Shane Farrell is in a unique situation.
The 30-year-old was hired as the Blue Jays’ director of amateur scouting in December with his club set to make the fifth pick in the 2020 MLB Draft. It will be the highest selection Toronto has had since choosing Vernon Wells with the same-ranked selection in 1997. Because everyone departed for the holiday season just after his hiring, Farrell only began getting to know some of the people he’d be working with during the club’s organizational meetings in January.
Since then, he and the rest of the baseball world have seen unprecedented measures taken to combat the spread of coronavirus, resulting in amateur baseball being shut down early in the spring and scouting halted for a period before recently being able to resume remotely.
“This is certainly a unique time that has presented a lot of challenges I didn’t expect going into the year, but all 30 clubs are dealing with this and it’s creating somewhat of an even playing field,” Farrell said. “But as long as we’re sticking true to our process and our decision-making and continue to collaborate, we feel confident.”
Farrell’s confidence has been helped not only by his staff but also through daily conversations with Tony LaCava, Toronto’s senior vice president of player personnel. LaCava has spent three decades in the game and has a passion for amateur scouting.
“He has a tremendous amount of knowledge and just history of the game, life experience in the game and so much,” Farrell said. “Not only myself, but our whole staff and department can learn from him. So I'm beyond excited to work as closely as I am with Tony.”
LaCava’s first introduction to the young evaluator came by way of Steve Sanders, Farrell’s predecessor in Toronto who is now assistant general manager with the Pirates. Farrell also received recommendations from national supervisor Blake Crosby, regional crosschecker C.J. Ebarb Jr., and Jamie Lehman, who became a West Coast crosschecker for the Blue Jays at the same time Farrell stepped into that role for the Cubs two years ago.
“We loved Steve and he built something pretty cool, so I started to think about what we had with Steve, why he was a good leader,” Lehman said. “It was humility, work ethic, authenticity, passion and care, and I realized that’s a lot of what makes Shane really good, too. … I wanted to put him in the mix for those reasons, and then the club had to do the rest of the work on whether he could do all the other parts of the job.”
Added LaCava: “It starts with how he treats people and his values, and then it extends to his scouting abilities and his intelligence. Steve Sanders is next to impossible to replace, in my mind, but Shane is going to do really well.”
Despite the logistical difficulties Farrell is facing ahead of the Draft, he remains excited about the 2020 class, and the Blue Jays are confident in his abilities to lead his staff through whatever lies ahead.
“There’s no question he’s going to have a challenging year,” Lehman said. “We’ve joked about it a couple times that he’s going to remember this for the rest of his life, and it’s something that I don’t think anybody in any way could have expected, especially with how much it’s going to change the Draft and our job. But all that being said, the same things that were going to make him an effective leader -- if the Draft was just the normal old Draft -- are why he’s going to be great for us even though it’s going to be a huge challenge for all of us.”