Tigers hire new farm director

According to Bob Elliott of the Canadian Baseball Network (links to X), the Tigers have hired Shane Farrell as their new farm director. Farrell spent the last five seasons as the Blue Jays director of amateur scouting and was in charge of the team’s drafts.

As Elliott notes, Farrell has past ties to Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris, as the two previously worked together in the Cubs’ front office when Harris was Chicago’s director of baseball ops and Farrell was a scout and crosschecker. There is also a distant family connection to Detroit for Farrell, as his father, John (the longtime former manager and pitcher), spent his final season as a player with the Tigers in 1996.

It isn’t yet known if Farrell is joining the Tigers’ current front-office mix or if he’ll be replacing a departing executive. Ryan Garko is still credited as the team’s VP of player development, but Garko was also promoted to an assistant GM role in May. Fellow AGM Rob Metzler oversees the team’s scouting operations, and Mark Conner has spent the last two seasons as Detroit’s director of amateur scouting.

Farrell’s departure leaves the Blue Jays with a big hole to fill in their front office, and it represents a shakeup in the club’s player development strategies. While such notables as Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette and Alek Manoah are homegrown products of the Toronto farm system, the Jays have long had difficulty in developing a consistent pipeline of minor leaguers who become productive members of the MLB roster.

This problem predates Farrell’s arrival in the organization, and it is naturally hard to gauge his work in Toronto, considering how almost all of the players drafted by the Jays in the last five seasons have yet to reach the big leagues. Austin Martin (the fifth overall pick in 2020) is the only player drafted by the Blue Jays from 2020-24 who has made it to the Show, and Martin was traded to the Twins back in 2021 as part of the deal that brought Jose Berrios to Toronto.

Of course, the lack of immediate help could be an issue, both in giving the Jays some big prospects to bolster the roster or to use as trade chips. 2021 first-rounder Gunnar Hoglund was also dealt to the A’s as part of the Matt Chapman trade package in March 2022, and other prominent young pitchers drafted under Farrell (Ricky Tiedemann, CJ Van Eyk, Brandon Barriera) have all had their careers slowed by injuries.