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MLB Draft: Sitting down with Twins scouting director Sean Johnson

john shipley, pioneer press
·11 min read

Major League Baseball’s three-day, first-year player draft will begin Sunday at 6 p.m. and the Twins will have three picks the first day, including the No. 8 overall choice, the team’s highest since it selected Royce Lewis with the top pick in the 2017 draft.

That was longtime Twins scout Sean Johnson’s first year running the show as Minnesota’s director of amateur scouting — he has since been promoted to a vice president position — and it was a good start. Lewis, a shortstop drafted out of high school, played well in his first major-league games this season before his season was ended by knee surgery on June 21.

The Twins have a bonus pool of $10.03 million to share among as many as 20 picks, but the No. 8 pick is slotted for a bonus of $5.5 million. The Twins also will pick No. 48 (second round) and No. 68 (competitive balance Round B). The three-day, 20-round draft is heavy on position players, Johnson said, in large part because many of the top arms are recovering from surgeries.

Lewis was one of five Twins first-round draft picks on the major-league roster this season, joining all-star center fielder Byron Buxton, utility player Nick Gordon (2012), outfielder/first baseman Alex Kirilloff (2016) and outfielder Trevor Larnach (2018). Outfielder Brent Rooker, the 35th overall pick in 2017, was traded to San Diego with Taylor Rogers in the deal for Emilio Pagan and Chris Paddack, and has played two major-league games. Last year’s top pick, hard-throwing right-handed high school pitcher Chase Petty, was traded this spring to Cincinnati for veteran starter Sonny Gray.

Two other recent picks, Keoni Cavaco (2019) and Aaron Sabato (2020), have stalled at Class A. Cavaco, picked 13th overall out of high school in 2019, is hitting .229 with 11 walks and 78 strikeouts in 57 games with low-A Fort Myers this season but still only 21. Sabato, a 23-year-old first baseman drafted 27th overall in 2020, is hitting .216 with nine home runs and 37 RBIs in 61 games at high-A Cedar Rapids.

A catcher at Wichita State and formerly the Shockers’ operations manager, Johnson started with Minnesota as an area scout for the southwest 21 years ago. He sat down with a handful of reporters on Friday to talk about this year’s draft and the process the Twins use to draft players. The following Q&A has been edited for space and clarity.

Is there more pressure with a Top 10 pick?

I think the pressure feels the same every year to try to deliver on your first-round pick. I think every team feels that no matter what. The pressure’s certainly higher at 1 versus 26. There’s a gap in the pressure because (at No. 1) you’re trying to take the best player on the planet. Every draft has different strengths, different amounts of depth and players that you feel great about. So, you’re just playing the hand that you’re dealt throughout the first round; you’re just going to have to do a little guesswork on, is this going to come back the way you think it will? Is the player going to play the position you think they will?

Even the decorated college hitters, there are a few that aren’t outstanding on defense but they’ve had great performances with the bat. In a perfect world, you want to deliver a player to player development that has a chance to impact the game on both sides of the ball. So, that’s always the goal. … (With) your pitching, in the first few rounds, you’re definitely going to shoot for a starting pitcher because that’s the toughest thing to develop.

Does ‘best player available’ change at No. 8 versus, say, No. 28 in terms of ceiling versus floor?

There’s not a big gap between the tools, but the skills are better, the resume is better and the ceiling is certainly higher. You can take a guy in the second round that has the same ceiling as a guy in the first round, but there just may be more risk involved. Factoring risk into the equation is something that we certainly do, and it’s tough to measure because you just never absolutely know whether a guy is going to hit, or start a game in the big leagues. It’s just very difficult to tell.

If that’s the case, is there something to be said for having your pick of the best pitchers? You can take the best pitcher on the entire board.

Yeah, there’s a chance, and that’s one of the many scenarios. I don’t think a pitcher will go before us. We have a pretty good signal that they won’t, so you could look at it as, ‘We can take the best pitcher on the board; is that the route we want to go?’ A lot of discussions before now and draft night if that’s what we want to do, and that’s just one of the many scenarios we walk through.

How much of a factor are, say, coachability and work ethic?

We factor in makeup a lot. There are different ways to look at it. We’ve learned that there’s a difference between personality and on-field versus off-field makeup. And we just experienced this at the combine. You can meet a player who you think is going to be this surly, competitive personality and then they walk in the door and they’re gentle and kind and sweet. It just throws you off because there’s a disconnect. A lot of guys flip a switch; they’re one way off the field and another on. There are guys on the big-league team you can think of who are like that when you talk to them versus when you see them on the field.

So, you have to be cognizant that there may be a difference between who these people are between the lines (and outside), and that’s really a thing we focus on: Is he competitive between the lines? How does he perform when the lights go on? Does the spotlight get too tough for them? Are they calm in tough situations? And that’s the reason our scouts go and go and go back again, to try get the answer to that. In my mind, makeup changes. If you think of (the ages) 17 to 25, you change as a human being. Your mind changes. Your outlook on life changes. But going back to Royce, he loved to play. He played hard all the time, his teammates always embraced him. He came with energy every time we saw him. He did that in the big leagues when he got here and was healthy; you saw the same things we saw. He hasn’t changed much since the day we signed him.

What is your access to prospects?

With the (MLB Draft) Combine (starting in 2021), if you’re a Top 300 prospect, you cannot do private workouts for teams. Basically, the agent has to put out, ‘This player’s going to work out at 3 o’clock tomorrow. Everyone can show up.’ You have to have the same access to the player. So, we can still interview or do off-field activities with players if we want to, but nothing on the field. That’s been the biggest change.

So, it’s not like when you brought Carlos Correa in (in 2012) …

No, you can’t do those things anymore. But I’m glad I got to witness the Carlos Correa pre-draft workout. It was incredible. … We had him and Adam Brett Walker (the Twins’ third-round pick in 2012). and I can’t really remember who else was there because it was just really about (them). Adam Brett Walker hit a ball that was almost off the big sign in dead center, which you can’t dream of a person hitting a ball that far. And Carlos … he’s hitting balls into the upper deck, and he’s barely 17. The crazy thing about him is he remembers the day; he remembers talking to certain scouts, like, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember you from the workout.’

So you would have picked Correa had Houston picked Buxton?

Yeah, those were 1 and 2 on the board. I think that’s where we left it: if they took one, we would take the other. But it wasn’t clear. We didn’t know who Houston was going to take (with the No. 1 pick); they could have taken Mark Appel or (Mike) Zunino or anybody. We thought it was one of the two but it wasn’t a lock. Once they took Correa, it was easy for us to take Buxton (at No. 2).

How do you parse data, especially with a small sample size?

You think you want all the information and all the data; well, it’s not all good. This guy’s movement plot looks a little crazy, it’s better than anybody in the big leagues. OK, well, maybe there’s some bad info in there. So, knowing what to look at the right way is part of what that group does down there, and they do a great job.

Usually you hear about data supporting a case. Does it chase you away from some guys?

The scouts’ opinions lead the conversations, all the time. We layer on the analytics, the information, the data — all the things you want to measure — at the very last second. We don’t want to give the scouts all this information in January and say, ‘Here’s who’s doing what.’ We keep the two things very siloed until the very end, because as a scout, once you see the numbers, you can’t help but be biased toward what you see. … Once we get to the end, we bring it together.

I think a good example is when we drafted Trevor Larnach, who had a little bit of a high strikeout rate. But we dug into video and talked to Trevor and (learned) that part of the Oregon State plan was to take a lot of pitches, get into the bullpen early. So, he was a little more passive. So, it wasn’t like he was getting beat by fastballs. He was in two-strike counts, I think we looked at it, like two-thirds of the time. So, if you’re in a two-strike count two times out of three, you’re going to strike out more than the next guy. But he had a good walk rate, he had a good eye. When we went to watch him play, he took good at-bats. So, we tried to bring all that together to make sense of it because Trevor was not a first-round pick going into the season, so we wanted to make sure we were comfortable doing that, and when it was our turn to pick, we felt really good about it because of Trevor’s makeup — no problems there. That’s just one example of using information outside of the scout’s eyeballs to make a decision.

Is there good data on high school kids?

The good thing is in the summer, we have events at, like, Tropicana Park and PetCo. This year there was an event at Chase Field. So, they show up at parks that have Hawk-Eye (tracking), so we trust most of that information we get. If they’re at (Team) USA events, we have access to that information. Certainly on a pitcher, we’ll chase that down because we really want to feel good about whether a guy has an outstanding fastball and it matches up (with the data). I don’t think we’d take a pitcher anymore without some (analytical) information to support it, which seems like a good idea. We just think more information is better. We have information at the big-league level. If you throw 100 (mph) and it doesn’t have any carry to it, these (coaches) don’t care because they’re going to turn it around. We’re aggressive on information and want it all, but boiling it down to the human decision is really the balance.

2022 MLB DRAFT

  • Sunday: 6 p.m. CDT, ESPN/MLB Network plus streaming services (Rounds 1 and 2, plus competitive balance rounds)

  • Monday: 2 p.m., mlb.com (Rounds 3-10)

  • Tuesday: 2 p.m., mlb.com (Rounds 11-20)

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