"As a scouting department, with the confidence we have in our player development, if a guy has the potential that we think they have and the makeup and they stay healthy, we think they will be a productive Major Leaguer. We take a lot of pride in that"
About this Quote
The line reads like baseball front-office boilerplate until you notice the quiet power move inside it: Roy Clark is selling certainty in a business built on failure. Scouting is a casino disguised as a clipboard, and he’s trying to flip the narrative from luck to craft. The phrase "with the confidence we have in our player development" is the real thesis. Talent, in this worldview, isn’t discovered so much as manufactured - raw potential becomes inevitable outcome once it’s fed into the right system.
His conditional stack - "if...and...and..". - also does rhetorical work. It preemptively blames the variables that can’t be controlled: makeup (code for work ethic, coachability, temperament) and health (the god of random elbows and hamstrings). By naming them, Clark frames misses not as scouting failure but as life’s interference. The department stays credible even when a prospect flames out.
Calling the player "a guy" matters, too. It’s the language of a clubhouse, not a laboratory - an insistence that evaluation is human, intimate, and based on character as much as tools. "Makeup" is the tell: this is a culture statement. He’s signaling that their identity is not just picking athletes but selecting people who’ll submit to the grind.
And then the button: "We take a lot of pride in that". Not pride in championships or payroll flexing - pride in process, in being right over time. In an era when scouting departments were increasingly challenged by data, this is a defense of institutional expertise: trust our eye, trust our development, trust that we can turn projection into a Major Leaguer.
His conditional stack - "if...and...and..". - also does rhetorical work. It preemptively blames the variables that can’t be controlled: makeup (code for work ethic, coachability, temperament) and health (the god of random elbows and hamstrings). By naming them, Clark frames misses not as scouting failure but as life’s interference. The department stays credible even when a prospect flames out.
Calling the player "a guy" matters, too. It’s the language of a clubhouse, not a laboratory - an insistence that evaluation is human, intimate, and based on character as much as tools. "Makeup" is the tell: this is a culture statement. He’s signaling that their identity is not just picking athletes but selecting people who’ll submit to the grind.
And then the button: "We take a lot of pride in that". Not pride in championships or payroll flexing - pride in process, in being right over time. In an era when scouting departments were increasingly challenged by data, this is a defense of institutional expertise: trust our eye, trust our development, trust that we can turn projection into a Major Leaguer.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coaching |
|---|
More Quotes by Roy
Add to List
