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Tigers Hire Mark Conner As Amateur Scouting Director

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11:50am: The Tigers have confirmed Conner’s hiring.

8:36am: The Tigers have made another addition to their front office this offseason, reportedly plucking Mark Conner from the Padres to serve as the team’s amateur scouting director under recently hired assistant general manager Rob Metzler, per Evan Petzold of the Detroit Free Press.

Conner joined the Padres as an amateur scout in 2010 and was promoted to northeast regional supervisor in 2014 before eventually serving as the club’s scouting director during the 2015-2021 seasons. With the Padres, Conner helped draft Robert Hassell, CJ Abrams, Ryan Weathers, and MacKenzie Gore. He transitioned to a special assistant role for GM A.J. Preller in September 2021 and was given the task of evaluating every player within San Diego’s farm system.

The Tigers had been looking for a new scouting director since early October, when the new president of baseball operations Scott Harris fired Scott Pleis. Pleis had held the title of amateur scouting director since 2010. Conner inherits a rather poorly ranked Tigers farm system, with only three prospects in MLB.com’s Top-100 Prospect Rankings after the recent graduations of Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson. However, the team will have a strong draft pick after finishing the 2022 season with a 66-96 record. MLB.com projects that the Tigers have the sixth-highest chance (7.5%) of landing the first overall pick in the 2023 draft.

Conner’s addition to the Tiger’s front office is another retooling of the staff built by former general manager Al Avila. Recent additions include Scott Harris as president of baseball operations and Rob Metzler as vice president and assistant general manager. Additionally, the team is looking to add a general manager.

In the dugout, manager A.J. Hinch has also been hard at work retooling his staff, with hitting coach Scott Coolbaugh and quality control coach Josh Paul both departing the organization.

Establishing A Nationals Way

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The Nationals have been a team in transition since winning the 2019 World Series. Their on-field talent has shifted the team into a new strata of contention (which is to say, non-contention), the front office has had to retool itself under GM Mike Rizzo after numerous departures, and most of the stars that represented the Nationals for the last half decade have departed. With all those changes, the Nationals are working to remake their identity.

Externally, Juan Soto will be the face of this club for the next three years, but internally, the organization needs processes, ethos, and a shared vision to return to their status as a perennial contender. That starts with establishing a “Nationals Way,” writes Mark Zuckerman of MASNsports.com. While awaiting participation from the Major League contingent of players, the Nationals are wasting no time in putting their minor league campers to work in building that culture.

In St. Louis, organization wide adherence to the “Cardinal Way” has long been the call-to-arms for the most stable franchise in the the National League. It’s not a bad model to follow. But it’s not easy to duplicate.

The Cardinal Way is more than strategy, more than brand. People, baseball teams, businesses, any complex organization needs a ground truth, to know “true north,” and the Cardinal Way is the religion that keeps St. Louis baseball on task. It’s not an accident that two teams with the strongest organizational identities – the Yankees and Cardinals – have been the most stable contenders over the years. Out of 22 baseball seasons this century, the Cardinals made the postseason 15 times. They put a winning ballclub on the field in 21 of those 22 years, only failing to do so in 2007 when they posted a hardly-disastrous 78-84 record. The Cardinal Way works.

Of course, other franchises have talked the talk about building organizational continuity, but it’s harder than it looks. If there’s hope in the Nationals Way succeeding, it’s in their short history. The Nationals posted a winning record in eight consecutive seasons from 2012 to 2019. They were not, at the time, viewed as a behemoth of contention because it wasn’t until the eighth season – their championship season – that they even won a playoff round. But they had created an engine that routinely churned out winners.

That said, while competence became boilerplate for those Nationals, true contention was balanced on a razor’s edge. Only once did they make the playoffs in back-to-back seasons, despite four division titles in the six-year span from 2012 to 2017. From where we sit today, the fact that their run coalesced into a World Series win seems more magical than engineered. But of course, that doesn’t give the Nats’ organization enough credit.

With Major Leaguers locked out, Ryan Zimmerman retired, and a host of new instructors leading the way in Nats camp, whatever system was in place before needs a system reboot in order to get up and running again. De Jon Watson, in his first season as the Nats’ Director of Player Development, is the man tasked with establishing the Nationals Way. De Watson talked to reporters, including Zuckerman, who provides some details about the system they’re trying to implement.  Zuckerman passes along De Watson’s plan, but with axioms like “attacking the strike zone” and “doing damage when we have the opportunity to do damage,” the Nationals Way, publicly, is more esoteric than proper outline. In that way, it’s identical to the Cardinal Way. It’ll take time to know if they’re similar in any of the ways that matter most.

Quick Hits: Cubs, Giants

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While the lockout rages on, so, too, does front office churn. Here’s the latest from front offices around the game…

  • Cubs assistant GM Jeff Greenberg is one of three finalists to be then next GM of the Chicago Blackhawks, writes The Athletic’s Scott Powers and Mark Lazerus. Greenberg’s candidacy is definitely a bit of a surprise, and he’s not the odds-on frontrunner of the final three. The once-proud Blackhawks are staring down another season outside the playoff field, and with the championship stalwarts of Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews in their age-33 seasons, they’re eager to get the franchise back on track. With Captain Serious largely out of action because of injuries, Kane is only only palpable link to Chicago’s Stanley Cup winners in 2010, 2013, and 2015. The closest baseball corollary to these Blackhawks might be the pre-2020 Giants, and the Hawks would love a similarly quick turnaround. If they miss the playoffs this season, as expected, it will be the fifth time in the last six years that Chicago sits out postseason play. Greenberg has no formal experience in hockey, but he wouldn’t be the first executive to switch playing fields. Paul DePodesta is the hallmark example, having jumped from baseball to the NFL to run the Browns. To see how this saga ends, stay plugged into the latest Blackhawks news over at Pro Hockey Rumors.
  • The Giants have hired Josh Herzenberg as the Assistant Director of Player Development, per Herzenberg himself on Twitter. Herzenberg has spent the past two years working with the Lotte Giants of the Korean Baseball Organization. He started in the KBO as a pitching coordinator, but rose to the level of Director of Research and Development and International Scouting. Prior to his time overseas, Herzenberg spent time in the scouting departments of both the Diamondbacks and the Dodgers. Congrats to Herzenberg on his new position in San Francisco.

Player Valuation Trends Remain At Issue In CBA Negotiations

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As the lockout draws on, time has proved insufficient in healing the conflicts surrounding the current collective bargaining agreement negotiations. The latest reports suggest that the league owners and MLBPA are no closer to finding middle ground on most issues. The most recent concessions were catalogued here by MLBTR’s Darragh McDonald. Today’s analysis, however, comes from thescore.com’s Travis Sawchik, who provides valuable context for a number of trends that have been at issue during these negotiations.

Sawchik tackles the current imbalance between production and pay, the changing demographics of the player populous, and the role that analytics has played in shaping the game’s financial landscape. I urge you to read Sawchik’s full analysis, but below are a couple of passages from Sawchik’s article that frame the current debate.

For starters, player careers have declined. Sawchik writes, “The average service time of MLB players was 4.79 years in 2003 and fell to 3.71 years in 2019, according to MLBPA data from last year.” It’s no coincidence that players become eligible for their first arbitration raise after three years of service time.

Careers are closing in on players from both sides. Sawchik provides the following data: “…the share of position players aged 30-plus declined from 40.4% of all hitters in 2004 to 29.9% this past season. Of all players to step on an MLB field in 2019, 63.2% had less than three years of service time. Careers are also starting later. The average debut age of 25.6 years this season was up from 2011 (24.6 years) and 2001 (24.5), according to Baseball Reference.”

Not only are there less players in their thirties than in the past, but younger players are debuting at older ages than usual. What this amounts to is owners taking advantages of players’ few prime years between the ages 25 and 30, thereby avoiding the growing pains of youth and at the same time forestalling free agency until players are on the tail end of their athletic peaks. Excepting where those superstar players are concerned, teams can then feel comfortable replacing those players with the next wave of cheap, young players entering their primes.

Advanced analytics has made it so that teams have a better understanding of the advantages that this system provides them. Meanwhile, player care has improved and the field of biomechanics has taken on an increased role, only deepening the information available to owners and front offices.

What makes this situation so very complex is that as individual players use these advancements for the benefit of their own careers, the aggregate only pushes the balance of power further in the direction of ownership. The MLBPA knows not to expect owners to yield their high ground willingly, which is why we are where we are in terms of the lockout.

The entire revaluation of an economic ecosystem as complex as Major League Baseball is hardly a simple matter. There is no reset button, especially when only one side of the conflict sees the current system as broken. Still, for the sport to resume, both sides will have to engage in persistent and significant compromise. In the meantime, we all get a little older.

Nationals Add Pair Of Analysts To Front Office

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The Nationals have added a pair of analysts to their front office. Washington needs the influx of talent, as their analyst group has been greatly diminished since their championship run in 2019. Carmen Ciardiello and Lee Przybylski are the latest new hires to join research and development, per Jesse Dougherty of the Washington Post (via Twitter).

Earlier this winter, the Nats added former players Bill Mueller and Coco Crisp to their on-field player development teams. They also added Jon Weil as a special assistant to help in the scouting department.

The Nationals have typically been content with a smaller-than-normal front office group. These additions, however, amount to a refilling of the coffers more than an expansion. Dougherty covered the Nats’ front office situation in a full piece last December.

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