MAN WITH A PLAN STILL THERE 24 YEARS LATER
Fred Uhlman Jr., an assistant general manager, is beginning his 25th year with the Padres. He followed his father, a scout inducted into the Orioles’ Hall of Fame, into baseball but the 2020 season that is about to begin will be unlike any other in the game’s history. (Editor’s note: This conversation began in March and continued after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down baseball until summer camps opened earlier this month. A longer version is available online.)
Brown is back. You’ve seen a lot of iterations of what this team has looked like. What’s your favorite Padres uniform?
I’ve always been fond of the uniforms from ’98. Those were obviously good years. I loved those uniforms, loved those memories. I was not a fan of the brown originally, but as I saw it in spring training (in March), the more I see it, the more I like it, the more it grows on me. Hopefully this is a long-term uniform and it’s something that fans enjoy. That’s what’s important. … The thing about the brown is it’s unique. When you see it on the field, you know it’s the Padres. It’s not blue, it’s not red. It’s a unique color in MLB.
Your dad is in the Orioles Hall of Fame. He had a long career in baseball. Tell us how you got started in the game.
My dad started scouting the year I was born, 1967, for the Reds. He was with the Reds from 1967 through 1984. So he was there during the Big Red Machine. So I grew up around baseball, living in Colorado and then in Texas. I knew it was something I always wanted to do. I wanted to play, but I was realistic enough that by the time I was a junior in high school that I knew I wasn’t good enough to play beyond college.
So I started thinking of ways I could continue to be in the game. One of the ways was I ended up going to junior college in Maryland and started an internship or a part-time role in their scouting and player development department. Back in that day computers were new.
My job was, the scouts would send in their scouting reports and I would sit there after class from 3 in the afternoon to 9 at night and just enter reports. That gave me an opportunity to read scouting reports and understand the language and get to know the scouts. That eventually turned into a full-time job with the Orioles, where I was an assistant in the scouting department and I got to go out and actually evaluate players my last four years there.
So you were a premoneyball stathead. There actually weren’t a lot of stats back then. It was basically entering scouting reports. But it was like studying for a test from 3 to 9 every night. I’d sit there and just enter reports. I started to get to know the scouts as well as anybody in the scouting department. I started to know their tendencies and gradually got more responsibility . .... After I started doing that and after I started going out and seeing players, I wanted to scout. I never had a goal to be an assistant general manager. I never had a goal to be a general manager. I always wanted to scout. When I had the opportunity to come here in 1995 and work for Kevin Towers, I was Kevin’s assistant in the scouting department and I was out seeing players with him. I got to spend a year with him watching players and evaluating. My path, my goal was to always stay in scouting somewhere.
When Kevin became a general manager, he asked me to be his assistant for a year or two and then go back to scouting and 24 years later here I am — one year in the scouting department and 24 as an assistant general manager.
How do you gain confidence in knowing what you’re looking for in players?
Scouting is about building a library of players and learning from your mistakes. I was fortunate enough that being around it when I was a kid, my mom and I would travel with my dad during the summer and I would sit there and run the radar for him in the scouts’ section. I got to be around it as a kid and hear the stuff. Not that that makes you a good evaluator, but I had good exposure to the scouting world early in my life. You’re always going to make mistakes scouting, but it’s about instinct and comparing players. It’s about comparing a player you saw in 2005 to somebody you see in 2020. I think the more players you see, the more confidence you get.
Do you remember the first player you were absolutely sure about? Actually the first player I ever wrote a report on was Chuck Knoblauch. They sent me to Texas A&M. There was a tournament there. He was the first player they asked me to see. It was pretty obvious he was going to be a big-league player. Beyond that — and it wasn’t me that signed any of these players — but in 1989 we had the first pick in the country. The Orioles were terrible in 1988. Ben Mcdonald was the first pick in the country at LSU and I went and saw him. In 1990, we had the 20th pick in the country and we took Mike Mussina out of Stanford. In 1988, we started a philosophy of leaning more toward college guys because we’d gotten burned on some high school guys. We had a run where we took Gregg Olson out of Auburn and then in ’89 it was Ben Mcdonald, ’90 it was Mussina, ’91 it was Mark Smith out of USC — he didn’t pan out. In 1992, it was Jeff Hammonds and in ’93 it was Jay Powell. We had a run of guys that you kind of knew were going to get there.
Did you have any notes on Knoblauch’s throwing? (Laughs). Actually, yeah. He was pretty young. He was playing shortstop. He was pretty lean. He had good range and had a plus arm. No throwing issues. I couldn’t see that part of the future.
What was it like watching games with your dad as a kid?
It was really cool to be able to grow up around that. Those teams with the Reds were good. They were going to the postseason a lot. I went to year-round school in elementary school. So I was in school nine weeks and then I was off three and in those three weeks I was off my mom and I would travel with my dad. In the spring it was to see amateur players and then in the summer he ran tryout camps and did pro coverage. It was just a great experience, one that you appreciate more as you get older and look back at the things you got to do as a kid. It was unique. I was very appreciative of my dad for allowing me to do that. It’s what you know. I’m sure kids that grow up with educators get to know the education world. I got to know the baseball world.
What’s it like to watch baseball games with your dad today?
Over the last couple years I’ve got to spend a lot of time with him back east. I travel back and forth to Maryland to spend time with him. Just got him set up with MLB Network in his new place and he loves watching games. He’s 89, but he’s still sharp. He still knows.
He still views the game as a scout and he’s still got a very good idea what’s going on with the Orioles and he follows the Nationals. It’s a lot of fun. When I was back there, we watched a lot of the playoffs and the World Series last fall. It was great. I feel very fortunate both from a professional standpoint that allowed me to do what I do now,but also from personal standpoint because it allowed us to connect and become closer.
How much has baseball changed since you started, how fast and how difficult is it to stay ahead of the curve?
It’s changed in a number of ways. One, in just the size of the staff, the baseball operations staff. Our staff probably over the last six to eight years has probably doubled. So you have a lot more people to manage, day-to-day, and you have a lot more information. You have to sort of manage the people and manage the information and the flow of that information. That’s sort of the way I view my job. My job is to just be helpful, whether that’s to A.J. Preller or Josh Stein or Jayce Tingler, the coaching staff, the medical staff.
jeff.sanders@sduniontribune.com