WORCESTER—Shaun McNamara has spent a lot of his life painting.
As a standout pitcher at Holy Name, then Brown, then for North Shore and the Worcester Tornadoes in the Can-Am League, McNamara painted the corners of home plate. In 2006, he was the league’s Rookie Pitcher of the Year.
These days, when he has some winter down time from his fulltime job as a pro scout for the New York Mets, McNamara paints.
He does not paint living room ceilings and decks. McNamara does the brush-and-easel kind.
“A little bit of everything” is how McNamara describes his portfolio. “It’s sort of been a hobby my whole life. I do abstracts, landscapes, family Christmas cards. I have fun with it. It’s relaxing. A baseball summer is pretty busy.”
His work is such that McNamara’s paintings have been displayed along with other local artists in a Providence gallery, the city he now calls home after growing up here.
Painting is a pastime. Baseball has been McNamara’s life. He is 42 and it is the only fulltime job he has ever had. This is his 15th year with the Mets, all as a pro scout. Scouts are not like third basemen or catchers. Their job description is much less specific. McNamara puts it this way:
“We are information gatherers. We’re looking for information that may not be available online. We’re looking at trends. We’re trying to collect background information, and then we’ll file reports on what the player will be in the future.”
It is not a line of work he stumbled into.
McNamara graduated from Brown, where he pitched four years of varsity baseball, was team captain and remains among the school’s all-time strikeout leaders. He then got a Masters Degree in sports management at UMass, at the same time serving as pitching coach at Amherst College.
“When I got done playing in 2008,” he said, “I still had a lot of passion for the game. I still loved the game, and wanted to explore if there were options in baseball for a career.”
There were.
In a classic timing-is-everything moment, as McNamara was finishing at UMass, his former Holy Name basketball coach and longtime friend J.P. Ricciardi was joining the Mets organization. He told him there was a scouting position open in New York.
McNamara got the job and has had it ever since.
He was at Polar Park last week to watch the Syracuse Mets play the Worcester Red Sox. McNamara will go to Binghamton, N.Y. next week to scout the Mets Double-A team there.
“I’ve always been a pro scout,” he said. “When I was hired, at that time I was covering different organizations. The job has shifted a bit over time. I’ve gotten more international coverage. I’ll be going over to Asia — Korea, Japan — then scouting the Dominican Winter League.
“Rather than covering specific organizations and their minor league affiliates, it’s more targeted now.”
There have been baseball scouts for about as long as there has been baseball. That has not changed but technology has. It becomes more of a factor, it seems, with each season
“Certain reporting structures have changed,” McNamara said, “but at the end of the day you’re still looking at athleticism, bat speed; command and control for pitchers. Some of those things have stayed the same — the fundamentals.
“The way the game is played, the sort of ways to have success have changed. The style of play has changed. When I first started there were a lot of sinker ballers. Now it’s a lot of 4-seam fastballs at the top of the zone, uphill swings. But at the end of the day, hitting the ball hard, making the routine plays, spotting your fastball — that hasn’t changed at all.”
The scientific data generally confirms what scouts see, McNamara said. For instance, if the eyes see bat speed, the radar sees exit velocity. Same thing. There are occasional diversions.
“There are differences,” he said, “but they don’t happen frequently. When there is one, you have to make your case in your report narrative because it will throw up a red flag when there is a vast difference between what you think and what the data says.
“That’s why communication between our scouts and our analysts is important.”
McNamara is recently married. His wife, Kristin Murphy, is involved in support roles for political candidates in Rhode Island — Democrats, which is the main option in the Ocean State. And in a happy coincidence, maybe not such a coincidence, she is from Connecticut and comes from a family of diehard Mets fans.
Being a scout involves a lot of traveling. McNamara has been all over the country and seen some of world, but has no trips scheduled to Antarctica as of the moment. He will probably see 100 or so games in person this year. While the Mets map out his schedule during the winter, there will be the occasional detour for special circumstances.
It is part of the description of the only job McNamara has ever known. Or, for that matter, wanted to know.
“I absolutely love the game, the challenges it brings year to year,” he said. “Like anything else, the more you learn, you realize the more there is to learn. I love the challenges. I love being part of the team. I love meeting interesting people all over the world.
“It’s something I’m really thankful for.”
Some people never get to make a living at something they love unlike McNamara, who has spent his entire life doing something he loves.
Bill Ballou can be reached at vetgoalie@aol.com
