Dana Brown, the Astros' GM, boasts a scout's eye and an elite makeup
The Washington Nationals head to Houston for a series against the World Series champion Astros this week. The Astros the Nationals beat all those years ago to win it all — Anthony Rendon into the Crawford Boxes, Howie Kendrick off the foul pole, what a team, what a time — were constructed by men who are no longer at Minute Maid Park, pushed out in the wake of a sign-stealing scandal that shook the sport. The Astros the Nats face this week? They’re the responsibility of a man who had more of an impact on the Nats than he has yet on his own club.
“I thought my window was closing for this type of opportunity,” said Dana Brown, the first-year Houston general manager.
Go back to the dawn of baseball’s return to Washington, when a team fell from the sky and a group of vagabonds had to somehow make it work. Omar Minaya, the general manager when the franchise was still in Montreal, bolted for a better opportunity with the New York Mets. Jim Bowden, the former general manager in Cincinnati, was hired by Major League Baseball — which owned the team, which was and still is crazy — to be the new GM. And the scouting director — the man responsible for drafting players and overseeing a bare-bones scouting staff — was Dana Brown.
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That June, the fledgling Nationals took Ryan Zimmerman with the fourth overall pick, and he leads the franchise in every meaningful offensive category. They took right-hander Marco Estrada in the sixth round, and he later became an all-star with Toronto. They took lefty John Lannan in the 11th round, and he eventually started for them on Opening Day — twice. They took right-hander Craig Stammen in the 12th round, and he has appeared in 562 big league games.
Oh, for a Nats draft like that this summer.
“It’s crazy,” Brown said. “We were doing it without data. We were just doing it with the scouting eye. I look at it now, I’m like: ‘Wow. We were so fortunate.’ It’s so hard. Learning what I know now, I wouldn’t totally trust just the naked eye.”
Brown’s foundation is that: the scout who judges with that eye and casts what he sees against a bottomless bank of knowledge. But he wouldn’t be in the chair he’s in now — constructing the roster and planning the future of a franchise that just won the World Series — if his mind was limited to what he sees on a radar gun or in a left-handed swing.
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Last offseason, when Astros owner Jim Crane decided he didn’t mesh with James Click — the former Tampa Bay exec who was hired to replace Jeff Luhnow, fired in the wake of that sign-stealing scheme — he needed someone with an impeccable reputation who he knew could work with people. Brown, working as the vice president of scouting under Alex Anthopoulos in Atlanta, was the perfect fit — not only because of what he knew, but because he understands what he doesn’t know. Brown’s foundation is as a scout, and he knows what it’s like to drive around the Northeast watching high school games with temperatures in the 40s. But he now runs an organization that has long been regarded as being on the forefront of baseball’s data revolution. His personality and intellect allow both approaches to exist side by side.
“His humility, that’s one of the biggest things that I learned from him,” Anthopoulos said. “It’s incredible. You combine that with personal intelligence, and it allows him to keep getting better and evolving. He’s evolved … right along with the game with everything — data, information, all those things. He constantly wants to learn and get better. He gets excited about it.”
There are tangible elements that made Brown — who played at Seton Hall alongside Hall of Famer Craig Biggio and slugger Mo Vaughn — a strong candidate for a general manager’s job, even in an era when those jobs tend to go to quants from elite colleges who approach baseball like a math problem.
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The Braves beat the Astros in the 2021 World Series, and a big piece in that postseason run was reliever Tyler Matzek, a former first-round pick whom Brown convinced Anthopoulos to sign out of independent ball. In 2019, the Braves took a high school outfielder from Georgia, Michael Harris II, in the third round. In 2020, they took right-hander Spencer Strider from Clemson in the fourth round. Last season, Harris was the National League rookie of the year. Strider was second. No other player received any first-place votes.
“People started to look at what we were doing,” Brown said.
But Brown, the only Black general manager in the sport at the moment, is also a firm believer that the summer of 2020 played a big role in his hiring by the Astros. Not because of anyone he scouted when the coronavirus pandemic upended both the sport and the world, but because of the protests that swept through the country after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. That summer of tumult caused executives in all industries to consider how and why they hired whom they hired. Theo Epstein, then the president of baseball operations with the Cubs, was particularly introspective and outspoken about his own record and how he believed it contributed to the stark lack of diversity in baseball front offices.
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“The majority of people that I’ve hired, if I’m being honest, have similar backgrounds as me and look a lot like me,” Epstein said then. “That’s something I need to ask myself — ‘Why?’ I need to question my own assumptions, my own attitudes. I need to find a way to be better.”
Brown heard that, and loudly.
“That’s important for somebody like me to hear somebody like Theo say that, because he’s been such a successful GM and he’s even saying: ‘You know what? Maybe we have to think about maybe hiring some minorities,’” said Brown, 56. “I think that was a big part of it. I’m not saying that these guys are racist. They were just used to hiring people that they were comfortable being around.”
That gets back to one of Brown’s strengths: being comfortable around people and making people feel comfortable around him. When Brown was with the Expos, he hired Anthopoulos, a young Montreal native, as a scouting intern. When Anthopoulos became the general manager in Toronto, he hired Brown as a special assistant, then hired him again when he got the job in Atlanta. This wasn’t a matter of buddies taking care of each other. This was deep connective tissue personally and professionally.
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“As a human being, he’s elite,” Anthopoulos said. “I don’t even think there’s a strong enough word. There’s no better human being across the board. So that makes him someone people want to work with and work for, which is important, right? You can’t do it alone. You need good staffs. You need good people. …
“If he was a player, he’d be a great clubhouse guy. You want to be around him. He makes others around him better.”
The people around him now are the staff of a team that has made the postseason six straight years and won two World Series titles — one tainted, one not. The expectations are to extend that, even though the Astros’ system is thinned because MLB stripped them of first- and second-round draft picks in 2020 and 2021.
“That’s four players who could play up here,” Brown said.
And four players Brown must find for Houston’s future. He once did that for the Nationals, and successfully. He will now do it for the Astros, who have both a reputation to shed and a standard to uphold. In Dana Brown, they have the perfect person to do both.
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