If you’re a high school or collegiate baseball player with the skills and determination to go pro, John Gonsalves might want to talk with you.
Gonsalves is a part-time amateur scout with the Seattle Mariners and you might like what he has to say.
Of course, he has to like what he has to see.
“You have to pass the eye test,” said Gonsalves, a Carver resident in his fourth year working for the Mariners. “If you see someone who looks like an athlete, you just watch him play. You look for the five-tool type of player, of whom there are very few. (A five-tool player can hit, hit with power, has speed, can field and can throw – all at a high level).
“So you look at all their attributes and you grade them. You might see a kid who can hit mammoth home runs but strikes out half the time. But that power potential is something that pro teams are always looking for.
“For example, a kid might be an average runner, an average fielder with an average arm, but he has what they call plus power. That’s what (teams) are attracted to. If somebody has one great skill, like in pitching, if you have a 17-year-old kid who’s throwing 90, 92 miles an hour but has trouble finding the strike zone, he has a plus arm. So he’s someone you keep your eye on.
“You’re always looking for that one, or more, great skill. If you find one with all five, well, everybody else has found him, too.”
Then it’s up to which team gets the opportunity to select him when the amateur draft rolls around in June.
“With pitchers,” Gonsalves said, “you have to break down their delivery, find flaws in their delivery, watch their shoulder position, try to project whether they’ll be starters or relievers. That comes after watching kids throw quite a bit. The skill guys (veteran scouts) can do that.”
An Easton native who has lived in Carver for the last 11 years, Gonsalves, 54, is an amateur scout who tracks high school kids, college players and other free agents who haven’t been signed yet.
“A pro scout,” he said, “will go to minor league games and scout prospects within their own organization to see how they’re progressing and/or scout prospects in other organizations for possible trades.”
Pro scouts also scout other major league teams for various reasons. The scout’s parent team could be coming up soon on another MLB team’s schedule and a pre-series scouting report is due. Those “possible trades” might also figure in the scouting equation, as does another aspect of a scout’s learning process.
A face at Fenway
“The only pro scouting I do is at Fenway Park during September,” Gonsalves said. “Part of my training to be a scout is go to a bunch of pro games and actually scout the Red Sox. So I’m sitting there a couple of years ago, thinking, ‘What am I doing here? Here I am, a guy who lives in Carver, and I’m scouting Dustin Pedroia.’ The reason I was given is you can’t really scout a pro player unless you know what a pro player is.
“So I go to the Red Sox games early, watch batting practice, and watch how they proach the game. Then when I see college kids or high school kids, you try to see some of the same things. The Ce Cod League season (which Gonsalves also covers) is done by then, the draft was in June, college is certainly over, so it’s kind of a training ground to keep us on our toes.
“I do it every year. The fun part about it for me is you get to meet some of the older guys who have been around baseball for a long time and get to talk to them. You learn quite a bit.”
Gonsalves’ scouting area is the northeast, which embraces all six New England states and New York. Recently he was in warm, sunny Fort Myers, Fla., where he scouted some high school players as part of a working vacation.
“While I’m there, I give the scouting department a different look,” Gonsalves said in a phone interview. “Other scouts and I are there and everyone turns in a report on everybody they see.”
Gonsalves was not in Florida during spring training. He spent time watching New England college teams getting ready for the season.
“We try to cover every college,” he said. “We talk to the coach, find out who he believes his prospects are or draft-eligible players. College players are not draft-eligible until after their junior year (or if they’re 21 at least 45 days before the draft). So for three years we watch them, especially as a junior because they could be part of that year’s draft.
“Most college freshman we’ve seen as high school players and we just watch them progress. I keep files on them, file reports and go from there.”
Gonsalves said it is customary for big league organizations to pay for a draftee’s final collegiate year should he return to complete his degree.
Junior college players are draft-eligible at any time.
Gonsalves emphasized that scouts “just recommend the players. We don’t select them (in the draft).” That’s up to a team’s general manager and its scouting supervisor after all the players have been checked and cross-checked and final reports have been filed.
The highest draft pick of Seattle based partly on the recommendation of Gonsalves is power-hitting first baseman Mickey Wiswall of Stoneham and Boston College. He was drafted in the seventh round after his junior year in 2010 and is now with the High Desert Mavericks of the Class A Advanced California League.
Gonsalves grew up in Easton and attended Oliver Ames High School (Class of 1976). He was an infielder at OA and at UMass-Dartmouth (an ’81 grad), later played some semi-pro baseball, then started a family. He now has six kids and seven grandchildren.
His full-time job is that of a purchasing agent for a Middleboro firm that manufactures equipment for the packaging industry, but he finds time to serve as assistant boys varsity basketball coach at Oliver Ames in the winter and coach a Central Mass. AAU baseball team during the summer.
His high school connections helped Gonsalves land his scouting position. He was an assistant to Coyle-Cassidy baseball coach Brian Nichols, who eventually left that job for one in scouting. Now the east coast area scouting supervisor for the Mariners, Nichols asked Gonsalves to come aboard.
“Baseball is a good old boy network. It’s who you know,” Gonsalves said. “I’m sure there are a lot more qualified baseball people than I, but I just hpened to know the right guy.”
It’s not about the money
Money is not what anchors Gonsalves to scouting.
“It’s not a very lucrative job,” he said. “You don’t get paid a lot of money. I do it not so much for the money but for the love of the game. You get to see a lot of good players play and meet a lot of good coaches. That’s where I get most of my joy from. That’s very rewarding.”
Also rewarding is helping kids get into college, even if it means that a high school player he’s scouting, and recommends for drafting by the Mariners, will delay his signing a contract.
“Being a part-time scout,” Gonsalves said, “I talk to a lot of kids. It means as much to me if I can use my references that help a kid get a scholarship somewhere as it does getting a kid drafted in the 30th or 40th round and he might never make the big leagues. But a reference to a kid getting into a good school, that’s very rewarding. As I tell the kids, school really comes first. Get your education.
“If you’re looking at a kid in high school and you’re thinking about drafting him, chances are a lot of the top prospects have college offers at a Division 1 school. He’s pretty much set unless you draft him very high and unless you obviously give him a large signing bonus.”
Signing bonuses range widely, descending significantly from Round 1 of the Major League Baseball draft through the 50th and final round. The average first-round pick in 2010 got $2,220,966, 10th-rounders were paid an average of $137,143, and those between rounds 41 and 50 received an average of $14,304.
Seattle’s first-round draft choice (second overall) in 2011, left-handed pitcher Danny Hultzen from the University of Virginia, signed a five-year contract worth $8.5 million. The deal for the 6-3, 200-pound Maryland native included a $6.35 million signing bonus and escalators that could push the total value to $10.6 million.
Hultzen, 22, is currently pitching for the Double-A Jackson (Tenn.) Generals of the Southern League.
“I spend a lot of time with high school and college kids. My biggest advice to kids – aside from the educational aspects – even if they’re not pro prospects but still good ballplayers, is that somebody’s always watching, somebody’s always observing how you play, how you act – sportsmanship. You never know who’s watching, so always hustle, never show a bad attitude because that is all part of the process.”
Attitude is a big part of the process.
“One of the key questions is ‘What type of kid is he?’ Is he coachable? What’s his attitude? What’s he do when he fails? Baseball’s a tough game and you fail a lot of the time, so what does he do when he fails?
“If I see a kid who’s been great, and I call in someone else to watch him and that person sees him once and at his worst (attitude-wise), that’s it. They don’t want to see him anymore. That can be as damaging as it could be. Like anybody else you’d recommend in any job, that’s a bad recommendation for you. And that’s really what you want to avoid, obviously.”
Making a house call
Another way to judge a prospective draftee is to make a home visit, dig right in and poke around up close and personal. It’s akin to college basketball coaches on a recruiting trip.
Said Gonsalves, “That’s a great way to find out more about the kid, find out about his family, find out where he’s going to go to school, find out if he’s interested in the draft. Basically, try to find out his draftability.
“You might have a kid who’s going to Brown University, his father’s a surgeon, and he might be a great pitcher and you ask him. ‘Are you interested in playing pro baseball?’ And he says, ‘Well, maybe after I graduate from Brown. I want to be a surgeon like my dad.’ That’s part of those discussions.
“The other part of it could be the kid doesn’t really want to go to college and wants to start (pro ball) right away. Those kids will say, ‘Please sign me. I’ll play for anything. Just give me a chance.’ ”
Projectability and comparisons are two key words in a scout’s vocabulary.
“You try to project what 16- and 17-year-old kids you’re looking at will be like at 21 or 22,” Gonsalves said. “That’s the skill part of it, to take a kid and break him down and say ‘in five years this kid is going to do this, or he’ll be doing that.’ That comes from experience.
“When it comes to comparisons, when you file a report, you might say, ‘This kid hits like Pedroia’ or ‘this guy pitches like Jon Lester.’ ”
Talent like that would make any scout one hpy fella.
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