WEST PALM BEACH, FL (SportsRadio 610)- The 2025 season will Gavin Dickey’s second as Astros player development director. After playing football and baseball at the University of Florida, Dickey was drafted in the 12th round by the Seattle Mariners in 2006. He played professional baseball for six seasons before joining the Astros as a scout in 2011 and rose up the ranks of the organization.
SportsRadio 610 sat down with Dickey and talked about the state of the Astros farm system, top prospect Cam Smith, and where the team has fallen short in player development the last few years.
You made a lot of staff changes in the offseason. Why did you feel the need to do that and what were you looking for with the people you brought in?
After our first year, we had (Senior Director, Player Development & Performance Science Jacob Buffa) and myself (leading) the player development department. We took a year and just took some inventory, looked around and tried to fill some gaps or some holes that we felt that we had. We knew we needed to improve our infield defense. We wanted to get someone in who had the ability to continue to teach well. It was very important for us to bring someone in that was also bilingual, that could speak to both English speaking players as well as our Spanish speaking players and someone who had experience.
We brought Nick Ortiz in (to be infield coordinator). He’d been with the Yankees for a long time. He has a background in scouting, coached at the Major League level. We felt like it was a really good fit. Outside of that, we had a lot of upward promotions. We promoted basically a full team of staff from the DSL, and then we promoted some of our dev coaches to managerial roles, and we felt really good about the moves that we made.
What would you say you’ve done well in the last three years?
The fabric of our organization is built around pitching development. There's no secret to that. Biasedly, I feel like we have one of the best pitching development staffs in baseball.
Where things stand today, four of our five starters we roll out on the first series the year are homegrown players. Not a lot of teams can say that. Then we got two or three coming back from injury during the year that are also homegrown, so you're talking about seven or eight homegrown, real major league starters that we either drafted or signed as international free agents who are going to help us win or have helped us win here for a really long time, so fabric of our organization is pitching.
What do you feel needs to get better?
I think we need to do a better job of leaning into position player development. There's no secret about that. The best hitters come from the top of the draft; we've been fortunate enough to have had those guys in the past. Because we've been successful, we're not picking at the top of the draft, so we need to do a better job of developing positional players and leaning into their strengths and maximizing the ability that they have.
We also need to do a better job of developing our young Latin talent. It's been a while since we've developed a young Latin bat. We need to clean it up. We made some changes on that side of it. We promoted our assistant directors. Now, Christian Perez is over our Latin America complex as well as the FCL complex, and he's done a good job of taking what Dan Henning, our director of hitting and Aaron Westlake, our hitting coordinator, has done to push and accelerate development in Latin America.
It's hard in Latin America because you’re singing these guys when they are teenagers, but why has it been a struggle to develop position players from down there?
I think in the hitting space in particular, there's been a lot of turnover the last few years, and that's just a byproduct of success. Up until last year. I think it was three different hitting coordinators in three years here, so that kind of stunts consistency, obviously, and that's just because those guys were good and they had success, and they had opportunities to go on and coach at the major league level, which we all want, right? But part of hiring Dan and promoting Aaron was to build out a program that's sustainable and could be successful, so when those guys leave to coach at the major league level, which I hope they do, we have a product that's sustainable and can be built out upon, and we're not starting from scratch every time someone else leaves.
Understanding that public prospect lists and rankings aren’t the be all end all and tend to be tilted towards age and where a guy is drafted you guys are still ranked at or near the bottom on most system rankings lists. Do you feel that is an accurate assessment of where the system is right now?
No, I don’t. At the trade deadline, when we make trades for players, it doesn't reflect that. Our internal rankings don't reflect that, and look, I spend a lot of time talking to those guys about prospect rankings and where we have those guys, and quite frankly, it's going to be really difficult for us to get a prospect ranked really high, especially if we don't have a pick in the top 10 picks.
If we're not picking high, and we have some guy and we throw a bunch of money at in the first round, $4 million or something, he's immediately a top 30 prospect. We just don't operate in those waters.
I'm very comfortable not picking in the top 10, and I hope we don't go back there for a long time, but we have to do a good job of development, and we have shown that. The Hunter Browns of the world that was a fifth round pick that we developed into our number two starter, Jeremy Peña got on the top 100 list late in the year. I would rather win championships at the Major League level than have a top ranked farm system.
I think consistently over the years, we've proved that we're really good at developing players that work for us, and we're not really too concerned about, “Oh, they got to have the number one prospect”. We haven't had a top farm system for a long time, but the data shows that we consistently produce the most Major League players in baseball.
So who are the players being overlooked right now?
I think Brice Matthews is close. You look at what he's done as a professional player, and it's eye popping numbers. He's played, I think, a total at 110-120 games, and you're talking about upwards of 30+ doubles, multiple triples. I think it's like 19 homers, 50+ stolen bases, and .850+ OPS, and that's not even a full season, so you extrapolate that out over a full year, and it's easily a potential for a 30/30 type of player, while being young for the league every stop away last year, so I think he's close. He's made tremendous strides over the last six months defensively, working with our coaches. I think Puerto Rico was huge for him.
Zach Dezenzo’s got a chance to play a major role for us this year. The bat's coming. I think the bat's going to be ready to contribute at the Major League level this year, as well as Shay Whitcomb. Shay handles the bat very well. He had a huge year in Sugar Land last year, and I think he's going to provide valuable depth and at bats for us this year.
Those three guys are guys that have played at the Major League level already, so who are some guys at the lower levels to look for.
Just taking a 5,000 square foot look at it right away, I think we're going to be very strong in the pitching department. I think we have some arms that are coming. You have the Anderson Brito, you have Ethan Pecko. Bryce Mayer is going to probably have a strong year for us this year. Not a lot of people know about him. Ramsey David is a little bit of an older guy, but he's going to have a strong year. It's real stuff. Guys like that are kind of under the radar, I guess, in the third party world, but internally we value those guys, and we trust that Eric Niesen, our director of pitching, has done a good job, and we lean into our development. I think those guys are going to have a really good year for us.
Has Dana Brown made any changes to the way you develop players and are the types of guys that you are drafting any different?
I don't really think he's changed the way that we've developed players. He probably operates a touch faster than we probably may have historically in the organization, but I don't think it's without reason.
We have some holes that are coming open at the Major League level the next few years, and we need to, I don't want to say turn over the roster, but it wouldn't hurt to get a little bit younger, get some young guys in that can add a little bit more speed and athleticism and a little bit more dynamic as we build out the roster and hope to continue sustaining success over the years.
One of those young guys in Cam Smith, he’s had a really good camp so far. What are your plans for him in 2025? Where do you want him to start and what do you want him to focus on?
As I've gotten to know Cam since we've traded for him, and gotten to have conversations with him in spring training and watch him play, the first thing that stands out is, aside from his physical abilities, he's physically imposing. He’s tooled up, but it's a combination of tools and skill. There's aptitude, but then the makeup is just off the charts.
He is a rare player, and I've been here for a long time, been in professional baseball pretty much in my whole adult life, it’s rare to have a player that has the ability to raise the floor of players around him, and he does that without knowing that he does it, so we expect big things out of Cam. He's very mature. He has a strong understanding of the game of baseball, and I expect a big year. We're undecided about where we're going to start him this year.
At this point, he's in Major League camp. He's competing well. Obviously, had a huge day the other day, got a base knock the other day, so we're going to let it play out. Hopefully he continues to show well, and then as we get deeper into camp, we'll make a decision on where we expect him to start in 2025.
Are there any concerns with rushing him to an upper level or maybe even the big leagues? What are the negatives in doing that?
I never want to stunt the growth of a player, if you will. The goal is when you have a top prospect like we've had over the years, and I know it's like something like 90% go back (to the minors), but our goal in player development is, when you send a player like that (to the Major Leagues), they don't come back. You want him to be a finished product when he gets to the Major Leagues, and he can have sustained success for a very long time.
I think we've had players like that over the years that we've turned them over to the big leagues, and you six years later they still have three options left, so that's the goal in our player development department. Once we turn over a top prospect, who's not going up because someone's hurt, that they don't come back to the minor leagues.