ByteVibes

Steve Sanders was asked to give his scouting report on a young pitcher.

As the director of amateur scouting for the Blue Jays, he gets this type of query all the time. Specifically, though, he was asked to assess a 6-foot-1 right-hander who pitched for Northwestern University during the 2010 season.

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Sanders laughed. Then he kindly obliged, turning the focus back on himself.

“The more pitchers I watch now, the worse my scouting report would have been on myself,” he said, with a smile. “I didn’t have big stuff, again, after the surgery. I didn’t have a big fastball. I pitched off a changeup, and had to rely on deception more than anything to stay off of barrels.”

The surgery was to repair the torn labrum in his right shoulder. Sanders suffered the injury in his senior year of high school. He still attended Northwestern but sat out for two baseball seasons while he recuperated. He pitched for the club team in his third year to build up his arm and then, determined to achieve his goal of pitching for a Division I school, made the team in his senior year. He pitched 4 2/3 innings in seven games.

“Even though it didn’t go quite the way I had anticipated and I had limited opportunities to pitch, for me it was more about being able to check that off and accomplish something that I had spent a long time working for,” Sanders said.

The layoff from playing was a blessing in disguise, setting Sanders on a path to pursue a career in baseball operations. Not unlike the top prospects he now drafts, the 31-year-old rose quickly up front-office ranks, eventually joining the Blue Jays, where he currently heads the amateur scouting department, which is responsible for drafting and continuing to build a farm system ranked sixth by Baseball America.

“The injury and my inability to come back from the surgery, I think, opened my eyes a little bit and I think opened me up to other ways to stay involved in baseball when I was done playing, which I think I realized pretty quickly was probably going to be after college,” Sanders said.

But first, Sanders dabbled in other pursuits.

While still in college, the Los Angeles native interned at a talent firm, the Gersh Agency, working under agent Joe Longo. In 2009, Artie Harris, a family friend, who worked in the Dodgers’ scouting department, helped Sanders land an internship with the team, where he performed tasks ranging from player development to trade deadline prep.

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He spent two summers with L.A. then interned for MLB at the Arizona Fall League in 2010 after graduating. There he connected with folks from the Boston Red Sox, which helped him land an internship with their advance scouting department. He was hired full time by the Red Sox in 2011 and worked in various roles within international and amateur scouting. At every stop, Sanders said he tried to soak up as much knowledge as he could, while figuring out which area interested him most. Eventually, amateur scouting emerged the clear winner.

“I was fortunate enough to work with and learn from a lot of really, really great people (in Boston), and part of that is that they exposed me to a lot of different things really early on and gave me opportunities to learn and make mistakes,” he said. “For me, I think that’s what allowed me to continue to grow my curiosity in that space and grow my experience there.”

In the fall of 2016, Sanders was hired by the Blue Jays to be the director of amateur scouting. It was an exciting yet nerve-wracking challenge for Sanders. But after speaking with the team’s leadership, including president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins, Sanders knew he wanted to be a part of what the organization was building.

“Moving to a new city and starting a new job with a new group of people was all of those things for me — exciting, scary,” he said. “Most of all I was comforted by the fact that I felt like this was a group of people that I knew that I wanted to be a part of.”

Said Atkins: “It was interesting with Steve, within a couple of months of him being hired, he was already articulating our values to the entire organization better than I or Mark could. It was clear there was something that he identified with and aligned with and it was important to him.”

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Today, Sanders manages a staff of more than 30 scouts deployed across North America. Year-round, Sanders and his staff are focused on finding baseball’s next great players. Sanders spends a good amount of his time on the road watching prospective picks. Along with Tony LaCava, the team’s senior vice president of player personnel, he also works to continually improve and streamline the Jays’ drafting process. Eventually, their work culminates with three sleepless days in June during the MLB Draft. And yes, when it’s over, they have a dinner to celebrate — but they don’t breathe a sigh of relief until draftees are signed.

Due to the uncertainty that accompanies drafting young athletes, Sanders and his team can’t judge the outcome of a draft until years later. For that reason, his job requires patience, a quality he admits he’s still honing. The job also requires self-evaluation. That means marking successes but also acknowledging when they got it wrong or missed something entirely.

“We’re going to make mistakes, and we’re going to make the wrong calls sometimes,” Sanders said. “It’s about learning from them and trying to take something from every one of those mistakes we make and trying to apply it to the next one, so hopefully we don’t make the same mistake again.”

That doesn’t mean those missteps don’t sting, though.

“I lose a lot of sleep over the guys that don’t pan out or haven’t panned out,” he said. “Honestly, I think if I didn’t, I’m not sure I’d be in the right job.”

When it comes to Toronto’s approach to drafting, Sanders said it’s about bringing in impact players to either eventually help the major-league team or be used in future trades. No draft has a set-in-stone strategy. Instead — and Sanders recognizes the cliché but insists it’s true — each round the organization is looking to add the best player available and, eventually, classes will diversify to include the full gamut of players — from risky, high-upside high schoolers to trusty college pitchers. Thanks to the work of scouts who are out on the front lines with these players, with each pick the team is bringing in someone they believe in from both an on- and off-the-field perspective.

“It’s about making sure we know who they are and that they align with what we’re looking for from a values standpoint, from a work-ethic standpoint, from a teammate standpoint,” Sanders said. “Everybody brings something different to the table, but every one of these guys,  whether they make it to the big leagues or not, can make our organization better even if that’s being a good teammate at the lower levels or helping somebody along the way that ends up making it, even if that guy doesn’t get there himself. So it’s bringing people into the organization that can do that and make us better in some way.”

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Since Sanders joined the Blue Jays, the team’s farm system has risen from 24th in 2016 to sixth, based on Baseball America’s recent organizational talent rankings. With the Blue Jays in the midst of a rebuild, Sanders is aware of how conscious the fan base is of its most promising homegrown prospects, who can provide the roseate hope fans cling to in rebuilding years. Sanders said he welcomes that attention from across Canada.

“It’s fun, it’s exciting,” he said. “It’s neat to see other people outside the organization as excited about the players that we’re bringing in as we are.”

Sanders has been at the helm of three drafts for the Blue Jays. His first draft class, in 2017, is headlined by pitcher Nate Pearson, who was recently promoted to Triple-A Buffalo. Pearson likely won’t be in Toronto till next season, but as the 22-year-old and his fellow draftees near the majors, Sanders is getting closer to seeing if the first fruits of his labour with the Blue Jays can impact the big leagues.

When that day does come, it’ll be a special one, he said.

“It’ll be a cool day,” he said. “I try not to get too caught up in that because hopefully it’s not just one, hopefully it’s a wave and then another wave and then another wave. But it’ll be a neat day when the first of those guys gets up, not just for me, but again, for the entire staff that got to share in that.”

As for what his next step could be, Sanders said he’s happy right where he is.

“The goal is to win and I think for me, having been lucky enough to experience that once in Boston only made me want to get back there even more,” he said. “I think we’re well on our way here, so I think my goals are to win a championship here and with this group of people, and everything else is secondary to that.”

(Photo courtesy of the Toronto Blue Jays)

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