopkins usually does — as when it’s not.

How else would players learn not to make the same mistake twice?

“It’s just teaching,” Babb said, typically matter-of-fact.

That unfailing discipline is how he built something colossal day by day, year by year, even as most of the world had no idea it was happening. He’s down to his last few games before retirement, and the 70-year-old baseball lifer still remains immersed in his quest for subtle advantage.

“He has an intensity about him in terms of getting the best out of each person,” said Bill Stromberg, who played on Babb’s first Hopkins team in 1980 and went on to become CEO of T. Rowe Price. “Bob’s teaching and Bob’s mentorship played a significant role in helping me understand how to compete in any career, any phase of life.”

The Colts were still Baltimore’s NFL team when Babb began coaching at his alma mater. The Orioles had yet to begin their current 42-year World Series drought. Through nine U.S. presidencies, the dawn of the internet and a global pandemic, he has never finished a season with a losing record. He’s responsible for 1,344 of the 1,710 wins Hopkins has accumulated since the university began keeping track in 1887.

The only professional achievement that has eluded Babb is a national championship. In 2008, his team came within a strike of clinching the Division III World Series before walking in the game-tying and game-winning runs. In 2023, the Blue Jays had the tying run thrown out at the plate in the eighth inning of another World Series decider.

Babb knew he still had a few years of coaching left in him after that wrenching defeat. He told his players last summer that 2025 would be his final ride.

What a ride it has become.

Hopkins’ record stands at an astounding 43-3, and the Blue Jays are on a 25-game winning streak after beating Case Western Reserve to start an NCAA super regional Friday. The teams play again Saturday. It will be a doubleheader, if necessary, but Hopkins needs only one win to advance.

If the Jays take that series, they’ll be bound for Cleveland and another shot at the big prize.

It’s very possible that Babb’s 46th team is his best. His players, present and former, hunger to see him exit in the grandest fashion possible.

“It would mean that much more to us,” All-America catcher Caleb Cyr said.

“It’s in all our text threads and email exchanges,” said Craig Brooks, who played for Babb from 1983 to 1986 and later coached on his staff. “Everybody wants it so badly for him. Not for us, for him.”

But that tasty narrative hook only scratches the surface of what Babb has built and maintained at a university known more for multibillion-dollar scientific research and medical marvels than three-run homers and 4-6-3 double plays.

He found his ideal context, studying baseball just as assiduously as all those high-powered academics around him pursued their fields.

“These were real conversations that Bob and I had when we talked about going somewhere else,” Brooks recalled. “I said to him, ‘What if Maryland calls?’ And he said, ‘I’d love to give it a shot, but I love working with really smart kids.’ The truth was they suited his game so well.”

“Analytical” is one of the first words that comes up when Babb’s alumni describe what makes him tick. That was always him.

“I was never overly emotional as a player,” he said. “I was the point guard on the basketball team. I was the captain of the football team. I played with a bunch of very unintelligent players, and I had to get them in the right position on defense. On offense, I was a running back, but I would tell the quarterback, ‘This is what we need to run.’”

Babb’s former players include CEOs and doctors, high-powered attorneys and magazine writers. He never wanted it any other way. It meant they were equipped to master a book’s worth of pickoff scenarios or to crack — OK, steal — opponents’ signs.

“He always took advantage of what he had around him,” said Major League Baseball umpire Dan Merzel, who played for Babb’s 2008 NCAA runner-up. “At Johns Hopkins, he has a group of very academically oriented, book-smart people. That doesn’t always translate to baseball IQ, but he definitely encouraged everybody to think as a baseball IQ athlete.”

Hopkins baseball was not a serious enterprise when Babb arrived as a player — he’d actually been recruited more for basketball — in 1973. The Blue Jays had lost more games than they’d won in 19 of the previous 20 seasons.

But baseball coursed through the blood of this new kid from Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, son of a successful coach and so attuned to the game’s rhythms that he obliterated the program’s stolen base record despite pedestrian speed.

Did Babb have any sense that he might be the man to bring sustained diamond excellence to Baltimore’s most proudly eggheaded (not to mention lacrosse-obsessed) university? That his name would one day adorn Hopkins’ baseball field?

No.

“I would have laughed if you told me,” he said.

He thought he was going to become a lawyer.

With his mustache and trademark briefcase (he expanded to a duffel bag in recent years when his scouting notes outgrew their original vessel), Babb could pass for the attorney or history professor he might have become had coaching not worked out. He taught social studies for two years at Lansdowne High School, but destiny called, and he became his alma mater’s head baseball coach (not to mention a football assistant) when he was just 24.

It wasn’t a full-time gig in those days, so he also pursued a master’s degree and taught physical education at Morgan State.

Babb had played with 10 of the guys on his first Hopkins baseball team, a potentially awkward arrangement that did not stop him from demanding a transformative attention to detail.

Immediately, the Blue Jays began winning at a greater rate, going 21-6-3 that first year.

Babb was no firebrand. For his first 20 years or so, players called him Bob rather than Coach, but they respected his baseball mind, the way he inevitably knew tendencies for every pitcher, batter and manager they faced.

“You could tell right away that he was a person who could figure out how to win,” Stromberg said. “The age difference being just five years really didn’t play a role, because I naturally respected him. He knew exactly what he was talking about.”

Players from that early generation and ensuing ones marvel at their experiences watching games next to Babb, who would call out what was about to happen next with disarming frequency.

“I got the privilege of playing professional baseball for a little bit, and the coaches and managers I was around were nowhere near the baseball intellectual level that Coach Babb was at,” said 2007 Hopkins graduate Rob Sanzillo, who played in the St. Louis Cardinals organization after catching for Babb and went on to work as an attorney for the MLB Players Association. “Being around that and absorbing his teachings, you necessarily become a better player.”

Players (and their high school coaches) got to know the Hopkins program before they ever arrived at Homewood, thanks to the detailed recruiting letters Babb handwrote and mailed seemingly every week. His early efforts created a network that eventually steered more gifted athletes to Hopkins by the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Equally important was his openness to students who simply walked into his office looking for a chance. Perhaps they had played only a year or two in high school and expected to shine in a different sport for the Blue Jays. But Babb didn’t turn them away and had a nose for how best to direct their talents.

“It’s interesting that one of the most consistently successful programs in Division III is a place where somebody who has any potential whatsoever is going to get an opportunity,” said Merzel, who had played more hockey than baseball at his Massachusetts high school. “Part of being a good leader in anything is putting people in position to succeed. That’s one of his biggest strengths.”

Step by step, the Blue Jays became a winning machine, although Babb’s players shocked themselves when they made their first Division III World Series in 1989.

“When we won the regional, we were running around like a bunch of clowns on the field, because we had never done it before,” recalled Scott Tarantino, a Towson-based orthopedic surgeon who pitched for that team. “We were thrilled coming in third. Now the expectation is they want to win the whole thing.”

Outside the Hopkins bubble, Babb became a giant to both peers and rivals in his sliver of the baseball world.

“He’s revered. He’s feared. There’s jealousy,” said Stevenson coach Matt Righter, who played for Babb and later served as his pitching coach after a stint in the Detroit Tigers system. “It’s all-encompassing, like he’s this great ‘Wizard of Bob.’ People don’t fully understand who he is.”

Inside the world he built, Babb became the patriarch. The term family is overused in describing sports teams, but Hopkins baseball alumni insist that’s what he created.

The story cannot be told without his wife, Gilly, whom he met in 1980 and married in 1984. She raised the couple’s three children while also opening their home to every player who came through the program, whether for group dinners or a refreshing chat over a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Every Christmas, the Babbs hosted a party for the entire athletic department.

“Bob has so many wins,” Righter said, “but I think his success would be measured by the number of invitations to weddings, all of the friendships he’s created, the connections he’s built between players and alumni, the number of dinners at his house.”

Players glimpsed Babb’s softer side.

The normally stoic coach would break into peals of laughter when the Blue Jays watched “Austin Powers” or “Major League” on the team bus.

They all made gentle fun of his insistence on throwing batting practice even as his knees failed him. And of his restaurant choices on road trips — Babb never turned down a meal at Golden Corral or Cracker Barrel. God forbid his athletes fuel their bodies with leafy greens.

When tragedy struck them individually or collectively (Righter pointed to a teammate’s death in a car accident and his sister-in-law’s death in a Navy training accident), Babb offered an unyielding shoulder to cry or lean on. He’s up there with parents and spouses on the list of people they can depend on most.

“It’s tough to talk about because it brings back some of those tough times,” Righter said. “But, whether it was a really high moment or a really low moment, Bob was unwavering.”

That’s why so many alumni are so locked in on every inning the current Blue Jays play. Each generation seems to have its own text thread, and all of them crackle during games. Former players have visited in droves this season, with many of them plotting trips to the World Series next week, assuming the Blue Jays advance.

Babb came painfully close to winning his title two years ago, when Hopkins had a chance to tie Lynchburg 7-7 in the top of the eighth, only for Lukas Geer to be erased by a bazooka throw to the plate.

“You could tell he was pretty affected,” said Kieren Collins, a graduate student pitcher who was a senior on the 2023 team. “You chase something for more than 40 years and come that close, it’s going to be hard.”

“You’re disappointed,” Babb said. “But, by the same token, you’re so proud of the fact they made it that far. There are 380 teams. To be down to the final two, that’s quite an accomplishment.”

Six position players from that 2023 group form the core of this year’s team, which has buried opponents with offensive outbursts, sturdy starting pitching and a deep bullpen. The Blue Jays are No. 1 in the country and built to fulfill their express goal of going all the way this time.

“They’re a confident bunch, and they should be,” Babb said. “No team in Division III has nearly the experience we have.”

Where does their venerable coach fit in that formula? To this day, Hopkins players feel they go into every game with a leg up because Babb has studied their opponents so carefully.

“There will be a few times this weekend,” Steuerer said, looking ahead to the super regional with Case Western Reserve. “Maybe a pickoff move at second base, trying to steal an out from them, or maybe they like to pick off in certain situations, and we’re ready for it. Little things in games like these, where both teams are very talented, if he can steal a thing or two from them that other teams haven’t seen coming, it gives us that slight advantage.”

Babb understands the anticipation brewing for his finale. He’s touched by the depth of feeling for him, all the visits from past Blue Jays. At the same time, he’d prefer the focus remain on the games and the players.

“I’m thankful so many people are so interested and so caring, but sometimes I feel like I’m a little rude,” he said. “Because some of these guys will want to talk, and it’s two minutes before first pitch. I’ve got stuff to get ready for the game.”