Q: When did you hook on officially with the Indians?
A: So (after the 2013 World Wood Bat Association World Championship in Jupiter, Fla.), I was able to have informal interviews with Brad Grant, (the Indians’) scouting director at the time; Paul Gillispie, assistant scouting director at the time; and Matt Forman, another former BA intern.
About a day after the Winter Meetings had ended, they asked if I would want to move to Cleveland for a baseball operations internship. So, kind of sight unseen I ended up moving to Cleveland in the dead of January—my first day in Cleveland was during the polar vortex. It was minus30 degrees or so. I ended up spending probably the first eight or nine months of 2014 with the Indians and Cleveland as a baseball operations intern, and I ended up transitioning more into an assistant amateur scouting role. Soon after that is when Clint (Longenecker) joined us as well, so we kind of had a BA duo in the office at that time.
Q: What were your first impressions of guys like Jones (second round, 2016) and Naylor (first round, 2018), and what about them made you pound the table for them?
This story is from the December 2020 edition of Baseball America.
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This story is from the December 2020 edition of Baseball America.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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