- [Sam Hughes] Anybody can come to a game and be like, "This kid. Boy,
he's really good. He had a good game." That's great. He was good tonight.
What do you think he's going to be, six years from now? Because that's what we're
trying to do.
- [Kyle Schwarber] They have everything on you. They have time to first base.
They got a time from first to third. They got how strong your arm is.
They got your spin rate. They got your launch angle, hard hit percent.
They got everything on you.
- [Daniel Carte] So what do you think your biggest adjustment going into professional
baseball is going to be?
- 91.
- [Jason McLeod] I absolutely love the competition. Every day, we get to go scout
with this mindset of, "We're going to beat 29 other teams today." I want to beat them
on information. I want to beat them on the evaluation.
I love the competitive nature of it.
- [Matt Dorey] We get to shape the future of the organization,
by the people we bring in.
- [Bud Selig] The Chicago Cubs select Javier Báez.
Albert Almora.
Kris Bryant.
Kyle Schwarber.
- [Manfred] Ian Happ.
- [Dorey] That one player can change the future of this franchise.
- [Tom Ricketts] I'd like to introduce Theo Epstein.
- [Theo Epstein] Our goal will be to build the best scouting department
in the game.
It was neat, looking back on it, you know, the run that put us ahead in the
10th inning of game seven of the World Series. It was the product of three
consecutive drafts.
- [Joe Buck] Now we're underway in the 10th, and it's Kyle Schwarber.
- [Epstein] Kyle Schwarber led off with a hit.
- [Buck] Hard hit. Base hit.
- [Epstein] He was our first-round pick in 2014. Kris Bryant did a great job hitting
that fly ball and move him over. That was our first-round pick in 2013.
- [Buck] High fly ball into center.
- [Epstein] Then Albert Almora is the one who tagged up. He was our first-round
pick in 2012.
- [Buck] Tagging is Almora with great baserunning.
- [Epstein] Three straight years of first-round picks combined for the run
that put us ahead in game seven of the World Series.
- [Bucks] That's a base hit. Cubs will take the lead. Almora dig into the plate.
- [Epstein] That was a proud moment for everybody.
- [Male] Ohio's dairy farmers would like to wish all participants good luck in
today's event.
- [Daniel Carte] Scouting, like anything, is all about relationships,
the relationships you develop with the families, the kids, the coaches,
and when all those relationships are strong and there's trust,
then usually you make the right decisions.
The most important part of my job is getting to know the players.
Tell Seth I said, "Hello."
- [Man] Absolutely.
Tell him, "Congratulations," on being finished with school.
- [Dorey] Our area scouts know these players, inside and out, talk to their
counselors, their football coaches. They've gotten multiple
points of reference.
- [Carte] I have six states, and I'm the first person to kind of identify talent.
It's important for me to get in and kind of evaluate the guys that may be under the
radar a little bit, that I believe may have some value for the Chicago Cubs.
- What time do you guys play on Wednesday?
- We play at 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday.
- Oh, early game. Well, hopefully you win. You get bumped up.
All right. I appreciate it.
It's an experience like none other. I mean, you've played baseball your
whole life, but it's different when you're playing for people from all over the
country, all over the world, different cultures, and it's every single day.
Do you have any questions about the process at all, about the next couple
weeks of your life?
- [McLeod] Area scouts are probably the most unheralded people in the organization.
I always liken them to like the offensive linemen who block for the quarterback or
blow open the big holes for the running back. But if the area scout does their job
and does a thorough job, then they're going to put us in position to make
the best decisions.
- It starts with having talented scouts, talented evaluators in place.
- [Dorey] Area scouts are in charge of tools, skill, and maybe sometimes,
most importantly, makeup. Then we have two national cross-checkers.
The national cross-checkers are in charge of seeing the top 150 players in the
country, focusing all their attention on where we will spend
our money in the draft.
- [Sam Hughes] These kids don't just show up at Wrigley Field. It's great to see the
finished product, but there's so many blood, sweat, and tears,
travel miles, and people putting their neck out on the line with pounding the
table, "I want to get this guy. This guy should be in our organization.
This guy is what being a Chicago Cub is all about," because that's what we're
trying to do. We try to project and predict. Yeah, that's scouting.
I used to joke that I'm a professional driver that just kind of stops at baseball
games from time to time. Spend a lot more time behind the wheel or in an airplane
than I do at baseball games. That's for sure. We're going...I think it's in Casa
Grande. It's kind of in the middle of nowhere, pretty much.
Every time I go to the yard to scout a player, I try to focus on that player and
watch them as much as I can, from how he warms up, how he interacts with his
teammates. Yeah, I mean I call it a blink moment. What's this kid built like?
Is he long? Loose? Lean? Athletic? Short? Compact? You're looking for pitchers that
have good landing spots, have good sound deliveries, hitters that really take
pitches clean, get in the box, and compete.
We're looking for baseball athletes.
We are at Tempe Diablo Stadium, watching another championship high school game.
My "blink moment" was like, "I'm digging this."
Hey what's up, buddy? Yeah. Yeah, I just left. Yeah, your boy melted
four balls today. Just really went off. Fun to watch. Yeah. Yeah.
No, he's a dude, man.
- [Dorey] There's no days off for guys like us. In the scouting world,
it definitely takes everybody chipping in. It's the families and the wives and the
kids that have to kind of step up.
- [Hughes] I love the hunt. I love the grind. Definitely the hardest part of this
is being away from family and my loved ones. Breaks your heart every time.
You know, your kids realizing you're leaving again for another couple-week
trip, and can't really promise them when you're gonna be back.
- [Carte] Hey. What's up?
- [Carte's Wife] Come to daddy.
- Hey, buddy. What's up, man? Come over here. Oh, you got your helmet on now?
- High-five, bud. What do you say to daddy?
- [Child] I love you.
- I love you too, man. I'll see you tomorrow night.
Mom, I'll call you later.
- Okay. Love you.
- Love you.
- [Hughes] I grew up around the game. My dad has been in the game for close
to 50 years.
- [Gary Hughes] We're following Whitey DeHart, who's our area scout
up here in the Pacific-Northwest.
- I used to travel with him every summer, then work the radar gun for him
every night, and always know I was going to get into it.
- [Carte] I wish that I had this perspective when I was still playing.
I think that every player, when they're playing, gets caught up into the numbers.
It's what mom and dad see. That's what the girlfriend sees. That's what the friends
see. That's what's on Twitter. Being in scouting, you really don't care as much
about the numbers as you do about the quality of what the kid is doing.
- [Ian Happ] When you talk to those guys, you talk to Daniel. He'll tell you
the first thing they're watching is how a guy plays, how he runs on and off
the field, how he legs out a single into a double and does little things like that.
- [Pat Hughes] Ian Happ with a head-first slide to third.
- [Carte] Ian Happ was one of the first three or four reports I ever wrote and my
first draft pick.
So any chance I got, I was here in this stadium, watching him.
I remember one game in particular. He faced a right-handed pitcher and had a
really bad first-at-bat and struck out, and the guy came back with him with the
same arsenal, trying to get him out again, and it did not go well for the pitcher.
So right then and there, you knew he could make adjustments. You knew he had a good
feel for the game. So you had kind of a gut feeling that this guy might be our
first-round pick.
- [McLeod] I'm looking for someone that... Am I going to be really excited to see
this player in a Cubs uniform next Spring Training? I do like to try to meet with
the players, myself. It takes you right back to seeing Albert Almora sitting in
his house, in his living room, with he and his parents, when he's a high school
senior, Jed and Theo and I being on that couch, sitting there, saying,
"Is this the player that we should make really our first selection,
now that we're all here with the Cubs?" It's a really surreal moment to reflect
and remember how far everyone's come.
- [Dorey] Just putting the finishing touches on the 2017 Cubs Away Amateur
Scouting Manual, to pass on the torch to our younger scouts, so they can learn from
one of the best scouts that any of us have ever been around.
- [Sam Hughes] On behalf of the Cubs scouting staff, this is Sam Hughes.
We would like to dedicate the final selection of the 2017 draft to the memory
of Stan Zielinski. Stan was a long-time Cubs scout and passed away in January,
and is missed dearly.
- [Epstein] He was the heart and soul of the scouting department,
a guy that was beloved and that we all miss so much.
- [McLeod] He just had this way about him of writing these little stories and taking
you on a little journey.
- [Schwarber] Squint your eyes and imagine a grainy film of Babe Ruth hitting a ball
into the stands at Yankee Stadium. He's had the best college bat I've seen in a
long time. And remember, I'm old. So I've seen a lot of them. Yeah.
That's something Stan would say, for sure.
- [Dorey] He wasn't going to give Kyle Schwarber the title of being the fourth
overall pick for the Cubs until he got to know the player, inside and out.
And in that report, it was like a running history of how incrementally he fell in
love with Kyle. It was like we were watching this love story develop
in front of us.
- [Schwarber] For him to believe in me the way that he did, I want to go out there,
and I want to play with, you know, excitement. I want to play with
determination. You know, I feel like if I do that every day, I'm paying pretty good
respect to Stan.
- [Len Kasper] Way back and gone. Schwarber.
- [McLeod] There's a time, usually at night, we're done. People have cleared out of the
room. There's this moment that goes through your head as you're looking up at
the board and take in the magnitude of what's about to come and the enormity of
it, because it's so important. We're going to make decisions that are going to affect
this franchise for years to come.
- [Dorey] That's the only thing we really can't control, is that we had the right
process. We had the right environment that bred great conversations,
heated arguments, productive collaboration.
- [Carte] There's something about this kid that I just think
he can throw fuzz one day.
- [Dorey] The board blows up, and we took him at 30. Would you be comfortable?
- [Carte] I'd be much more hesitant at 30.
- [Epstein] It's a years-long process to get to know the player. It all comes together
the week before the draft, where we get everyone in a room, with all our
information at our disposal, apply some art to the science that's gone into it
over the course of the scouting year.
- [Dorey] The players and their success down the road, five years from now,
will be a byproduct of having a really good process.
- [Hughes] Some kids that you help bring into the organization, that have worked
their way up and know what they went through to get to Wrigley Field,
it's extremely rewarding.
- [McLeod] The draft day is our Super Bowl. It's the biggest day of the year.
We're planting seeds for the future health of this organization.
It's such an awesome responsibility to have.
- [Broadcaster] The Chicago Cubs, the defending World Series champs, are up next.
Who do they take tonight?
- [Manfred] With the 27th selection of the 2017 MLB Draft, the Chicago Cubs select
Brendan Little, a left-handed pitcher from the state...
- [Carte] As soon as the last day of the draft, we're starting for the next year's
draft. Yeah, the baseball world doesn't stop for anybody. Despite all the time I
spent with baseball, being with the Cubs, you kind of learn something new about the
game every day.
- [Hughes] Whenever I get home, it's awesome. I travel, when I'm gone close to
200 days a year. I love my family, love my kids. They're everything to me.
Really cool last 21 years, being a part of this organization. It's our job,
is kind of to predict the future. When you get it right, it's no better feeling.
But I'm sure I'll probably be at a ballgame, grinding it out the next day,
jumping on an airplane, keeping it moving. You know? It's kind of what I do.