I wouldn’t assume that the baseball team gives you people to hang out with immediately on campus. What if you don’t like them or don’t fit in with them? Besides, a reasonably friendly/gregarious/outgoing freshman can meet people in other built-in environments - their residence halls, classes, extracurriculars, etc.
Both BC and Amherst are excellent schools; I wouldn’t say academically it’s decidedly Amherst. On some rankings Amherst is ranked higher; however, those rankings are just for the sake of ranking schools. In the grand scheme of things is there really such a large difference (reputationally) between attending Amherst or Boston College? Probably not.
To me this falls to a couple of questions:
- Do you want to attend a small liberal arts college or a medium-sized research university? They're very different environments. BC has almost 5 times the number of undergraduate students as Amherst. And while Amherst is in the Five College Consortium, BC is also located close to Boston, which is a hub of educational institutions.
- Do you want to be located in a small town in a rural area or nearby a very large city? The environment is going to be different, as are the kinds of things your classmates will do for fun. (Boston is not necessarily better - by all accounts the Pioneer Valley is a great place to be a college student, and there are some advantages to going to college in a small college town.)
- Do you want to play baseball in college? You seem undecided about this.