Coach Jose Franco

Jose Franco was a co-captain, alongside (The Developmental Gap Podcast & Former MLB Pitcher) Pedro Borbon Jr., of the 1985 Dewitt Clinton Varsity Baseball team—two of five captains under Head Coach Steven Nathanson, who arrived at Clinton in 1982 after coaching the No. 1 MLB draft pick Shawon Dunston. Nathanson replaced his brother Scott, who went on to coach alongside former Major Leaguer Paul Blair at Fordham University.

During his high school years, Franco played travel baseball with Richie Corbo (Youth Service League 16U) and Mel Zitter (18U), experiences that helped shape his long-term approach to development and competition.

Franco attended Iona College for baseball before pursuing independent baseball. He later returned to Binghamton University's School Of Management, balancing academics while running two small businesses in the early 1990s.

After graduating, Franco began coaching at the Youth Service League, where he met Walter Paller. He would go on to coach JV baseball at Berkeley Carroll intermittently through 2007.

In 2008, Franco served as pitching coach for the PSAL “B” City Championship team (Morris HS) under Head Coach Richie Corbo. Both later coached with the New York Grays under David Owens and the late Jeff Cohen.

In 2012, Franco stepped away from baseball and opened Stoop Juice , an organic juice bar in Park Slope—three blocks from his daughter’s school. He proudly embraces what he calls his “helicopter parent trophy,” having dropped his daughter off at school every day from pre-K through her final day at Packer Collegiate.

Today, Franco—married for 29 years—is the cohost of The Developmental Gap Podcast , Head JV Baseball Coach at Berkeley Carroll, and Head Coach of the Brooklyn Cadets 12U team.

For readers who arrive at stoopjuice.com with no interest in baseball, Jose Franco’s writing exists as a separate pursuit—an attempt to scale the voice of a street philosopher. He's building a metaphysical folding table on Fordham Road, offering free, hard-earned insights about discipline, self-talk, and reality to anyone willing to pause and engage—without expectation or coercion. At the same time, he's scaling that table to the world through his writing, knowing he can offer clarity, but he can’t control who chooses to take it.

His work lives in the space between reflection and action, written for those experiencing moments of existential friction—the quiet overwhelm, the internal contradiction, and the realization that thinking more deeply does not always make life easier.

He is not trying to represent philosophers as much as he is trying to wrestle with them. The goal isn’t to quote Friedrich Nietzsche or Arthur Schopenhauer correctly—it’s to sit in the discomfort they point to and see what holds up in real life.

Most of his writing comes from that tension: the gap between what he thinks he understands and how he actually behaves. The aim is to internalize ideas to the point where they stop sounding like philosophy and start showing up as honest, sometimes inconvenient reflection.

Rather than offering solutions, his work invites readers to sit in that tension—what he often refers to as paying an “energy tax”: the willingness to move beyond passive consumption into active reflection.

In a digital environment optimized for speed and certainty, Franco’s writing deliberately moves in the opposite direction—slow, unresolved, and often inconvenient. Not to scale in the traditional sense, but to reach those who recognize themselves in the discomfort of thinking more than they act.