Davidi on Jays: Head of the class

The Toronto Blue Jays’ latest foray into developing Canadian baseball at the grassroots level comes in the form of a scout school for a handful of coaches from the country’s top amateur teams this weekend at the Rogers Centre.

The two-day session, which kicked off Friday morning, is being led by amateur scouting director Andrew Tinnish and is both selfless and a touch selfish in motivation.

By divulging some of the club’s philosophies on both player evaluation and development, the Blue Jays are hopeful that some key messages will trickle down to elite-level players before many of their habits on the field become set.

As Tinnish told the group of some two-dozen coaches during a discussion on hitting, “at the age you guys have them, you have a chance to impact them more than we do in some ways.”

But there is also an element of self-interest at play, as well, as the scout school should help the Blue Jays deepen ties with coaches from coast to coast, allowing them to potentially identify players earlier in their careers, gain a better understanding of them as they grow, and use that information to their benefit at draft time.

“We don’t want to get beat in our own backyard,” Tinnish said bluntly in an interview. “Look, we feel we have the next Canadian impact player in Brett Lawrie and we want to be the team that drafts the Lawries, the Morneaus and the Vottos.

“But we’re also in a unique situation in that we’re the only Canadian team in Major League Baseball and we represent a whole country. We want to do our part to help Canadian baseball improve.”

To illustrate the importance the Blue Jays placed in the school, Tinnish was joined at the morning session by Dana Brown, the special assistant to GM Alex Anthopoulos who is a former scouting director with the Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals; pro scout Jim Beattie; and national crosscheckers Marc Tramuta and Tom Burns, among many other members of the scouting department.

The idea of hosting a scout school first came to Tinnish shortly after he was promoted to his role by Anthopoulos in the fall of 2009, and it took until this year for it to come together.

A first class was held in Vancouver last month for about 15 coaches in the western end of the country, with the follow up round this weekend in Toronto. Coaches from some of the widest-reaching programs in the country received invitations.

While not as intensive as the two-week scout school run by Major League Baseball in Arizona, Tinnish and company offered many of their insights into how they break down players for the draft, how they scout them, what they look for, and red flags they seek to avoid.

High school hitters in particular, Tinnish said, are the most difficult players to project since their skills don’t always translate at more advanced levels. On the other hand, if a teenaged pitcher can throw in the 90s and spin a breaking pitch in high school, his raw ability can be repeated higher up the ladder, too.

“Stuff is stuff,” said Tinnish.

Key in projecting a high school hitter, the Blue Jays explained, is seeking out the key components of a player’s swing that correlate with what big-leaguers do.

Ensuring the player starts his swing from a strong physical base, with his hands staying inside the baseball, his front foot down and the barrel of the bat remaining in the zone as long as possible, are critical.

Elements of the ideal swing were described as follows: simple, compact load with direct path; loose hands working inside the baseball; plus bat speed/strength with good extension; good balance and lower half use; above average plate discipline.

Tramuta likes to watch players closely during at-bats to see how they take pitches, and feels that’s very telling of how advanced their approach is in the batter’s box.

But at the end of the day they all agreed scouting is more art than science, prone to each person’s subjectivity. While showing video of players from recent drafts, for instance, Brown and Tramuta rekindled some war room debates in breaking down swings, with only the passage of time to decide who is wrong and who is right.

“Being able to project hitters is a scout’s calling card,” said Brown.

Either way, Tinnish said the most important thing is for a scout to have conviction in his opinion. He said too often scouts feel the need to parrot industry opinion on a player, when they should trust their instincts most of all.

After all, he says, “we’re all going to be wrong more often than we’re right.”