Andrew Tinnish is wearing reflective shades,
a plain blue baseball cap, a beige windbreaker, jeans and a blank expression. He is a study in nondescript. He is standing beside the visiting dugout with his hands deep in his pockets, trying to stay warm in a stiff breeze on an early May afternoon that feels like mid-March. Two college teams, neither an NCAA power, are playing in front of 50 fans and family members. Tinnish wants to blend in. He’s there to see and not be seen. He stands along the first base line and trains his hard stare at a big right-handed batter in the on-deck circle. When that player comes to the plate, Tinnish steps right up to the screen and pulls a stopwatch out of his jacket, stealthily, like he is picking his own pocket. “I saw him at a showcase last summer,” he says in a voice quiet enough to be drowned out by the wind. “He crushed a couple of balls off a pitcher who has a shot at going in the first round. He showed two tools: plus-plus power and plus-plus arm. I want to get a better look at his swing to see if he has a chance to hit for contact. I want to see if he can field his position and how athletic he is.”
Tinnish, the Blue Jays director of amateur scouting at the tender age of 36, is an open book, but the book is open only to one page, and that page is heavily redacted. He doesn’t want the player of interest named. Not his position. Not his school. Not even the showcase where he saw him. It’s not that this player is a first-rounder, but it’s the principle of the thing. In scouting, information is power and a leak is power compromised. He’s okay to talk about what he’s looking for. He’ll shut it down if you want to turn the subject to what he has seen. He’s okay to talk about what the Jays are generally trying to do in the MLB draft. He’ll walk if you ask him specifically what they’re going to do.
Even within the hard limits of what he can and will talk about, however, Tinnish makes it clear that the Jays are in uncharted territory. During a three-year stretch, starting in 2010 and concluding this summer, Toronto is poised to invest more heavily in the draft than any team in MLB history. And though the Ottawa native talks about the collective rather than the individual, he has the last word on the prospects the Jays throw millions at—heady stuff for a guy who 10 years ago was working as a batting practice pitcher and office gofer.
The guy who oversees the Jays’ draft was at one point the kid who flew under its radar. Back in ’94, as an Ottawa high schooler, Tinnish drew interest from a community college in Michigan, but his first choice was Brock University, which was launching its baseball program the next spring. He knew a coach from the school was coming up to scope one of his games. His excitement gave way to disappointment when the coach talked to his teammate Grant Griffin after the game. Tinnish laughs about it now, but, offering his own professional second opinion, he betrays a lasting sting: “I thought I had a pretty good game.”
Let the record show that Tinnish not only made the Brock team as an unrecruited walk-on, but ended up winning the Badgers’ MVP award three times, leading the team to two national championships and setting school batting records as a first baseman and outfielder. “He was a great leader and an absolute sponge, picking up something from every clinic, every former major leaguer who came to work with us,” Brock coach Jeff Lounsbury says.
Tinnish wound up his playing days pitching for the Quebec City Capitales in the independent Northern League. At this point most would have moved on with their lives, but Tinnish wasn’t ready to set aside the game. “My prof in my sports management class at Brock asked me what I wanted to do eventually,” Tinnish says. “I told him that I wanted to be a scout. I had given it a lot of thought.”
Tinnish landed an internship with the Jays in 2001. J.P. Ricciardi, then Toronto’s GM, bumped up Tinnish to a full-time assistant’s role a year later. “We had a bunch of young guys, Andrew and Alex Anthopoulos and others,” Ricciardi says. “I called them the kids down the hall. You could tell there was talent there. They wanted to make a point that they belonged. We made a point of involving them.”
In the fall of 2002, Ricciardi sent Tinnish to MLB’s scouting school in Phoenix, Ariz., where he made an immediate impression on Walt Burrows, an instructor at the school for almost two decades. “I’ve had 15 to 20 young baseball men come through here every fall, and sometimes as many as 50, a lot of them former big-league players,” says Burrows, who heads up the MLB Scouting Bureau’s Canadian operation. “Some went on to become GMs like Kenny Williams [with the White Sox]. Andrew was one of the four or five best. He had a natural eye for talent and an ability to write detailed reports.”
A few months later, Ricciardi gave Tinnish his first full-time scouting gig, assigning him to the Florida Panhandle for a season. “That first season is the toughest, especially working a region you’re not familiar with,” Tinnish says. “It’s not just feeling the pressure of making the right decisions on players. It was finding my way around, going to all the ballparks for the first time.”
Tinnish advanced through the ranks with alarming speed. After a year in Tallahassee he became the organization’s scouting coordinator. Three years later he was the assistant scouting director. And in 2009, when his fellow kid down the hall Anthopoulos was installed as GM, he promoted Tinnish to the scouting department’s top slot. Anthopoulos had read Tinnish’s reports over the years and knew his batting average on prospects. The promotion would have been heady stuff for a young baseball man in any organization, but Tinnish was coming in at a watershed moment for the Jays. He was going to have opportunities and challenges that most veteran scouts only dream of. With their own picks in the June drafts in hand, the Jays collected additional picks as compensation for players lost through free agency. They had seven picks in the top 80 in both 2010 and 2011. They also own five in the top 60 of this year’s draft, which will commence June 4. Ultimately, they’re all Tinnish’s calls. The Jays have also spent $11 million signing their draftees in each of the past two seasons, more than everyone but Washington and Pittsburgh, whose numbers are skewed by No. 1 overall picks.
Anthopoulos disputes the
suggestion that the Jays have taken a different philosophical tack with the collection of these top choices. The GM sees each pick acquired as the fruit of a freestanding decision. “It comes down to managing assets,” he says. “Are we farther ahead investing in re-signing free agents or using that money to sign players from the draft? In the cases of players like Marco Scutaro or John Buck or Rod Barajas as examples, we decided the compensation picks were the best strategy rather than re-signing.”
Anthopoulos’s predecessor sees a more complicated picture. “It’s not just that the club has acquired these picks,” Ricciardi says. “Ownership has given them permission to spend over the slots of those picks.” Jargon translated: The Jays have drafted players whose price tags scare off others, a luxury Ricciardi says he rarely enjoyed.
Amateur drafts in any sport are exercises in projection, risk and hope. In big-league baseball, though, risk begins with coaxing prospects to sign. The draftees can use their options to go to or stay in college as leverage to get clubs to boost their signing bonuses. If they don’t like the club that drafted them, they can bide their time until a later draft, something that happens much more in baseball than other major sports. “Part of scouting is establishing signability,” Tinnish says. “You have to know the story to know if you can get a player signed for money that makes sense.”
The Jays undertook a significant risk with their first pick, 21st overall, in last year’s draft: Tyler Beede, a Massachusetts high-school pitcher committed to Vanderbilt University. Baseball America described him as “a tough sign” who was “too good to pass up.” Beede walked away from a signing bonus of $2.5 million, about a million more than the bonuses paid to each of the previous five picks. He ended up being the only first-rounder who didn’t sign with a major league team.
At a glance it looked like a bad gaffe. It was anything but. The Jays knew that if Beede opted not to sign, they would get the 22nd pick in 2012. They also knew they were going to be able to spend more freely than other clubs in the compensation and second rounds, where they had six picks. With their fourth compensation pick, No. 57 overall, the Jays selected Kevin Comer, a big right-hander from New Jersey who was also committed to Vanderbilt. The Jays met his price for “un-committing”: $1.65 million, the second largest bonus in the second round, nearly three times the slotted value, and more than what 13 first-rounders received. The Jays weren’t done there though. With the first of their two picks in the second round, No. 74 overall, they opted for Daniel Norris, a Tennessee high school left-hander with a 92 mph fastball. Again, Norris dropped because other organizations thought he was committed to Clemson University. The Jays managed to woo him with a $2-million signing bonus, a number befitting a top-10 selection. So it looked like the Jays missed out on their single first-rounder, but in fact they were effectively bringing two into the fold.
The game is dragging on at the Campus That Must Not Be Named. Tinnish is looking forward to getting home tomorrow, his first chance to see his wife and two kids, who are four and two, in 10 days. He has been on the road for all but five days per month in the past calendar year. The nearer June draws, the more days he’ll pack for. His lifestyle is even more peripatetic than it sounds. Many mornings, he’ll wake up in a U.S. city and not know if he’s going to see a game there or if he’ll have to fly someplace else. He’ll check team schedules and weather reports and get the dope from his area scouts about injured players and starting pitchers. A flight a day made on an hour’s notice, four days in a row, is business as usual.
The logistics bore him. He’d rather talk about the aesthetics. “Anyone can tell you why a prospect won’t play, and there are guys who’ll do that every time and then just go with Baseball America’s list,” he says. “I try to see what a prospect might be able to do. I look for strengths rather than just focusing on weaknesses.”
The player of interest today is a disappointment. The big shots he hit in the showcase last year were aberrations. He looks average in the field. He has gaping holes in his coverage of the plate. He doesn’t show plus-plus power, plus-plus arm or plus anything. The player of interest has become a player of no interest.
Tinnish remains phlegmatic. “Sometimes you go to see a player and the other team walks him intentionally four times,” he says. “Managers aren’t worried about letting the opponents’ best players show what they can do.”
This wasn’t a wasted trip. Yeah, he could have just looked at the area scout’s reports and spent an extra day with his family. But that extra day would be spent without the peace of mind that comes with seeing and knowing. And it would eat Tinnish up if someone snapped up the player in June and he made the majors someday. It’s better to know what’s not than to not know at all.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.