Nationals Director of Scouting, Dana Brown, sat down with me for an interview on Friday to discuss his background, how it led him to scouting and the past, present and future of the Washington Nationals.
His path to the major leagues began in the late 1980s where he played for Seton Hall with future major leaguers Mo Vaughn, John Valentin, and Craig Biggio. He remains the Pirates leader in games played at Seton Hall. Drafted by the Philadelphia Phillies in the 35th round of the 1989 draft, Brown played three years in the organization before Del Unser, then in Phillies management, came to him and told him they liked his baseball knowledge and saw his future as a front office candidate or scout but wanted to start him off as a coach. He spent two years coaching in Philadelphia’s farm system before making the switch over to scouting with the Pittsburgh Pirates in the fall of 1993. Over the next eight seasons, he worked for the Pirates signing current major leaguers Chris Young, Ian Snell, and Dave Williams. In 2002, Montreal Expos General Manager Omar Minaya brought him on board with Montreal as the Director of Scouting. When Minaya left for the Mets in 2005, current General Manager Jim Bowden came on board retaining him in the role he holds today.
I asked him he felt any added pressure in his job given the Nationals stated goal of rebuilding the franchise from the minor leagues up. He was quick to reply that it wasn’t pressure he was feeling, it was excitement. “We started out with the thought process that the team could be contracted and they (MLB) weren’t going to spend a lot of dollars in player development,” Brown said. He continued, “We had a skeleton crew of nine area scouts [while] other teams had around seventeen.” When he found out the Expos were not going to be contracted and that they were relocating to Washington, the plan changed. “They [President Stan Kasten and Bowden] have given me the opportunity to go out and get some strong scouts and add to our staff. We’ve been active in the Latin American signings,” said Brown. He offered the following analogy, “We live in a microwave age. People want it quick. Put in the microwave and eat in thirty seconds. [What we are doing] is building a house. When you put down the foundation, it doesn’t look pretty, but when you do it the right way, and the foundation is set, you start to build and get a picture of what it looks like. That’s when the excitement starts.” Brown added, “We are getting past the foundation part and starting to build it the right way.”
Since he brought up the Latin American signings, we transitioned to discussions of the progress made there. Since the Lerner family took ownership of the Nationals midway through the 2006 season, the Nationals made their presence felt in the Dominican Republic with the signing of SS Esmailyn Gonzalez to a $1.4 million bonus. They have since added to this with the acquisition of four more players from the Dominican (LHPs Randy Almonte and Francisco Vizcaino, RHP Marcos Frias, and CA Ricardo Martinez) and four players from Venezuela (CA Sandy Leon, SS Adrian Sanchez, CF Jesus Morales, and 1B Juan Urdaneta). “We went from signing zero players in Latin America, which is not going to help you,” Brown explained, “to adding ten to fourteen Latin American players that can end up being in our top thirty prospects in the minor leagues which ends up making your big league team better down the road.”
I inquired about what the expectations were of the recent haul of Latin American players. “When you look at players getting to the big leagues, it usually happens within three to five years. That’s what history says,” Brown said, “It’s going to take a couple of years to see how good these guys are and how they are going to impact the big league level.” He continued, “If you get four big leaguers out the [MLB First Year Player] draft, you are doing a good job. If you add two Latin American players, that’s six major leaguers.” Reports have been out there that the Nationals plan to bring Gonzalez, Almonte, and Leon to Viera for Spring Training this year. Brown confirmed this and cautioned, “These guys are only 17 years old. If the were in the US, they’d only be juniors in high school. You don’t want to rush them but you want to give them a shot. It’s difficult to put a high school junior into professional baseball, but you want to let them play in spring training and then make an assessment of where you think they should be.”
I asked if there were plans to expand their international footprint in other countries. Brown replied, “The plan is to hire quality scouts in some of these areas which we are in the process of looking into, but you have to get boots on the ground [first]. Once you get boots on the ground, you can go into these countries and scout these players. The Nationals have made strides in the area of such personnel. In November, the Nationals added ten people to the scouting staff, putting them on even footing with the rest of major league baseball. The Nationals went from nine area scouts for 2002-03. An area scout is responsible for covering a geographic area the club specifies. This number went up to eleven in 2004-05 and then to thirteen in 2006. The Nationals will be at fifteen for 2007. “We are right in the ballpark of where the other teams are,” Brown said, “We’ve also improved with help from national and region crosscheckers (Crosscheckers take the scouting reports of the top players in an organization and evaluate these players in person to make sure ratings are consistent). In the past we only had two, now we have four.”
Unlike the international signings, players scouted in Canada, the US, and the US territories (e.g. Puerto Rico) are subject to the MLB First Year Player Draft. I inquired how the progress was going towards the 2007 draft. “We have our plan in place,” Brown replied, “For 2007, we have all of the names we’ve targeted to see, upwards of 1,000 and between myself and all of the scouts, and we will go out and see these guys to determine who is a priority versus who is a middle of the road guy versus the lower end guy.” At present, the Nationals will have six of the top one hundred picks in the draft (one 1st, two supplemental 1st, two 2nd, and one 3rd). “We are really excited because there are a lot of good players out there,” Brown said, “There seem to be a surplus of high school pitching. There is a chance we could get a real quality close to the major league player at #6. Then we start to see some young quality high school arms and high school bats. We have options and we’ll know more about those options as we get closer to the draft.”
Next I looked back at his 2006 draft class, those the Nationals signed, those they didn’t, and those who are still possibilities (i.e. draft-and-follow candidates).
I’ll start with the ones who got away. I asked him who the hardest unsigned player to lose was, given that five of the Nationals unsigned draft picks (Sean Black, Sam Brown, Sam Dyson, Dustin Dickerson, and Khris Davis) are ranked by many among the top 25-30 incoming college freshmen for 2007. “They were all hard to lose. We wanted to sign all of them,” Brown said, “But Sean Black was a disappointment. Sean and his family made the decision that he wanted to go to college (ironically Brown’s alma mater Seton Hall) and we respected that.”
The Nationals have between eight and ten players who comprise the last class of draft-and-follow players (often abbreviated DFE for draft, follow, and evaluate). MLB eliminated DFE in the new Collective Bargaining agreement. DFE allows clubs to maintain exclusive signing rights to a drafted player until a week before the following draft, if that player attends junior (or community) college. Teams lose the right to negotiate/sign a player who attends/returns to a four-year college once he attends his first class. The Nationals have between eight and ten players who qualify under the final year of DFE. “We are going to scout them heavily and be aggressive,” stated Brown “Sometimes younger players want to get a year of college under their belts. Maybe they’re more likely to sign this year than last.” I asked how far they’d go in pursuing the likes of Joey Rosas or Marcus Salmon, to name a couple. “At the end of the day we are going to assess what their value is,” Brown replied “If they have unrealistic dollar expectations, we’ll move along.”
Finally, I asked him to discuss some of the players from the 2006 to watch in 2007, specifying the lesser publicized players (e.g. Chris Marrero, Colton Willems, and Zech Zinicola). His quick response was four pitchers: Glenn Gibson, Cory Van Allen, Adam Carr, and Hassan Pena. He really feels that lefthanders Gibson and Van Allen really have the potential to break out in 2007. Both made brief appearances in 2006. Gibson, son of former major leaguer Paul Gibson, pitched in three games for Vermont (6IP 2H 7K 0BB) after being selected in the 4th round. He’s a projectable LHP with three solid pitches. Van Allen, a college LHP, was a 5th round selection who also pitched in Vermont (13G 57.67IP 53H 41K 16BB). The remaining two are RHPs with interesting back stories. Carr was grabbed in the 18th round out of Oklahoma State. In college he was primarily a 1B but the Nationals saw his value higher as a RHRP. “He’s really going to come on,” said Brown. Carr pitched for both the GCL Nationals and Savannah Sand Gnats in 2006. What was as surprising as his performance on the mound (16G 25.67IP 21H 27K 11B) was his performance in GCL with the bat where he batted 343/425/629 in 35AB. The final name Brown excitedly discussed was 13th round selection Hassan Pena. Pena, a Cuban defector who pitched at Palm Beach (FL) Community College slipped on many draft boards after experiencing some shoulder soreness. “Pitchers go through stretches like a roller coaster, up and down,” said Brown, “If he can come back to what he was (90-94mph fastball) when I saw him in the fall of 2005. He could be something really special.”
I concluded with his reaction to all the negative things written about the Nationals farm system. Brown replied, “When you lose a lot of games in the minor leagues, it’s very easy to write you need help. We’re building it and we know we need to add more, but you can’t judge a minor league system on the number of losses. We got guys to big leagues quickly (e.g. Ryan Zimmerman and Chad Cordero). In the big leagues, you have to win but in the minor leagues, development comes first. If it’s between winning and development, development comes first.”
