Justin Newman spent years building toward this job inside the Pirates’ organization, even before the formal interview process started in mid-September. By the time Pittsburgh promoted him in October to run the amateur scouting operation, he was already a familiar face with a decade of work behind him.
“It's always something that I had my eye on to some degree, and I think it maybe came more into focus for me over the last year or so,” Newman told MLB.com Monday.
At 31, Newman steps into a role that comes with plenty of weight and a very high bar. The Pirates have had recent Draft wins, adding cornerstones like Paul Skenes and Konnor Griffin, while also bringing in prospects such as Seth Hernandez, the Pirates' No. 1 prospect and No. 9 in baseball, per MLB Pipeline, and Murf Gray, the Pirates' No. 4 prospect and MLB No. 89.
“I think to get to lead a group of people that are already operating at such a high level, not everyone stepping into these kinds of roles gets that opportunity,” Newman said. “A lot of times, you might get this kind of opportunity because something wasn't going well before. And we're starting off at such a high point, a high standard for me to live up to.”
Newman’s path through the organization has been long and layered. He arrived in 2017 as a baseball informatics intern after graduating from the University of Rochester, then moved through a series of roles that brought him closer and closer to Draft decisions.
The Pirates also looked outside the organization before choosing him. Those interviews were less about introducing Newman and more about how he would handle a job with a much broader scope than his previous one.
As director of player analysis, he had overseen a “handful of people.” Now he’s responsible for more than two dozen.
“I think for me the biggest change is I've been super involved in the Draft to date, but now it's a totally different vantage point of trying to think about how we best develop our people and bring in really good people and set up a process that allows us to have sustainable success, as opposed to being an input to the process or a part of the process before,” Newman said.
His background in quantitative analysis and research and development gives him a different lens on the job, but he’s clear about where the scouting staff fits. Even as baseball’s scouting world has changed, Newman still sees the scouts as central to everything Pittsburgh does.
He called them “the core of what we do,” and pointed to moments in recent years when a scout’s relationship with a player helped the Pirates land someone other teams believed was out of reach.
“My lens isn't in scouting, so I'm not going to be on the road constantly the same way that maybe some or most scouting directors really are,” Newman said. “...
So I think leadership for me looks a little bit different in this role. And I think as much as I'm not going to be mentoring our scouts in the kind of eyeball-evaluation piece of it, I'm going to be learning from them as much as I'm probably giving them on that side of it, [while] trying to get to a spot where I can help grow their understanding of how we're making decisions and the broader evaluation space and what we're valuing at the Major League level.”
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