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TPOP’s Interview With MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo

[Confirmed to have lunch interview with Jonathan Mayo. All right, let’s get ready for some great condiment-related puns and…]

“Do you like Indian food?”

[….]

[Kevin crumples up his list of e-headlines like “Hold The Mayo”]

I’m waiting inside Coriander, an Indian restaurant in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. A man walks in and by his smooth pate and fellow enthusiasm for a goatee, I recognize him as Jonathan Mayo. If I didn’t, he was helpfully wearing a bright red polo shirt with ‘MLBPipeline.com‘ emblazoned on the crest.

After a moment, our waiter comes over and Mayo orders the buffet option. I follow suit. “I’m a vegetarian,” says the 44-year old, “and this place is one of the few places that I can feel full after a meal.”

Over our first plates of jerra aloo and daal tadka, we discuss the basics. I ask him about his philosophy on prospects. “I consider myself a reporter first and evaluator second,” says Mayo. “I may talk to 15 scouts and scouting directors, then compile all their opinions into one. I’ve seen a lot of baseball and a lot of players, but I’m not an expert on mechanics or anything like that.”

As per his bio on his site, it states that Mayo is a New Jersey native and a graduate of the University of Penn (in Philadelphia), so I ask him what brought him even further westward. “My wife and I were living in New York City, in Brooklyn, in 2001. We just had our first child, our son, and realized that we couldn’t afford it. I had been with MLB.com for a couple of years and it was right around that time they were seeking writers to work remotely, so I went for it. My wife is from here, so we moved back and have been here ever since.”

Mayo, up until a couple of years ago, was the sole voice on prospects on MLB.com. And then Jim Callis, previously the maven of prospects at Baseball America, joined MLB.com to share the workload. For some people, this would be intimidating or even a slight to their ego, but not for Mayo.

“He’s much smarter and a harder worker than I am!” joked Mayo about Callis. “With a guy like Jim around, you’re going to push yourself to be better.” The respect for Callis is evident in both professional and personal terms. “He’s a robot, he has an inhuman ability to recall things about players. He’s also a tremendously unassuming guy.”

“We were on TV during the draft in Jim’s first year with us. I got a text, looked down at my phone, and it was Jim’s wife suggesting that I tell Jim to smile,” chuckles Mayo. “But that’s Jim, he’s a robot.”

It has to be hard to keep track of and evaluate all 30 systems, but also live in one of them. I wonder if he’s ever felt an inherent Pirate bias in his work. “No question, because I’m here. It’s much easier to build relationships by seeing people more frequently than perhaps once a year. But I’m cognizant of watching for bias.” Up until about five years ago, I didn’t even realize Mayo lived in Pittsburgh. He beams at this. “Then I’m doing my job,” he says over a forkful of chickpeas.

Mayo sees some of his son’s friends in the restaurant and says hi to them. I ask how much travel he has to do for the network. “I do about two trips a month, maybe 2-3 days at a time. In Spring Training, I’ll be gone for 2-3 weeks. In the fall, I go to the Arizona Fall League for 2 weeks, spread over two trips.”

There are many families where one or both of the parents travel, but I ask how the travel affects him with two kids. “One year I coached my son’s Little League team. That was a mistake. I was travelling a lot and felt out of touch, really stressed out.” His son is a 3B, but also a pitcher. So what’s his son’s fastball on the typical 20-80 scouting scale?

Mayo chortled loudly, realizing I was asking him to evaluate his own son like the thousands of prospects he has done before. “He’s throwing it in the low to mid-60’s as a 14-year old, so I’d say he’s a 50. Maybe 55.” And the command? Mayo laughs again. “Well, that’s more like a 30. No secondary pitch, either. One time he hit the first guy he faced and that worked out well for him, because the next four batters backed way off the plate!”

Mayo also goes to New York to appear on TV for the MLB Network. In June, he’s there for 5-6 days. I can’t help but ask him about a few MLB Network personalities, starting with Harold Reynolds, noted anti-stathead.

“Harold is incredibly generous with sharing on-air time,” starts Mayo. “The first year I was on for the draft coverage, he realized I hadn’t spoken in a while, so he made sure to throw the conversation my way. Something else that many people may not know, but he’s an expert at finding a comparison to another player based on their batting stance. He’ll say, ‘Hey look at how he gets his front foot down, just like so-and-so’ and you’re like ‘Wow, he’s right’ and I wouldn’t have ever seen that.”

It’s obvious that Mayo likes Reynolds, but he said something interesting about him. “He doesn’t mind being wrong, especially if the resulting discussion on-air will result in good TV.” Mayo pitches his idea for a Brian Kenny/Harold Reynolds show (“like CNN’s old show Crossfire”) where the two of them would debate issues from a stat/non-stat perspective.

We go up for our second plate from the buffet. I take the time to look for some different things that I may have overlooked the first time through. In much the same way, when we return to the table our conversation drifts to topics that don’t have anything to do with baseball.

I mention that I saw him on local TV one morning in the audience of a community improvement meeting in Homewood. He laughs and says, “That’s my other life.” When I ask him to clarify, he says that he’s the Vice President of a group called the Pennsylvania Interfaith Impact Network (PIIN). They are a collective of people from Muslim, Christian, and Jewish faiths that have come together to work towards resolutions on various social issues.

They have committees on reducing gun violence, implementing green jobs during the upcoming ALCOSAN infrastructure projects to reduce sewage overflows, improving public transportation, and a fully funded education system. In short, they’re trying to make the world a better place.

There’s a million questions on my notes and in my head that I didn’t have the chance to ask him. There’s a bunch of stories that won’t make it into this article. But know that when you read Mayo’s work or see him on TV, there’s a lot more texture to the man and his life than just grading a fastball or reporting on a prospect’s hitch in his swing.

Nerd engineer by day, nerd writer at night. Kevin is the co-founder of The Point of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Creating Christ, a sci-fi novel available on Amazon.