Event Name: National Showcase

Event Type: Showcase

Site: Braves Turner Field/GA Tech - Atlanta, GA

Date: June 17 - 19th, 2005

 

A LOOK BACK at the 2004 Perfect Game National

Held at Tropicana Field

 

EXCERPTS FROM PATRICK EBERT'S: (Full Story)
Atlanta Braves Scouting Director Interview
Roy Clark Interview

Patrick Ebert: Speaking of Perfect Game, what areas do they specifically help you and other scouting directors out there identify and evaluate players?

Roy Clark: Jerry (Ford) and his staff do an outstanding job. We feel that they put on, and it's not even close, the best showcases and tournaments of anybody. They're so well organized. Jerry has tremendous knowledge of scouting. They have a lot of former professional and college baseball people in their organization. Since they put on the best showcases and tournaments, naturally they're going to get the best players. We are pretty much a high school oriented organization, so where the best players go we will be there. We have sometimes up to 10 or 11 scouts covering Perfect Game events. It gives athletes the chance to compete at the highest level of their age group, in a team or showcase format, in some of the best facilities in front of both colleges and scouts. They're (Perfect Game) the best and the top colleges and the highest level scouts know it.

. . . . Patrick Ebert: That ties back to your comment before about makeup, where you have the best players in the nation playing against one another.

Roy Clark: Exactly. I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago I went to see Carl Crawford from Texas, now a star with Tampa. I did not see him in any of his showcases. I saw him one time against very, very disappointing competition. I didn't really get a good read on him. Obviously he went in the second round and has been a tremendous Major League player. Tampa Bay saw him over and over against the best competition, they did a tremendous job scouting him and then signing him. That's the fruits of the labor. So, what do you learn from this? What happens is that you have to see these kids over and over and over again against the best competition to make the best decisions and the best choices, and that's what we try to do. Instead of seeing a kid in four at-bats in one game early in the spring before the draft, we try to see him in as many at-bats as we can, as many innings as we can, and the more we see him the better chance we have of getting him right.

. . . . Patrick Ebert: So much is being made about the high school versus college debate these days. Given your preference for high school players, do you believe it's not about drafting high school versus college players but drafting the right player?

Roy Clark: There's no question about it. When we go into that draft room we don't sit there and line up one board and say, "Okay, here's all the college guys that we're not going to take and here are the high school guys that we are." We try to take the best players. In 2001 we took a guy named Richard Lewis from Georgia Tech. Absolutely loved him, his ability, his makeup, and we slotted him accordingly and we took him in the sandwich round. The next year we took Dan Meyer, the guy we just traded to Oakland for Tim Hudson. We've taken a lot of college guys over the years, a lot more than people think. However, with so many teams concentrating solely on college players, there's very few of those guys left for us. We like that because more and more of the better high school guys are slipping to us, and deeper. So, we're getting what we feel like are second and third round high school guys in the fourth and fifth round. I know Logan White, Jack Zduriencik and other scouting directors that are known to take high school guys are loving that too.

Full Interview can be found here