ON THE COUGARS: Scouting duties never end for Kubota

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If it were as cut and dry as picking Stephen Strasburg and calling it a day, Eric Kubota’s job would be quite a bit easier and the Oakland Athletics’ big board wouldn’t have close to 900 familiar names on it each year when draft day rolls around.

Preparation for the draft and its 50 rounds is what 100 percent of Kubota’s position as director of scouting is devoted to year-round, and it is Kubota and his scouting staff that do the year-round assessments that led to 49 A’s picks last week.

Of those 49, the organization estimates about 50 percent or slightly less will be signed, and then assigned to one of Oakland’s six farm teams, including Kane County.

But before a select few join the Cougars this summer, a lengthy process of sending scouts to evaluate tools on countless college and high school players from across the country took place.

Last week’s First-Year Player Draft often appears to be a drawn-out exercise in chance for some, especially to players who may have been told what to expect and experienced something completely different. But for people in baseball, particularly in positions such as Kubota’s, baseball’s draft is an expanded version of the same rhyme and reason that goes into drafts in other sports.

A year of preparation culminates in a war room atmosphere on Day 1 of the draft. Kubota says it is quite similar to other sports, only with a larger staff, which is charged with helping to fill out seven rosters rather than one.

“It’s a great day,” Kubota said. “There’s a lot of excitement, no different than the excitement I’m sure they go through in other sports.

“We have boards with all the players we have. It’s over 800 players, I think pushing 900 players this year. All of them are ranked somewhere on a board. We bring our entire scouting staff in there. We have really about 25 actual staff who are directly involved in it and we make our selections.”

Much has been made in recent years of the A’s drafting philosophies – too much according to Kubota.
The organization has developed a reputation for honing in on college talent requiring less grooming and is hence closer to the big leagues than their raw, teenage counterparts.

“I think the steadfast philosophy and the dogmatic approach that was portrayed in [Moneyball] was hugely overblown, for one,” Kubota said. “For two, our feeling is we’re always trying to get better and we’re always looking for new ways to do things.”

Especially in the early rounds, the A’s draft their highest rated player, as is often the case in other sports. In the first round this year with the 13th pick, that’s exactly what it came down to when selecting USC shortstop Grant Green.

“We picked the top player that was left on our board when it came our turn to pick,” Kubota said, adding that high-round selections are naturally players who possess a wider range of top-level tools. And as the draft progresses, selections are made based on impressive aspects of a player’s game rather than a complete package.

After 48 more picks, the focus immediately shifted to working to sign those players before a mid-August deadline, and all the while, the organization’s staff is already out doing its homework for 2010.

Fourteen of Oakland’s picks have already been signed, some of whom could see action in Kane County in the second half of the Cougars’ season, which begins late next week. One intriguing local possibility: Neuqua Valley product Ian Krol, a left-hander who was selected in the seventh round.

And when they arrive, they might feel like they’ve landed in the most random of places, as one of 1,521 players selected who are shipped off to unfamiliar parts of the country.

But it’s just not that simple.

• Kevin Chroust is a sportswriter for The Chronicle. He can be reached at editorial@kcchronicle.com.