Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Barber, Phillies won’t give short shrift to shortened draft
In a typical year, the Major League Baseball amateur draft would consist of 40 rounds of selections plus compensatory and “competitive balance” picks added for spice after the first round.
To say it was a bloated affair would be a vast understatement. At least it didn’t compare in hype and glitz to the likes of the three-day NFL assault on the senses.
For baseball, there are some smart voices savvy enough to call for less length, less awkward allocations of bonus pool money and thus, more attention to earlyround detail.
It was almost an accident of convenience this year that a world-wide pandemic that saved its cruelest impact for the United States would move the league to drop its draft to five rounds.
And for the Phillies, who wagered a second-round pick as compensation to the Mets for the free agency signing of pitcher Zack Wheeler, that means their usual months of homework to come up with at least the common 40 draftable players was mostly spent honing in on four – count ‘em 4 – players to account for their 2020 draft class. How special it will be. “Definitely a weird one for sure,” said Brian Barber, a former MLB pitcher who logged nearly two decades with the Yankees’ scouting department before being hired away by the Phils in October to replace Johnny Almaraz as scouting director. “I can’t imagine going through my first draft as a scouting director with what we’re going through and my response to everybody has been, ‘Nobody’s been through anything like this.’ So I don’t care how long you’ve been a scouting director, you weren’t prepared for this eventuality. It’s definitely been different.”
The one major difference with this MLB draft is cutting it down so drastically. That’s supposed to save the league some $30 million in draft pool cash, which in this COVID-19 era of lost revenue apparently means something even to the Baseball biggies.
So they went for the maximum cutdown of rounds. For the clubs and their scouting staffs, that made this usually sleepy draft a bit more interesting.
“Not being able to go to the field and seeing the kids, that’s what we do. We go out, we go to the field, we evaluate talent and we try to combine that with a lot of other different things, and (now) we’re missing that component,” Barber said on a conference call Monday.
“But we’ve been able to dive a lot deeper into other things to try to be able to fill those holes.
“I’ve been a guy who’s used video for a long time now, but not to the extent that we’ve had to do it over the past 2½ months. One of the silver linings for us has been the ability remotely to meet more kids than we ever have before. Dive deeper into their makeup and what makes them tick.”
The scouts are hoping that pays off after the draft, when the real party begins. With so few players being drafted, that means the number of undrafted amateurs will drive that market up. So all the homework will truly pay off then.
As for the draft itself, the Phillies will naturally take the “best player available.” Doesn’t everyone?
But for his first Phillies draft Barber may have dropped an obvious hint when asked about different strengths in the large pool of top players who will be hoping to be one of only 160 selections leaguewide.
“Lots of arms out there, lots of college pitching that’s out there,” Barber said. “The strength of it would probably lend itself to that college pitcher mix but there’s players in every category that you could come up with.
“Quality players in each and every one, but there are a lot of college arms out there this year that people are going to like.”
The players that Barber’s team of scouts favored got their looks. The scouts hit the ground running from the very start of college seasons in warm climates near the end of January until essentially all of the sports world shut down in mid-March.
“We had targeted guys to go out and look at the beginning of the season,” Barber said. “So there’s not a single player that we as an organization did not get to that we really wanted to (see). There are several guys on the board that are on there that did not have the opportunity to get out there and step on a field this spring, too. It makes it hard and you have to dive deep into your database for looks on all guys like that.”
In addition to getting as many looks as they could last year and what existed of this year, the Phillies had to rely on the digital world.
“The players have gotten used to being on Zoom, and three months ago I barely knew what Zoom was,” said the 47-year-old Barber. “And now I consider myself sort of an expert on it. The kids have gotten really good on it as well. I remember the first one we did there was some (discomfort) with it with everybody on our end and the players’ end. But as everybody’s gotten more comfortable the conversations have gotten a lot better.
“It’s not like a Zoom call to watch them throwing a bullpen or taking a batting practice. It’s getting to know the kids, what makes them tick, where they want to be in the future and how they’re going to try to get there.”
Where Baseball goes from here is anybody’s guess. The owners and the players still seem far away on a compromise in salary and safety procedures that would enable some semblance of a season to be conducted in the coming months. The only certainty is a severely scaled down version of Baseball’s amateur draft will go off beginning Wednesday.
The excitement is hanging in the stale spring air.
Contact Rob Parent at rparent@21st-centurymedia. com; you can follow him on Twitter @ReluctantSE.