Minnesota Twins reliever Ryan O’Rourke grew up in Worcester, Mass., and pitched at St. John’s, a state athletic powerhouse brimming with so many recruits that he only threw 18 innings as a junior and senior. He canvassed the whole gamut of opportunities for exposure, emailing 10 college baseball coaches every week, traveling to showcases and competing in the biggest local tournament, the Bay State Games. O’Rourke, however, garnered little interest from colleges — “I got ignored more than I got a ‘no,’” he said — and also went undrafted by big league clubs out of high school.
“I wasn’t a showcase player,” O’Rouke said. “I didn’t throw overly hard. I didn’t hit or run too well. But I think if you saw me over time or in a game situation, it would have been a little different for me.”
O’Rourke eventually chose Division II Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., where he starred and became a 13th round draft pick of the Twins. When the lefty specialist made his big league debut in 2015, he became the first former Merrimack player to reach the majors — the culmination of a winding route through uncharted baseball frontiers.
A young entrepreneur named Alex Tuccio sent O’Rourke a direct message on Twitter last month, explaining his vision: an app called ScoutDay in which high school players can load video, vitals and stats for an evaluation from a major league scout for distribution to college coaches. Upon reading about the idea, O’Rourke recalled exclaiming out loud, “Where were you 10 years ago when I needed this?”
Well, Tuccio was still in middle school 10 years ago, but he would endure a similarly challenging recruiting landscape despite receiving two-time all-league accolades at the Salisbury School, a Connecticut prep school with a proud athletic tradition. Tuccio, now 23, expanded his search much farther than O’Rourke, even attending showcases in Georgia, Florida and California.
“I still couldn’t get the looks that I felt like I deserved and what I thought was a good fit for me. I felt like I was pretty under-recruited,” Tuccio said, adding: “I still couldn’t find the one school where the mutual interest was strong enough. That’s how the process went for me, and I know it goes for thousands of kids every year. That’s why I do what I do.”
Tuccio ultimately matriculated to Seton Hall as a preferred walk-on but transferred to Siena before his freshman season because, he later realized, Seton Hall wasn’t a good fit — he was overmatched and had fallen into the trap of going to the best baseball program rather than the program that was the best fit. At Siena, Tuccio became a starter in the outfield and, as importantly, took advantage of the university’s entrepreneurship center where he solicited advice for how to start ScoutDay.
The thrust of the app is to solve what he calls a “three-sided marketplace” — recruits, college coaches and major league scouts — that often has unbalanced information and unnecessary expense. The app, which will have its own video editor and tips about the content and duration of highlight videos recruits should upload, is slated to launch in August and provides college coaches with an accessible recruiting database he can review anywhere from his office to a bus ride. It could save both sides on travel expenses, and recruits will also have the confidence to know that a qualified evaluator will see them play, minimizing the chance of being overlooked.
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The deluge of emails currently arriving in every college coach’s inbox is “an archaic recruiting process,” O’Rourke said. Through ScoutDay, a coach must indicate interest in a player before the latter can send a message, prompting Tuccio’s tagline for venture capitalists: “Moneyball meets Match.com.”
One high-ranking executive with a National League club who has extensive amateur scouting experience, when asked how many draft prospects get overlooked, said “probably not as many as people would think. I do think MLB combs through draft-potential kids pretty good, but there are more college-type recruits that fall through the cracks, especially in rural area or Northern states.”
Tuccio had put down a deposit to get his MBA at Rollins College but opted to postpone that experience and pursue ScoutDay, reaching out to as many baseball influencers as he could find. (There is growth potential in other sports, but baseball remains the focus for now.) He targeted those that might have a relatable experience to his, which is how he ended up in touch with O’Rourke on Twitter and veteran reliever Kameron Loe via LinkedIn. O’Rourke likened his involvement to that “Warren Buffett style of investing,” he said. “He would only invest in companies he could touch and feel and use.” Tuccio said he’s in daily contact with both O’Rourke and Loe. (Asked if he had a title with the company, O’Rourke riffed off the “special assistant to the general manager” title many former ballplayers have with their old clubs — such as Torii Hunter has with the Twins — and settled on “special assistant to Alex Tuccio.”)
Loe readily admits that he had the advantage of growing up in Southern California where there’s “some kind of scout” at just about every high school game. But Loe was only a 39th-round pick out of high school and a 20th-rounder after he attended Cal State-Northridge. He looped in his former Brewers teammate, pitcher Doug Davis — himself a 31st-round pick out of high school — for a third big league investor.
“There have got to be at least a dozen kids around the country every year that don’t get seen at all,” Loe said from Mexico, where he’s currently pitching for Los Tigres de Quintana Roo. “Hopefully those kids will hear about this app, get evaluated, get seen and change their lives.”
So far the big league evaluators Tuccio has signed on for contributions are associate scouts — “bird dogs” in baseball parlance — who are part-timers helping full-time area scouts identify possible recruits. The app can help advance their professional interests through exposure to new diamond-in-the-rough recruits as well as provide some extra cash (a “side hustle,” Tuccio said).
“[The scout] will tell you how it is, whether you want to hear it or not,” O’Rourke said. “But it’s honest, and it’s coming from someone who knows the game and who scouts and who has seen everyone from Alex Rodriguez to Johnny down the street.”
ScoutDay, Tuccio said, isn’t for those blue-chip prospects like Alex Rodriguez but for “that player fighting for the next opportunity.” And in the right college setting, someone barely recruited — like O’Rourke and Loe — might find the right setting into which to develop.
“I think that there’s going to be some kid in the big leagues in the next 5-to-10 years who wasn’t getting recruited and wasn’t getting scouted, but they found him off of ScoutDay,” Loe said. “I just feel like there’s going to be a story like that.”