Mt. Lebanon grad named major league scout with Tigers
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
During 16 seasons playing professional baseball, nine of them in the major leagues, Don Kelly watched the game at a high level. Now, as a scout, he has to translate the keys and cues he used to look for into an actionable scouting report.
“Something that I always wanted to know as a hitter, what does a guy go to with two strikes?” Kelly said. “Is he going to try to go up in the zone, is he going to try to bury me with a changeup low or a slider down and in, how is he going to try to get me out? When you watch it as a scout, now you’re putting a grade on that pitch. And not only a grade [at the] present, but a future grade, what do I think this pitch is going to be down the line and how do I think that?
“I laughed this year because, say you’re up to bat and you strike out, and you’re going back, you’re never going to tell a teammate, ‘Man, he’s got a 60 curveball.’”
Kelly, a Butler native and Mt. Lebanon High graduate, recently received a promotion to full-time major league scout for the Detroit Tigers. Kelly spent the 2017 season as a part-time pro scout and assistant to player development for the Tigers, the team that drafted him out of Point Park in 2001. He scouted the minor leagues, with a little bit of major league scouting in September, and spent time as an instructor with the Tigers’ minor league affiliates.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity,” Kelly said. “The role that I had last year, on both sides of player development and pro scouting, and to have an opportunity to step up into organizational coverage, it was a tremendous opportunity and something that I couldn’t pass up.”
Kelly made his major league debut for the Pirates in 2007, but played the majority of his career with the Tigers, from 2009-14. He played sparingly for the Miami Marlins in 2015-16 and suffered the uncommon phenomenon of Tommy John ligament replacement surgery in a position player.
“I guess Father Time is undefeated,” Kelly, 37, said. “You know that the end is going to come, you just never know when it’s going to be.”
A collaborative effort from Tigers general manager Al Avila, vice president of player personnel Scott Bream and VP of player development Dave Littlefield (who brought Kelly to Pittsburgh when he was the Pirates GM) brought Kelly into the Tigers’ front office. In his first experience as a scout, Kelly watched the low-A Columbia (S.C.) Fireflies and Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow hit a home run.
The first year taught him how to be more efficient and select the proper scouting report card. He also learned where to direct his attention when trying to evaluate 10 men on the field at the same time.
“Say a catcher’s [throwing] time down to second base, to be able to anticipate that,” Kelly said. “If you get the cleanup guy that gets on first base, probably not going to steal, but if you get the leadoff guy or the eight, ninehole guy that plays center field or middle infield, there’s a pretty good chance he might go. So you start to pick up on situations where, OK I have to get this information. So now the catcher’s time takes priority over maybe the pitcher’s time to home plate or maybe bearing down on that hitter at that moment.”
Kelly found the time spent on the field with minor leaguers rewarding and enjoyed passing along his experience to them. He found being responsible for his own flights, hotels and rental cars, after years of boarding planes and buses with everything taken care of, took some getting used to. And he found the volume and breadth of information collected and analyzed by a modern baseball operations department surprising.
“As a player, I think you think that you have an idea of what’s going on on the other side, “he said, “and there’s so much that goes on that you really don’t have an idea of what it is.”