TORONTO – In the summer of 2011, after being selected in the 46th round of the draft, Shane Farrell signed with the Toronto Blue Jays and tried to rehab the arm issues that dogged him throughout his collegiate career. The right-hander had an up-and-down run at Marshall University, where he majored in business management, but the competitive desire to see what he could do on the mound when right physically lingered.
Eventually, though, Farrell’s body forced a surrender, a case of thoracic outlet syndrome doing in both his ambitions on the mound, along with the possibility of a career in coaching.
“It had gotten fairly painful and was disrupting my normal day-to-day life,” says Farrell. “There was a lot of intense therapy, and surgeries that went into it, and I was probably living in a little bit more pain than a normal 22-year-old should, so I thought maybe transitioning into scouting or an office job would alleviate some of that.”
An internship with Hall of Fame baseball writer Peter Gammons, filing reports on players he liked in the Cape Cod League, sent him on that path. Farrell met dozens of baseball people during that summer of 2012, leading to an amateur scouting assistant job with the Chicago Cubs.
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Progression through the ranks over the past seven years brought him to the Toronto Blue Jays, where he took over from amateur scouting director Steve Sanders, who in December left for an assistant general manager position with the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Sanders, a college teammate of Farrell’s younger brother Luke, is a friend and helped to guide him through the interview process. Now, at 30 years old, Farrell is not only at the helm of a pivotal draft in which the Blue Jays own the fifth overall pick, he’s also working through an unprecedented scouting process with the continent shut down amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s very different,” Farrell, the middle son of former Blue Jays and Red Sox manager John Farrell, says during a conference call Tuesday. “Scouts can tend to be creatures of habit at times so to tell a scout he’s got to spend Friday night at home in March, April and May, that’s just not something we’re accustomed to. We are spending a ton of time communicating, whether it’s phone calls, texts, we’re implementing a lot of Zoom calls, as well. Having regional breakout groups in talking through players. Things like that. …
“We have as much (data) as everybody else,” he adds later. “It’s going to be how we process that information.”
Mentoring him through the challenging promotion and these even more challenging times is Tony LaCava, the club’s senior vice-president, player personnel, who also helped groom Sanders when he first came over from the Boston Red Sox in September 2017.
LaCava, 58, is the Blue Jays’ dean of scouting, beginning his career as a birddog with the Los Angeles Angels in 1989 after a couple of years as an infielder in the Pittsburgh Pirates system. He’s played a number of key roles in the organization since former GM J.P. Ricciardi brought him over as an assistant GM in October 2002, even serving as interim GM during the transition from Alex Anthopoulos to Ross Atkins.
In pairing LaCava with Farrell, as they did with Sanders, the Blue Jays are hoping to meld his invaluable decades of experience with the modern skills of an on-the-rise executive.
“With Steve, he’s exceptional – I learned from him and we had a really good dynamic. You can’t replace Steve Sanders, he’s as good a guy as I’ve worked with. He’s going to be a star,” says LaCava. “But we did really well bringing in Shane. He’s got a lot of Steve’s good qualities, his values are great, he’s easy to be around, he treats our scouts with respect, treats everyone with respect. And he’s smart. He pitched, he played, he worked in a progressive front office with some smart people. He’s going to help us here get even better as a group.”
Under the circumstances, simply staying level is a worthy goal, as when the draft takes place (it will be between June 10 and July 20) and how long it will be all remain up in the air.
The draft can be short as five rounds, which would be less than ideal in a year the Blue Jays are selecting so high and have the ninth largest signing bonus pool to work with.
The No. 5 pick has an assigned value of $6,180,700, and a total pool of $10,737,700 for the first 10 rounds if the draft goes that long, $9,694,300 if it only goes five rounds.
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Typically, teams picking early in the draft can save some pool room with their early picks and reallocate that money to find value in later rounds, but such cheats are less effective with fewer opportunities to select players.
Add in that the spring season is used to chart the gains and losses made by developing players and this year’s pool becomes especially tricky terrain.
“This is so different than anything any of us have ever done,” says LaCava. “But we have in the can a lot more information about these guys than what it would have been like say 10 or 20 years ago. That includes all the showcase events in which the best players in the country, generally, show up … that weren’t necessarily as prevalent 10 years ago. Then the amount of video we have on these guys is certainly considerably better and all the analytics, the batted ball data, the Trackman information, these things weren’t even invented 10 or 20 years ago. So we do have some of that. Ideally, you’d like to have more of it for the current year, but even then we’ve captured some stuff we can evaluate and process.”
To that end, LaCava has been encouraged by the way Farrell has worked to build relationships with the club’s scouts and sought to create evaluative structures within the current confines. Teams are now able to resume contact with draft-eligible players, their parents and coaches, creating an opportunity for better background work and data-based scouting in the absence of games to watch.
Farrell describes himself as “a bit more balanced” between traditional and modern approaches to scouting, saying, “it’s finding the proper marriage using the numbers at hand to confirm or help push an argument that you’re trying to make or capture about a player.”
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LaCava will be there to provide equilibrium, and since Farrell’s hiring, the two have spent hours sharing ideas, thoughts, visions of where the Blue Jays’ scouting department is going and how they’re going to get there.
“My interactions with Tony have been incredible, he and I talk daily in some form or fashion,” says Farrell. “He has a tremendous amount of knowledge and history of the game, life experience in the game and so much, not only myself, but our whole staff and department can learn from.”
Then there are his own experiences to draw upon, from watching scouts operate during his days as a player to his early work in the role himself, the foundations of how he operates now.
“(Scouting) puts your own talent level into sight very quickly,” says Farrell. “We all think a little highly of ourselves as competitors and in our on-field talent, and then you go out to the Cape League and you’re watching a pool of players that everyone on the field exceeds your own talent level, and it dawns on you that maybe getting into scouting at an early age was the right choice. So, there were some good learning curves along the way, but one of the biggest takeaways was understanding how challenging it is to go in and properly evaluate a player, especially in a shorter look or a shorter setting.”
Drafting amid a pandemic, that may hold truer than ever.
