Jamey is a lifelong Rangers fan who has been blogging for nearly 20 years at newbergreport.com and traces his fandom back to the days of Bump Wills, Bert Blyleven, and the powder blues.
They were different in so many ways. One was an undersized middle infielder who drew little college interest, the other a projectable prototype possessing what one industry publication called “the most electric arm” in his draft class.
The first player was so hungry to turn pro that he eagerly signed for barely half of what his draft slot called for. The other commanded enough that his team had to go more than 50 percent above slot to bring him aboard.
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One, the definition of chill. The other, fiery and regularly in your face.
But one Rangers scout believed with conviction in both Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Hans Crouse, as did the crosschecker he helped sell on each player. And, ultimately, so did the people making the ultimate decisions to call their names on Draft Day before any other club could. The urgings of Steve Flores and Casey Harvie carried weight and ended up carrying the day when Texas used its Round 4 selection on Kiner-Falefa in 2013 and its Round 2 pick on Crouse four years later.
Flores, the Rangers’ area scout for Southern California and Hawaii, and Harvie, the organization’s West Coast Crosschecker, are as distinguishable as Kiner-Falefa and Crouse. Flores, the son of a scouting legend and a man who has put in nearly four decades in pro ball himself, is stealthy and methodical, guided by old-school feel. Harvie, who was in pre-school when Flores started scouting, handles the grind with high energy and an obsessive refusal to get beat on the details.
In a way, Flores is Kiner-Falefa, and Harvie is Crouse.
But the thing that the two Rangers scouts have most in common — an internal fire, toughness, and passion for competing and for the game, however it’s expressed — is also what drew them to the two high school ballplayers.
“They’re both makeup monsters,” says Flores, who is in his 15th season with the Rangers, and 37th as a scout. “But in different directions. Izzy internalizes it, and Hans shows it.”
Harvie wastes no time getting to the point: “Both want to kick your ass, in their own way.”
Kiner-Falefa played 463 minor league games, piling up nearly 2,000 plate appearances over six seasons while playing seven positions, before getting the call to the big leagues. It’s the Rangers’ custom to fly a player’s scout in for his first Major League game, but Flores wasn’t able to attend Kiner-Falefa’s April 10 debut, and neither was Harvie. “We were slammed with games and couldn’t make it,” Harvie says. “We had to stream it on our phones.”
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Early April is no time for a scout to abandon his beat.
Whether Flores and Harvie will be on hand when Crouse arrives in Arlington is a matter for another time, likely at least a few years off. The 19-year-old righthander has just 20 innings of pro experience, all at the lowest of the six stateside levels in the Texas system. They were 20 really eye-opening innings — featuring one run on seven hits and seven walks (.109/.216/.188 opponents’ slash line) with 30 strikeouts — but as good as the organization feels about landing Crouse with the 66th overall pick last summer, after 21 other righties had gone off the board, his development program is just getting underway and will be less of a whirlwind than the process it took to make him a Texas Ranger in the first place.
That process, each year, lasts 12 months — really, it’s a multiple of that — as baseball scouts watch and assess and connect the dots, grinding through the never-ending chase for players. They look for those common qualities, measurable and otherwise, that project to play at the professional level, as well as the uniquenesses that separate some players and push them up whiteboards in 30 clubs’ war rooms.
Texas will call the names of two amateur players tonight, eight more on Tuesday, and another 30 on Wednesday, as Major League Baseball conducts the “Rule 4” First-Year Player Draft. The draft represents the beginning for high school and college players who have spent their baseball lives seeking a chance to play the game professionally. But it’s also a finish, the culmination of a process that Harvie has lived through 16 times, and that Flores has devoted himself to for more than half his life.
“You either enjoy the hunt,” says Flores, “or it buries you.” For the first six months of the calendar year, especially in regions like his where baseball takes little time off, he sees at least one ballgame, and sometimes as many as five, virtually every day. As one of the Rangers’ 16 area scouts (17 before Roger Coryell’s unexpected death in April), Flores is responsible for tracking draft-eligible high school and college players in Southern California and Hawaii, identifying those who show the potential to contribute at the pro level. He measures tools and judges makeup. He digs on background and health. He builds relationships.
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The area scout’s job is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and the really great wheat from the just-OK wheat, to put his crosschecker in a position to see the right players — a critical task given the finite amount of time clubs have to evaluate thousands of players all over the country. The Rangers push their scouts to make a case for players they believe in, a culture that flows down from GM Jon Daniels and Senior Director of Amateur Scouting Kip Fagg. Not all clubs are as open-minded, Flores says. “We’re encouraged here to speak up. We have arguments, and it can get pretty animated. Your crosschecker may hate a player you like. He may want you to go back and see a player who didn’t do it for you the second and third time you saw him. In some organizations, you file your reports and that’s it. You may never get to talk to anyone about what you saw. But you need to see the reaction on people’s faces, to feel their conviction when evaluating players. JD and Kip listen to their people and trust them. It’s energizing.”
Harvie, in his role as one of the Rangers’ four regional crosscheckers, has a team of five area scouts: Flores, Todd Guggiana (Southern California/Southern Nevada), Butch Metzger (Northern & Central California/Northern Nevada), Gary McGraw (Pacific Northwest), and Levi Lacey (Four Corners), who was Keone Kela’s coach at Everett Community College. Harvie is in communication with them on a daily basis, synthesizing information and seeing players himself to put an extra set of eyes on them and help build a history. His job is to bring context and perspective to the process, with two national crosscheckers and a special assignment crosschecker (plus several Special Assistants in the pro scouting department) in place to provide an added layer of evaluation before the information is filtered and funneled, with the help of Manager of Amateur Scouting Ben Baroody, up to Fagg.
In addition to managing people and information, Harvie estimates he sees about 400 games each year, and logs 150 car rentals. Not long ago, there was a day on which Harvie saw three games in three states. Three flights, three rental cars, lots of Red Bull. The job never rests. “It’s all about the hunt, the puzzle,” he says, with sizzle in his voice.
There’s that word again: The hunt.
Flores, who spent 10 years as a crosschecker with the Royals in the 1990’s, believes the key to a good one is trusting the judgment of his area scouts. “It’s the area guy’s job to scout the area. Read the report. If the player has a bad day, a good crosschecker should be able to look past that and see the player he saw on paper.” And a bad crosschecker? “The credit-grabber. The ones who want you to believe they did all the work. They can kill an area scout. That’s why it’s easy working for Kip and his guys. I see no signs of a big ego. He truly wants what’s best for the Rangers.”
Another one of the club’s crosscheckers, in the last four months alone, has been to 31 states as well as Canada and the Dominican Republic. He didn’t want to be identified. “Our group is full of guys who hit 30 or 35 states every draft season. I see articles on other teams, and the one thing that bothers me is when a single scout talks about how much he travels. The reality is that our entire group kills it every day and rarely sees their family. It’s not just game time that pulls them away. These guys are driving long distances or flying almost daily.”
It’s been a trying year for Harvie, who was named the Rangers’ Scout of the Year in 2017. He lost his wife Crissy, a pre-school teacher, on February 22 to melanoma skin cancer after a valiant battle that lasted more than a year and a half. She was 36. Their son Huddy was 2.
Crissy, Huddy, and Casey Harvie
Now a staunch advocate for melanoma awareness, Harvie lives the life of a man subjected to long days in the sun, to the challenges of finding meals on the road that aren’t cholesterol bombs, to time away from a son who just lost his mother.
“No two-year-old should have to experience this,” Harvie says. “But the army of family we have . . . it’s special. Huddy has five moms now.”
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It’s a job that demands the same passion for the game that scouts look for in players.
When Harvie says he’s energized “by seeing my guys grow and get better,” he’s talking not only about the players he helped bring into the Rangers system, but also the scouts who make up his team. “It can be a brutal job. On top of everything else, there’s a fog of confusion. The challenge is getting your hands around that and figuring out what’s real and what’s not. The great ones always dig.”
Flores started scouting in 1982 for the Cardinals. The first two players he signed for St. Louis were future All-Stars Todd Worrell and Terry Pendleton. “I thought I had it made, that I was cut out for this just like Dad.” Steve’s father Jesse Flores, who was the first native of Mexico to pitch in the big leagues, scouted in Southern California for three decades, signing players like Bert Blyleven, Jesse Orosco, Rick Dempsey, Reggie Smith, and Lyman Bostock. Steve, who had played two years in the Twins system in the mid-1970s, first as an outfielder and then as a pitcher, felt pretty good about landing Worrell and Pendleton right out of the chute.
“Before long, Dad tells me: ‘You scout really stupid.’ I was shocked. ‘Stop trying to break everyone down,’ he said. ‘Keep it simple. Watch the ballgame. Enjoy the ballgame. Let the player find you — if he turns your head, then go back and see if he does it again.’ It’s the best advice I ever got in this game.”
Fagg, who like Flores was once a Rangers area scout in California (signing Colby Lewis, Rick Helling, and Doug Davis, among others) and then like Harvie a West Coast Crosschecker for the club, will be running his ninth draft for Texas this week. He values Flores’s knack for building relationships with players and families. “Flo consistently puts us in a great position.”
The relationship Flores would build with the Crouse family was being forged well before Hans was born. Flores went to high school with Crouse’s grandfather, a man who would eventually play a large role in raising the young ballplayer. “Steve is really low-key and genuine,” Crouse says. “Just a great guy.”
Kip Fagg, Hans Crouse, and Steve Flores
It’s a description you regularly hear with regard to just about every man in the Rangers’ scouting department. Starting at the top.
“Kip’s got a gift,” says Daniels. “He knows what he likes, yet he goes into the process with an open mind. He likes players and he likes guys who like players, too. Kip is really good at drawing out opinions, and including everyone in the discussion — analysts, specialists, and evaluators alike — and processing all of it. It creates a really open vibe in the room, where everyone is comfortable speaking up and respects the different angles the information is coming from. And the whole time Kip keeps it light, messing with everyone, and not taking himself too seriously.”
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Harvie’s scouting report on his boss is full of 80-grade accolades. “Kip is so much more sophisticated than you think. He’s a great listener. Fun, keeps everyone loose. Lets guys do their job. But he’s a bull when he needs to be.”
It’s the scouting director’s job to set a tone, and Harvie recognizes that’s not always easy to do with a group of men hired to be opinionated and paid to be right. “Kip’s just a master at identifying personalities and managing egos. He has high expectations as far as work ethic goes, but the human element he brings to the job and to the group — it’s just amazing.”
One thing amazes Harvie more than anything as far as Fagg is concerned. “I’ve never once heard Kip brag about his own big-leaguers. He’s so selfless. Such a good person.”
Fagg will make the final calls on the 40 players Texas will draft this week. He will have seen a number of early-round candidates himself and met with their families to gauge expectations and get a more complete feel for the potential investment. He will have a few thousand reports on nearly 1,000 players. He will hear scouts make their case. He will ask his own questions and answer the GM’s. He will consider makeup and upside and medicals and signability, and blend it all. Ultimately there’s a Big Board ranking of players that he will have Texas focused on tonight and the next two days, measuring not only all those things but also how money might need to be moved around to stay within the budget assigned by the league for the first 10 rounds.
The approach is tried and true — last year’s Texas draft was especially strong, featuring Bubba Thompson, Chris Seise, Crouse, and Matt Whatley at the top, plus Tyreque Reed in Round 8 — but the club makes adjustments each year. “Our process pretty much stays the same from year to year,” says Fagg, “but there are always parts of it that are tweaked. The analytics part has become a bit more prevalent in the past few years, along with some advances in our digging into the makeup aspect. Every draft is a bit different from the last in the talent and depth of it, but we try to not let the current success at the big league level or in the minor league system factor into decision-making on selecting players. It’s a philosophy that JD is on board with, and it guides what we do.”
In other words: Best player available.
“I know that sounds like a standard answer, but for me, that means taking the player we feel has the most talent with the best intangibles in any given round.” If Fagg turns in the name of a left-handed-hitting center fielder like Travis Swaggerty or Jarred Kelenic at pick number 15 tonight, it shouldn’t be taken as an indictment of the Delino DeShields/Leody Taveras/Julio Pablo Martinez/Bubba Thompson/Pedro Gonzalez/Miguel Aparicio/Jose Cardona/Leuri Mejia group or an untimely brain cramp on how left-handed the Rangers lineup and frontline prospect group happens to be. It would simply mean the Rangers looked at their board and felt good about the signability of the top name still available.
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When Texas called Crouse’s name late in the second round last summer, dozens of picks after some industry mocks had him going, the consensus was that other teams might have backed off, not because of the violent delivery or a starter vs. reliever question, but perhaps based on the intangibles. Crouse, who has been through a lot, has a mound demeanor that apparently disturbed some teams. To say the Rangers were undeterred would be missing the point; they were thrilled that other teams lacked their faith.
“The bigger, more intense the situation, Hans rises to it,” says Flores, who started filing reports on the righty when he was a high school sophomore. “He will never run away.”
Harvie — the second of eight or nine Rangers scouts to see Crouse leading up to last year’s draft (it was “literally a whole-staff effort,” notes one club official) — was fully aware of the adversity Crouse had weathered and saw the positives in that. “As a young scout, you tend to pick guys apart. I learned, as I got older, that you focus on the good and buy into that. Hans was throwing harder as his senior season wore on, and the fastball command was so impressive for a power pitcher. That’s a rare combination for a high school arm. Now you add fierce, elite competitor and you have the ingredients for a front-rotation starter.”
In one of the reports he filed about Crouse, who is slated to open with Short-Season A Spokane when its schedule kicks off next week, Harvie said: “Nothing will surprise me with this guy. He loves baseball. It’s more about success and competing than money.”
Not that Crouse told Texas to pick a number and he was in. In what was a $926,500 slot, the Rangers agreed to pay Crouse $1.45 million to forgo an opportunity to join his brother Marrick on the USC pitching staff. Not long ago, going over-slot to pay a draft pick was basically a matter of ownership buying in and an incentive not to set a bad precedent. Under the current system, however, paying a player in the first 10 rounds more than his slot calls for requires a team to pay an equivalent amount less to another player or more.
In 2013, Texas went above slot on its two first-round picks, righthander Chi Chi Gonzalez and infielder Travis Demeritte, and on 10th-round righthander Cole Wiper. To do so without penalty — and more to the point, to have a comfort level in the first place selecting players they knew it would take extra money to sign — they had to find players elsewhere on Days 1 and 2 willing to sign under slot. Second-round righthander Akeem Bostick cooperated. So did the Rangers’ fourth-rounder, the Honolulu high school infielder Kiner-Falefa.
“Even at 120 pounds, Izzy believed he was going to be a Major Leaguer,” Flores recalls. “He’s not afraid of anything, and never was.” As a high school junior, Kiner-Falefa traveled with Team Hawaii to the Arizona Fall Classic in Peoria. Flores was having neck surgery and urged Harvie to go in his place, primarily to see Kiner-Falefa.
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“I was sold,” says Harvie. “Flo believed in the kid, and he believed in himself. His motor, his intensity, his competitiveness — combine all that with the talent, and I saw what Flo had seen.”
Kiner-Falefa, who helped lead his high school to a state championship his senior year, had “bulked up” to 160 pounds and grown half a foot. Fagg did his own reconnaissance as the draft approached. “I snuck into a workout with [former Rangers scout Don] Welke and went and met with the family. We didn’t want to alert any teams by showing up at a game.” The man in charge of the Rangers’ draft was fully on-board.
Based on the relationship they’d built with the family, the Rangers knew that Kiner-Falefa would sign at a discount — “Izzy wanted to play pro ball so bad, he almost wanted to jump in Kip’s lap,” Harvie recalls — which would facilitate what they’d be able to do elsewhere in the draft. The fourth-round slot where Texas sat called for a $386,100 signing bonus. Kiner-Falefa signed for $202,000. His commitment to San Jose State was a mere formality.
In a season that has been trying for Rangers fans, one of the brightest spots has been Kiner-Falefa’s emergence. Originally recalled when Rougned Odor strained a hamstring less than two weeks into the season, he worked his way into the lineup several days later and hasn’t come out of it. He’s started at second base, shortstop, and third base. A 2016 experiment at catcher gained momentum to the point at which it was where Texas was giving him the most work at AAA this spring before his call-up.
The defense was special from the day Kiner-Falefa arrived in pro ball, and he’s always been a tough out. But he failed to hit a single home run over his first four seasons. That changed in 2017, when he went deep five times for AA Frisco. He’s hit two homers this season for Texas. He’s never going to be a consistent power threat, but his game is constantly improving.
Harvie’s scouting report on Kiner-Falefa said: “Well above-average instincts, knack for being in the right place at the right time. . . . Potential special defender with instincts and well above-average makeup. . . . Intangibles guy, bleeds baseball. . . . Well above-average competitor, aggressive balls-to-wall effort 24/7. . . . Fun to watch, just scratching the surface on how good he’ll be.”
“Both want to kick your ass, in their own way.” Harvie said it of Kiner-Falefa and Crouse, reflecting the scouting of two kids that went well beyond radar guns and 60-yard dash times, the digging that a team of scouts did and the conviction they had in pounding the table for a couple high school ballplayers that not every organization evaluated the same way.
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Flores and the Rangers’ other 15 area scouts will take a week off after the draft. They’ll get a little downtime in December. The six months in between? Get this week’s draft picks signed, hit the Area Code tryouts and the showcase circuit in preparation for next year’s draft, mix in some pro coverage (this year, likely to scout other clubs’ prospects in advance of the trade deadline) as needed. From June to December, the grind isn’t quite as harsh as the first half of the calendar year — it’s merely five or six of those 13-14 hour days each week.
“It’s Groundhog Day,” says Harvie of the transition after the draft concludes. “You hit the reset button, and then it’s ‘Let’s go.’”
Flores, whose family’s legacy in the game is well into its eighth decade, still gets energized every time the process starts over. “My Dad always said you just work your ass off. But you have to love it.”
Starting with the ones Texas will select tonight 15th overall and then 55th, there will be 40 high school and college baseball players with an opportunity to transition as Texas Rangers into a phase of the game they’ve worked toward and dreamed about for most of their lives. Meanwhile, the scouts whose names are hardly more recognizable than their faces will enter into their own transition, renewing the hunt for the next ones.
They will see games and meet people and look for patterns and build networks and create a web of information, all based on the feel and appetite that they bring to the game and that keep them going.
When you read stories and watch interviews this week with some of the players the Rangers will draft tonight through Wednesday, you’re bound to hear them say “I was hoping it would be Texas,” or something along those lines. It won’t necessarily be because they grew up saving ticket stubs from Globe Life Park or because they’d bought an Adrian Beltre jersey when they outgrew the last one. It could be a high school lefthander from Tennessee or a college outfielder from Oregon or an elite two-sport athlete from SEC country, who, like a scrawny Hawaiian teenager once did, will talk about how fired up they are to be with the team that believed in them the most.
When they say that, you can pull up a chart that, in the far right column, will identify the area scout responsible for each player selected. You might see Steve Flores’s name once or twice, or five times. Every time you see the name Flores, Guggiana, Metzger, McGraw, or Lacey, you can be assured Casey Harvie’s stamp is on that player as well. You might even see Roger Coryell’s name next to a player he put in countless hours of work digging on before his untimely passing in April.
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Those men — who you probably wouldn’t recognize if they stood next to you in the car rental line, but who these players end up considering family — are the reason 18- and 21-year-olds tell reporters, through wide smiles they can’t wipe off, “I was hoping it would be Texas.”
Some of those young players might come across as chill like Kiner-Falefa, others in-your-face like Crouse — or like Flores or like Harvie, in much the same ways — but with that singular intensity that the best prospects, and the best scouts, have in common.
And if they execute on the vision that they and their scouts shared and get to the big leagues one day, there will be a phone call made from the Fourth Floor at 1000 Ballpark Way, inviting that scout to be in the building as the player first suits up as Major Leaguer. As big a day as that always is for a player and his family, it’s also about as big as it gets for the area scout whose belief in the kid on the high school or college diamond and in his parents’ living room put him on the path that led there.
If you don’t see Flores sitting with Crouse’s family on the night he gets to Arlington, or the area scout who pounded the table for tonight’s first-round pick, or tomorrow’s eighth-rounder, or the player taken Wednesday in Round 27 who explodes through the system when they make their own big league debuts, you are safe to bet why. Chances are they’ll be watching a baseball game where they don’t take attendance, or in a car or on a plane heading that way, digging for the next one.
EXIT VELO
- The draft starts tonight at 6:00 p.m. Central time. The Rangers will make their first pick, 15th overall, at approximately 7:30 p.m. (televised on MLB Network), and select their second-rounder, 55th overall, at approximately 10:00 p.m. Rounds 3 through 10 will take place starting at 12:00 noon on Tuesday, and will conclude with Rounds 11 through 40 beginning at 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday.
- Catcher Cameron Rupp opted out of his non-roster contract with AAA Round Rock and will look to hook on with another organization.
- The organization has moved High-A Down East righthander Michael Matuella out of the Wood Ducks rotation and into the bullpen. While the move could be temporary, the Carolina League has hit .329/.403/.563 off the promising 24-year-old this season, and the Rangers are looking to modify his routine in an effort to get him back on track.
- Don’t miss Levi Weaver’s exceptional three-part piece on the cutting-edge Driveline Baseball training program, which Rangers lefthander Brandon Mann and AAA righthander Tim Lincecum are recent graduates of. We’ll publish part two tomorrow and part three Thursday.Photo credit: Ben Baroody
