Phillies 2020 Draft: Matt Klentak talks adapting, four picks

Taking advantage of technology to improve

"“It’s pretty remarkable how quickly the technology, what used to be limited to just the big-league club, then trickled into the minor leagues and now it’s all throughout college baseball. I think it happened really fast.”"

The landscape of scouting and drafting players has changed in more ways than one in recent years, and not just because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Klentak noted how it is “pretty remarkable” how quickly the technology, that used to be limited to just the big-league club, has trickled into the minor leagues and throughout college baseball.

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“Five years ago, players in the draft were not nearly as well-versed in the technology as they are today,” he says. “Now, players come to us and ask, ‘Do you guys have this? Do you have that? What kind of software do you use for this? Do you have this technology if I threw a bullpen?'”

Klentak says players are well-informed and, thus, it has become a part of their “everyday existence as a player,” adding, “there’s certainly a lot of the top college programs have bought into it. A lot of the individual instruction that these guys receive utilizes that data. It just wasn’t like that a few years ago.”

Klentak noted that for a lot of players during this spring’s shutdown, players who post on social media a video or data on themselves, just throwing outside or in an indoor gym. Among those include Phillies southpaw pitching prospect Jeff Singer, who went 7-0 with a 2.34 ERA at Double-A Reading last season.

Even prospects that entered the 2020 draft posted videos on social, and Klentak says teams used that to their advantage. “I’m not saying that becomes the No. 1 one data point for them in making their selections, he says, “but teams would get that and they would add that into their library of information on the player.”