HOUSTON — Gavin Dickey embodies the balance baseball is largely still trying to discover. He played in a bygone era when scouting still dominated, then began his burgeoning front-office career on the cutting edge of analytics. The Houston Astros hired him in advance of their analytics overhaul and kept Dickey aboard for the ascension it authored.

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Continuing it is contingent on player development, the department Dickey now oversees. He is a lifelong scout who appears the antithesis of his three predecessors, but Dickey isn’t interested in pivoting away from their processes.

“He played as a player and he understands the data and the information, even more than I do. I thought a guy like that would be a perfect candidate,” second-year general manager Dana Brown said earlier this month after promoting Dickey to assistant general manager and director of player development. “Being the farm director would be more difficult now because this is more of a data age. He came from scouting in an age where there was data. When I have to look at data now, I trust my people. I use my baseball mind and I trust my people on the data. I use the data heavily.”

Elevating Dickey is perhaps the most consequential front-office decision of Brown’s brief tenure. Much of Houston’s major-league core is either aging or will enter free agency during the next two seasons.

No wave of readymade prospects exists to replace them, which is a byproduct of lost draft picks, prospect-rich trade packages and underwhelming returns from players supposed to stand out. Houston has traded away four of its past five first-round draft picks. Bear in mind, too, that Major League Baseball stripped the team of its first and second-round picks in 2020 and 2021 as punishment for the sign-stealing scandal.

Before the season, The Athletic’s Keith Law ranked Houston’s farm system 26th among 30 organizations. Brown then traded two of his top prospects, outfielders Drew Gilbert and Ryan Clifford, to the New York Mets in exchange for Justin Verlander. After he did, MLB Pipeline pegged Houston dead last in its midseason talent rankings. For a franchise that has long avoided lucrative free-agent deals, it creates an obvious oncoming crossroads.

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“We just need to do a better job of creating more depth. Losing first- and second-round picks obviously hurts your system. We’re back now. We have a first-round pick. We have a second-round pick. I think we’re going to be better,” Dickey said during the general manager meetings.

“The depth is probably the thing that’s been lacking the most, but to get good players, to get future Hall of Fame players, you have to trade, right? It’s not free. They’re not just giving us those guys. We just have to accelerate that player development pipeline.”

Brown believes this 40-year-old former college quarterback can catalyze it. Baseball is Dickey’s livelihood, but his status as a once sought-after football recruit and two-sport athlete “has a high level of credibility” with players, one of his predecessors said. Dickey never intended to play football full-time, but after receiving his first scholarship offer as a high school sophomore, saw the need to stick it out.

Before Dickey’s junior season at Lincoln High School in Tallahassee, Fla., an ESPN recruiting analyst labeled him “one of the nation’s top three quarterbacks.” Rivals rated him a four-star and ranked him the country’s 57th-best high school football player. Offers arrived from Notre Dame, USC, Clemson and Miami (Fla.). Dickey spurned all of them for Florida, where coach Ron Zook did not allow him to play baseball as a true freshman. 

Dickey played both sports during his next two collegiate seasons. He backed up Heisman Trophy runner-up Rex Grossman and Chris Leak while the Gators transitioned from Zook to Urban Meyer. Dickey appeared in nine games before stepping away from football to focus on baseball before the 2006 season. His departure left a thin quarterback room: Leak and a true freshman who had only just arrived on campus: Tim Tebow.

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After Seattle selected him in the 12th round of the 2006 draft, Dickey spent five seasons in the minor leagues and three more in independent ball. A .681 lifetime OPS in affiliated ball prevented him from ever advancing beyond Double A, but may have helped him hone his scouting acumen.

“I was so behind on (baseball) reps because I was playing football, so I studied a lot of the swing, how to be more efficient,” Dickey said. “Like, what’s a good swing? I watched a lot of videos, so I think that helped me. Not knowing at the time, over the years helped me to be a better evaluator, even just like mechanics and projection.”

Dickey has never held a director title, but is among the longest-tenured members of Houston’s front office. Former scouting director Bobby Heck hired Dickey during the waning days of Ed Wade’s stint as general manager in 2011. Dickey has since worked under three more general managers and alongside three other executives who now hold that title elsewhere: Mike Elias, David Stearns and Pete Putila.

“He’s been reared in a very analytics-oriented operation, but his job has been to retain some core baseball compass as a scout and I think he’s going to bring that to the farm system there,” said Elias, now Baltimore’s executive vice president and general manager.

“I think it’s going to be great for him and for the players — he’s got a great way of relating to them, but he also understands what everyone is doing in (research and development) and up and down the whole program.”

Heck hired Dickey basically straight off the independent ball playing field. He got assigned the south Texas area upon Elias’ arrival in Houston, meaning the two men worked closely while Elias learned his new surroundings. Dickey had no scouting experience before Heck hired him, but sent applications around the league anyway because, “I’m like 27, 28 and I’ve never had a real job. I got to grow up, right? I got to get a job.”

Elias and Putila both oversaw player development while Dickey rose through the Astros’ scouting hierarchy. He became a regional cross-checker in 2016, a national cross-checker in 2018 and a special assignment scout in 2021, all while Houston’s player development underwent a total overhaul toward uncharted territory.

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Under Elias and Putila, the Astros introduced the kind of advancements in player development and amateur scouting that are now common across the sport, be it data from TrackMan or Edgertronic cameras, wearing Catapult harness devices or other technologies that Dickey himself never utilized as a player. By all accounts, the trend continued under Sara Goodrum, who oversaw player development during the past two seasons.

“Outside looking in, people thought that we were just so analytically driven and it was only computers making all the decisions and that’s just not the case,” Dickey said.

“There was always a human element to everything that we’ve done here since I’ve been here. It wasn’t just only analytics making decisions, it was a really strong blend. And I think that’s ultimately the best path to take personally.”

Dickey is now determined to deliver that blend. Others who’ve held his job say the most seismic transition is managing the many facets of a department some see as just a set of minor league teams and players.

“You have a lot of other stakeholders involved in the development of players, from the managers and coaches, sports medicine and performance and then you layer on research and development and different tools and information to integrate into the process,” Putila said.

“It’s all about relationships and he’s going to nail that. On top of that, it’s about trying to understand which players need to advance and what things players need to work on and he has an eye for that. He’s been exposed to all of the different evaluation techniques that the Astros have, whether it’s more traditional scouting to the eye or advanced metrics based on technology.”

Yainer Diaz’s fifth-place finish in American League Rookie of the Year voting last week meant Houston has had eight top-five finishers in the past nine years. Five of those players were homegrown. Four-fifths of the team’s returning starting rotation is homegrown. Breakouts from late-round draftees and $1,000 signees J.P. France and Chas McCormick buoyed the 2023 team, which had more homegrown talent than any of its fellow playoff clubs.

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So, no, the Astros’ player department doesn’t need a restructure, but Dickey believes it could benefit from streamlining the message some players receive and how they process a plethora of information. Dickey will work alongside Jacob Buffa, senior director of player personnel and performance science, to ensure it happens.

Brown is a believer in advancing players quickly, abandoning the “level to level” promotions that once permeated the minor leagues. Getting prospects major-league ready quicker is a priority.

“I hate to use football terms, but I want guys to play fast and freely think,” said Dickey, who couldn’t help but chuckle at the juxtaposition.

“If you’re on the field and you’re thinking about what you’re supposed to be doing, you’re not playing fast and you’re not being athletic. So you’re always playing a step behind. We have to simplify the message and get it to the players so they can perform at the highest level.”

(Top photo: Evan Triplett / Houston Astros)