Time to get picky
How O’s adjusted scouting, evaluations for unique draft Elias on pre-draft video call: ‘We have choices we like’
“I think the mechanics of doing it remotely will be tricky for everybody, but in terms of the way that our scouting department has prepared,
it’s been great and I’m not surprised.”
A draft that will be held in unprecedented circumstances this week — remotely instead of conducted from teams’ respective draft rooms, with few if any in-person scouting looks at players, and just five rounds instead of 40 — will be the latest opportunity for the Orioles under executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias to continue the process of developing the next wave of talent from within the organization.
And after a few weeks of adjusting to the new circumstances, team officials believe the infrastructures already put in place over the past year, plus some changes in approach thanks to the coronavirus pandemic that caused so much disruption to their processes, have them ready to operate as well as anyone this week.
“I think the mechanics of doing it remotely will be tricky for everybody, but in terms of the way that our scouting department has prepared, it’s been great and
2020 MLB draft
Two days before he and the Orioles front office decide on the next cornerstone addition to their rebuilding project and begin a crucial stretch in which they have three of the first 39 picks of a shortened MLB draft, executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias outlined on a lengthy videoconference Monday afternoon how the team is preparing for the second overall pick, what might go into that decision, and more.
Elias, in his second draft in charge of the Orioles after being hired in November 2018, said the front office has enjoyed having something as significant as the draft to prepare for in a time without baseball, with the entire front office, including player development staff, having a role in player analysis.
All that will produce what could be another pivotal draft class in the Orioles’ efforts to build a homegrown contender. Here are five takeaways from Elias’ remarks on their big decision at No. 2 overall, the financial
implications in a shortened draft, and what comes next for the team after the draft. level of mystery surrounding that pick this year seems lower than average.”
For that reason, many projecting what the draft could look like see the Orioles as an inflection point for the rest of the top 10 because of the sheer number of options they have and what those routes could mean for other teams. Some years, there are no real questions until deeper in the top 10 picks. This year, there’s no consensus beyond No. 1 because of the Orioles’ uncertainty. can’t match up to the real things.
“Let’s pretend that there was another team that got to scout all through the spring, I would think that team would have a big leg up on us, so there’s a lot of value to the spring scouting process and the normal draft process,” Elias said.
For an organization that has come under fire for dismissing so many of its scouts over the past year, the fact that Elias noted that seems to make clear that in the future the organization will be using its team of front-office draft analysts only to supplement, not replace, the in-person insight that area scouts can provide.
He noted that there was also a lot of baseball to watch in the South before the coronavirus pandemic shut that down to create a basis for scouting reports, and much of the work that’s been done digitally with video and data analysis has happened as they’re “leveraging the work that the field scouts did in the summer and in years past.
“Their work is as important as ever, it’s just less concentrated on what happened late in the spring,” Elias said.
The Orioles front office was also able to make most of its planned visits in the winter to players’ homes or college campuses to get a feel for makeup and personality, Elias said. Those traits, he added, can be “the biggest area that can cause a high pick to fail” other than health.
“It’s often the intangible things that separate themselves from one another, and we put a lot of work into it,” he said. “We have met with the candidates in person this winter, I did personally, and there are others that we did not that we’ve met over Zoom, and that worked pretty well.”