[閒聊] Q&A with Eddie Romero
Q&A with Red Sox international scouting director Eddie Romero
http://t.co/X8bQKhAtxr (拿掉只討論紅襪的部份)
How different is scouting international prospects compared to amateurs?
Totally different. The age of the players is different, the advancement of
the players is totally different, they're completely opposite worlds. We have
about 20 scouts. We also have some consultants that help out. We also utilize
guys from the amateur department to help us out.
The kids you'll sign this year, the 16-year-olds, how long have you been
tracking them?
We try to get 'em as early as we can, we try to get an eye on guys early.
We've seen 13-, 14-year-olds. We're already identifiying guys when we're out
on the road, guys that we think we want to see again in the future. They
can't be signed until they're 16. Hopefully you can get a pretty good look at
them in international tournaments, or if they're at an individual program,
you just make a note of it so the area scout in that country can keep
checking on 'em.
Can you single out a challenge in following one of these players compared to
the U.S.-based talent?
The overall, there's a big unknown with a lot of the players that you face.
When it comes to the background on the player, the performance history, the
medical history. On the amateur market, you have access to a good amount of
information and resources and documentation. In assessing the risk of the
player, it makes it a lot riskier in the overall evaluation. In the
international market, we don't have access to a lot of that information. A
lot of it has improved — MLB has taken steps to help with that — and we
feel a lot more comfortable now than we did a couple years ago in signing
players and the risk associated with it. But there's still is a little bit
more of an unknown element in the overall background.
The other thing — it's 1A and 1B — 1B is the the history that you can
create in the states with a player through high school. You're seeing him
four years in high school and in summer ball, and you've got all the reports
in on him, all that kind of stuff. Whereas with the international market,
it's a little more difficult to follow the players over the time and get a
trackable history with them. Also, with some different countries, the
creations of more leagues, playing in more games, that's helped us as well.
For scouts, covering an entire country has to be tougher than covering, say,
a state or two in the U.S.?
In the countries where most of the prospects are coming from, we have
multiple scouts in each country. They're covering an area somewhat similar to
an amateur area. In Venezuela, for example. It's not like they're
individually covering a lot of areas there. Colombia, Panama, that's where
you have less scouts, but the baseball-playing areas are a little bit more
concentrated areas.
Is most of your staff based in their coverage country year-round?
We have bird dogs in countries that aren't full-time. I'd say overall, the
Dominican and Venezuela are obviously the most heavily covered. Columbia,
Curacao, Aruba, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Panama,
Nicaragua — those scouts (and others) are all year-round. We cover probably
some where in the ballpark of 20-25 countries. A lot of time you're moving
around. There's European tournaments in different countries, so you'll go and
you'll sit on a tournament for five or six days and while you're there, you
try to establish contacts. You put together a local group of players and form
a tryout there and see if you find anything.
If an international draft is instituted in the next collective bargaining
agreement, so for the 2017 season, would that change your approach?
Absolutely, because right now the way the market is set up, anybody can still
sign any player. Some players may price out some teams, but you still have
kind of the opportunity to sign any player. If the draft comes into play,
that'll obviously make it a lot more complex. There's going to be a good
number of players where, if you're picking 30th in the draft, you're not
going to have access to that unique group of players.
So allocation of resources, i.e. whom you scout and how often would change?
Exactly. It's how it is in the U.S. amateur draft. The teams that are picking
28th and 30th aren't going to expend that many resources on scouting a Mark
Appel as the top five, six, seven teams would.
What do you think of this year's international class?
As an overall class, I think it's a very good class. It might be a little
thin overall in the pitching market. Overall it's a strong hitting class. I
don't think it's as strong as last year's class, because there was a little
bit more overall talent. This year there's a little more upper-level quality,
but there isn't the depth that there was last year.
Do some countries provide a tougher challenge when it comes to background
checks than others?
Major League Baseball has really done a good job of cleaning that up, sending
investigators to whatever country's a player's getting signed from.
Obviously, with most players being signed out of the Dominican Republic and
Venezuela, those are the countries that were having some issues. But again,
MLB has done a good job of cleaning that up, and players know that they're
going to be investigated now. The agents know. It's a lot safer from a risk
standpoint now from what it was 5-10 years ago.
--
"HARD WORK BEATS TALENT
WHEN TALENT FAILS TO WORK HARD."
--
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