If not for a letter to George Steinbrenner a dozen years ago, David Robertson might never have become the New York Yankees’ closer.
The story goes like this.
The baseball coach at Indiana’s Culver Academy wrote a letter to the Yankees’ owner in July 2000, asking Steinbrenner to sign an infielder from his alma mater who had been overlooked in baseball’s amateur draft. D.J. Svihlik lasted just 13 games in the Yankees’ minor league system but so impressed the team with his baseball IQ and that he was kept around as a scout.
During one of his first weeks on the job in 2003, he came across Robertson while checking out a prospect at high school game in Alabama. Selected with the 524th pick of the 2006 draft, the unassuming right-hander with the boyish face now finds himself in one of baseball’s most scrutinized jobs — as Mariano Rivera’s successor, at least in name.
“There is something to be learned from his case when it comes to evaluating players,” Svihlik said this week. “To this day, to this very day, I’m not going to sit in the draft room and jump up and down for a 5-foot-10, 5-foot-11 reliever. I still don’t do that just because I signed David Robertson. But what it makes you realize is that sometimes there are players that are outliers, and David was an outlier.”
Robertson’s ascent from Tuscaloosa’s Central High School to big league All-Star offers a case study in the vagaries of baseball scouting, an example of how chance viewings by team representatives and encounters with longtime amateur coaches can lead to fame or failure. It’s an anti-Moneyball tale of scouts who drive thousands of miles each year and sit by dusty fields so they can spot potential no statistical formula has managed to capture.
To find how Robertson and the Yankees came together, you must go back to July 11, 2000, and the two-page, single-spaced letter sent by Culver coach Gary Hinton to Steinbrenner, class of ‘48.
“I’ve actually been meaning to write for about a month now. You though, of all people, know Culver — there is little down time,” Hinton wrote The Boss. “Any way, I wanted to tell you a little about a young man that graduated from C.M.A. in 1996 named D.J. Svihlik.”
Hinton detailed how Svihlik made the team at the University of Illinois as a walk-on but was bypassed in the draft a month earlier.
“You could hear the disappointment in his voice, but he stood tall. ... D.J. was ‘old school’ before the phrase became popular,” Hinton’s letter said. “Later it dawned on me, that this would probably be something you would want to know about.”
Steinbrenner couldn’t resist. Svihlik was 6 for 17 that summer for the Gulf Coast Yankees and 1 for 7 the following year at Greensboro of the South-Atlantic League. While he didn’t make an impression with his bat, he drew attention with his words.
“He was just so inquisitive,” said Damon Oppenheimer, then the Yankees’ director of player personnel and now their vice-president of amateur scouting. “I talked to him about players who were in the system for the Yankees, and he was very detail-oriented and knew a lot about them and you could tell he had really done his homework.”
Lin Garrett, then the team’s vice-president of scouting, assigned Svihlik to the south region.
One of Svihlik’s initial games — he thinks it might have been the very first — was to watch Chris Vines of Pelham High School pitch at home in suburban Birmingham against Central.
Source: The Globe and Mail
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