Making future plans from afar

Click eager for his first draft, despite just four picks, limitations on scouting

HOUSTON — No more than 10 cars appear at Minute Maid Park nowadays. The facility is gradually reopening. Employees trickle in either for the most pressing matters or to feel a fleeting sense of routine. Players work out on the field in groups of four or fewer. Across the street at Union Station, two men gather to discuss who could join them.

“It’s been nice to get back to some sense of normalcy,” Charles Cook said.

Cook and Kris Gross came back to their offices only recently. The duo will spearhead one of the most unconventional drafts in Astros history, one overhauled by both the novel coronavirus and cheating. Both are holdovers from former general manager Jeff Luhnow’s regime and now integral in the first tangible acts of the James Click era.

“They are tremendous evaluators of baseball talent, but beyond that, I think what has stood out to me is their ability to maximize the staff that we have and ask the right questions and drill down on the things that really separate players on the board,” Click said.

“They don’t get caught up in the minutiae or the things that don’t really matter. They’re doing a tremendous job of taking the resources we have at our disposal to try and line up our board as best as possible.”

Gross leads the Astros’ amateur scouting efforts. Luhnow promoted Cook to director of player evaluation last fall. They teamed to run Houston’s 2019 draft — the first since longtime scouting director Mike Elias’ departure for Baltimore. They chose 40 players. It was standard, an adjective few have associated with the Astros since.

After commissioner Rob Manfred stripped them of first and second-round picks in his sign-stealing punishment, the Astros will pick four times in this year’s five-round draft. On Wednesday, Click, Gross and Cook will gather their scouts and other front office personnel for a trial run of their virtual draft room. They’ll follow along, cross names off a board and debate selections on a night where they won’t actually pick.

“When it comes to a five-round draft with four picks for us, it honestly simplifies it a little bit,” Click said. “It can just be about taking the best talent possible because in those early rounds, that is the tool that we’re all looking for.”

The Astros’ first pick is 72nd — a compensatory selection after Gerrit Cole declined its qualifying offer and signed with the Yankees. If not for that, the Astros wouldn’t select until the 101st slot.

Envisioning who may be available that late in the draft is something of a fruitless exercise. The top 10 or 15 selections seem universally accepted. After those players are gone, few are sure how teams will treat this draft class — one stacked with collegiate pitching but idle for the last three months.

“Given the circumstances this year of having a lot less opportunity to see those players makes it increasingly difficult to predict which players may end up in each region of the draft,” Cook said. “We really treated it as a typical year and evaluated the entirety of the draft class that we saw as players of interest. As a result of that, some of those players are certainly going to go before we pick, but we feel good about knowing the draft class in this entirety.”

The Astros grounded their scouts in mid-March, only days before the sport shut down entirely. College teams only were about a month into their seasons, high schoolers only a bit further than that. According to Gross, the Astros were “fortunate to get pretty good (in-person) coverage” before the scouting world stopped.

“Even the Hawaiian high schoolers got seen by our West Coast guys,” Gross said.

“There’s so much video out there now, and we watched countless guys and basically had (scouts) do video reports and supplement it with the data that’s out there. Along the way, (we’ve) had Zoom meetings going over guys’ lists and starting to narrow the board down.”

In the absence of anything else, the Astros scouting department would seem more equipped than most to handle remote work. Luhnow’s preference for more analytical scouting from afar is still present and, perhaps, perfect for a world consumed by a pandemic.

In 2017, Luhnow established scouting analysis groups for both amateur and professional scouting. The teams focused more on data and video study in lieu of abundant in-person scouting.

The Astros still employ scouts — 11 domestic and six international, according to the 2020 media guide — but supplement them with copious data-driven evaluations from afar in Houston. Cook formerly was a manager of scouting analysis, one of the group’s key members. They strive for balance, connecting a scout’s in-person view of a player with what the data projects.

“There’s a wide array of information available with all sorts of different video sources and TrackMan across a number of different player populations,” Cook said. “We do our best to have a balanced approach and take the strengths out of each data source and combine those.

“We’ve been deploying this type of process for a few years now, and I think we’ve learned over time that having a balanced approach and blending different perspectives has worked well so far for us.”

Both Gross and Cook challenged a popular notion that this draft could be college-heavy. More video exists on college players, especially those in premier conferences, making them inherently easier to scout during a pandemic. As the Astros improved under Luhnow and their picks were lower in the draft, a clear college direction emerged. In 2018 and 2019, nine of their first 10 selections were college players.

Gross contended that most high school players were heavily scouted last summer during the showcase circuit. Spring seasons, according to Gross, existed as simple “check-ins” to confirm the thoughts or evaluations scouts developed over the summer.

“I do think teams will still be confident enough to have faith in high school guys, even guys that didn’t get games off this spring,” Gross said. “There is still pretty good familiarity with these dudes.”

Whether that extends to the Astros is a mystery. High school players generally require large signing bonuses to lure them from college commitments. Because Houston is without first- and second-round picks, its signing bonus pool is a major league-low $2,202,600. Their first selection at No. 72 carries just an $870,700 slot value. Teams are subject to penalties if they exceed their bonus pool.

Click is unconcerned with addressing specific areas of the Astros’ farm system, which outside publications label among the five worst in the sport. Outfield depth is depleted, as is lefthanded pitching. Houston spent its last two first-round picks on position players — first baseman Seth Beer in 2018 and catcher Korey Lee in 2019. The first four picks last year were collegiate position players.

“I would rather just know that these guys bump and fall linearly,” Click said. “We may think that we are stacked with pitching and wake up a year later and think the opposite thing. If you are constantly trying to address weaknesses, you may have foregone some talent because you were trying to address that weakness.”

Added Gross: “We’re pretty optimistic we’re going to get a pretty darn good player at 72 and 101.”

“We’re pretty optimistic we’re going to get a pretty darn good player at 72 and 101.”

Kris Gross, Astros domestic scouting supervisor

Astros general manager James Click and his team will be hard at work Wednesday, despite not having a pick until the second day of the draft because of sanctions from the cheating scandal.