What qualities should Blue Jays be seeking in new amateur scouting director?

TORONTO — Five years ago, when Ben Cherington left the Toronto Blue Jays to become general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, he decided to take Steve Sanders along with him.

During their time north of the border, Cherington really appreciated Sanders’ work as amateur scouting director, and a promotion to assistant GM helped pry him loose. They’ve worked closely in the Steel City ever since.

“His superpower is that he is a dogged communicator and that impacts culture across the board,” Cherington said during a recent interview at the GM Meetings. “He’s always willing to have the next conversation necessary to make sure that that person is in a good spot, whether that’s an area scout, R&D, whether that’s a boss or a player. Especially as we were getting started in Pittsburgh, I knew that I needed someone who I really trusted would just be that dogged communicator across our group and help us build the culture through that.”

Once the duo left, the Blue Jays replaced Sanders with Shane Farrell, who last month left for a player-development job with the Detroit Tigers, opening up the amateur scouting director position once again. Both internal and external candidates are being considered as the final stages of the process, which is expected to pick up this week.

Sanders ran three drafts for the Blue Jays — replacing Brian Parker, who was fired after a hugely successful 2016 draft — and his best first-round pick was Alek Manoah at 11 in 2019, while Davis Schneider (28th round in 2017), Spencer Horwitz (24th round in 2019) and Addison Barger (sixth round in 2018) are among his other notable selections. Jordan Groshans (to the Marlins for Zach Pop and Anthony Bass) and Adam Kloffenstein (with Sem Robberse for Jordan Hicks) were flipped in win-now deadline deals.

Austin Martin, selected fifth overall in the 2020 pandemic draft and used a year later in a deadline deal to acquire Jose Berrios, is the only Farrell pick to have reached the majors thus far, so the jury is still out on his work. No matter where that lands, the opportunity for a franchise-altering draft is there for whoever the Blue Jays hire, as they have the fifth-best odds of landing the top pick in 2025.

The specifics of what they’re looking for in their next amateur scouting director aren’t clear, although Cherington lists three primary qualities — “Understanding the player evaluation, willingness and ability to tap into the tools and insights that come from outside of amateur scouting, and then leading a team of people,” he said — that may offer insights into what the Blue Jays are seeking. 

First off, when it comes to player evaluation, Cherington believes the role demands “a really strong sense of how to value a player.”

“I don’t think that means you need somebody’s that’s had 30 years of cross-checking experience, but you’re talking about a player group that’s really young, really far away, is not fully materialized and it requires you do a lot of projection,” he continued. “It’s important that whoever is in the role is able to do that at some level and has some applied experience doing that.”

Second, he said, “is the ability to use insights that come from other groups, whether that’s R&D tools — the biggest part of that is the draft model itself, but there are other insights and tools that come from R&D that are important inputs in the draft; or whether that’s from a performance team; or whether that’s from coaching and player development. Every team is so competitive, and the draft is a very hard thing to find massive advantages in. The more you’re tapping into those insights from those different expertise areas, you’re just giving yourself an incremental advantage.”

Lastly, he argues the ability to lead the scouting group is essential, “because every area scout has a critical role in starting the process. Those inputs from the area-scout level are still probably the heaviest weight in the decision-making. The person in that chair has got to be able to lead that group in a way where those folks are invested, fulfilled, connected, getting continual training.”

Given that rough framework, hiring someone sooner rather than later is necessary so the groundwork can be set well in advance of the upcoming spring season. While there’s a base in place to work from, the higher up a team picks, the bigger its signing-bonus pool, allowing for more strategy and creativity in how the dollars are spent.

A new amateur scouting director will also want to review the Blue Jays’ current draft model, something Cherington did when he took over in Pittsburgh. In five drafts since 2020, the Pirates have already had five players reach the big-leagues, including the No. 1 overall pick in 2023, righty phenom Paul Skenes.

“The fundamental thing is to trust that you have a group of people with the expertise and the experience to understand how to build a model that is effectively weighing all of the inputs,” said Cherington. “It’s not that hard to find the inputs. It’s scouting reports, performance information, biographical information and health, etc. It’s hard to figure out the right weights. And then it’s hard also to figure out, OK, when do we include a new input? Because we may have enough information that’s telling us we’ll add value to this model and improve the model. You need a group of people that have the expertise to do that, basically data scientists. It starts there and having confidence in a group of data scientists to do that work. I can’t do that. I wouldn’t know how to do that.” 

The next step is empowering people around the organization “to stress it, to poke holes in it and say, wait a minute, this doesn’t smell right, is the model missing something here?”

“That helps the data scientist go back and say, ‘let’s go back and rethink that, maybe it is missing something, maybe we can compensate for that,’” Cherington added. “So it has to be continually trained, and it’s trained partly from R&D itself, but also partly from other users, like a scouting director saying, ‘wait a minute, this guy is not in the right spot, the model is missing something. Let’s figure out how to fix that.’”

It’s an approach the Blue Jays, no matter whom they hire as Farrell’s successor, should be open to ahead of a draft with the potential to majorly upgrade their farm system.

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