Former New York Yankees’ players looking to leave their mark as executives

The duties of executives and people in the player evaluation department never end. Despite the current coronavirus outbreak, they work tirelessly and put their expertise in practice at the time of scouting players’ strengths, weaknesses, and potential areas for improvement. The New York Yankees are constantly assessing talent.

Executives with playing experience are just as important as analytics-driven specialists and number crunchers. They can help the Yankees and general manager Brian Cashman, giving him a different point of view to help him make a decision.

In a very detailed interview, Mark Feinsand of MLB.com explained that the New York Yankees have three former players filling such roles in Kevin Reese, Matt Daley and Dan Giese. They are helping Cashman shape the future of the Bombers.

Former Yankees’ players are on the other side of the spectrum now

“Having played here, just about every player has conversations about, ‘If we got to make some of these decisions, we would do it different,’” said Reese, the club’s senior director of player development. “We had those conversations as players sitting in our hotel room. It’s kind of cool; these guys in this room, we all had these talks and here we are helping to kind of steer some of these guys’ careers. It’s pretty exciting. There’s never a dull moment around here.”

Daley and Giese are two of the Yankees’ directors of pro scouting. Daley said that his pro experience gives him a “jump start on the scouting side.”

“I played for 10 years, so I got to see a lot of really good players. I knew what the good players looked like and I got to see players who maybe we thought were going to be better than what they ended up being. You can kind of figure out why they didn’t get to their ceiling that their talent had.”

“Realizing how difficult it is to make it to the Major Leagues; seeing a guy’s stuff, if you don’t have the big stuff you better have elite command and control,” Giese said. “I’m always playing with, ‘If this guy is going to make it, he’s going to have to make up for this bad area over here,’ You have a good sense that a Triple-A All-Star doesn’t always translate into a good Major League career, because it’s a huge, huge gap from Triple-A to the big leagues. I have a good sense of what that takes.”