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July 25, 2008

Future Shock

Ben Cherington Interview, Part 1

by Kevin Goldstein

Ben Cherington has spent over a decade with the Red Sox in various capacities, beginning as an area scout, and later working in international scouting. Now the vice president of player personnel for Boston, Cherington has been a major force in the Red Sox' success at acquiring and developing young talent. I spoke to Ben this week about a variety of subjects revolving around the Red Sox system and Boston's approach to the draft and player development, and today we cover the draft and this year's international market.

Kevin Goldstein: Over the past few years, the Red Sox have been one of those teams that seems to consistently select players in later rounds who have, for lack of a better term, "signability problems," and quite often you sign those players. Can you talk a little bit about the philosophy behind that?

Ben Cherington: I think the way we look at the draft is to acquire as much talent as we can. We look at the talent each year and try to maximize the potential impact in every round. In the past two or three years, that's meant taking players that perhaps fell a little bit in the draft for various reasons. In doing so, it's part speculative, because we need time to get to know those players better and evaluate those players, both on the field and off the field, before we get to the point of deciding whether or not that player is worthy of an offer. It's part of an overall draft philosophy that goes toward trying to view the draft as a vehicle to acquire as much impact talent as we can, year-in and year-out.

KG: With a lot of these "over-slot" type of picks, you don't sign them until late, and at times there isn't even an offer made until very late in the process—kind of collapsing the process to the very end. Why is that?

BC: I think the advantage of drafting in particular high school players, because they are the kinds of players that usually fit into this category, and waiting to make an offer—and in some cases we never get to the point of making an offer—but the advantage of doing that is that it does allow for a little more time to get to know the player. In essence, the scouting season is usually ending in the first part of June, and we're getting until August 15^th. We've used that strategy with several high school players over the last two or three years, and there's a lot of them that we did a lot of work on during the summer, and we came to the conclusion that we were not comfortable offering a bonus anywhere near what their demand was. In other cases, after doing all of the work on a player, we decided that their asking price was closer to what matches up with our valuation of him, and we go ahead and try to get a deal done.