San Diego Padres director of player development checks up on Dust Devils

While the short-term goals for Tri-City Dust Devils players and coaches are to win games and contend for championships, the purpose of minor league baseball in the long run is to turn talented prospects into productive major league players. That’s where Sam Geaney comes in.

Geaney is beginning his second season as the San Diego Padres’ director of player development, and Wednesday marked the final day of his five-day visit with the Dust Devils, the organization’s short-season Class-A affiliate. Throughout the season, he’ll visit the Tri-Cities, and the organization’s six other minor league affiliates, several times.

“We pretty much go non-stop,” Geaney said. “There’s probably not going to be many days during the summer where the team is home and there’s not a member of our roving coaching staff here.”

While a player development director’s job usually consists of building relationships with players in the organization and ensuring that they’re receiving the proper training and playing time — both of which Geaney spends a lot of his time doing — Geaney’s background is in scouting and player evaluating. He said it is particularly helpful in early parts of the season when the organization tries to assess its fresh crop of draft picks.

“When we wake up in the morning, the question is ‘What can we do to make our players better?’ ” Geaney said. “And also, a huge thing for us is we’re a very relationship-based organization, so spending time with the kids, getting to know them. There’s a lot of people in this organization with major league experience, so getting at least one of those guys to have a relationship with each of those kids is very, very important.”

The Dust Devils have plenty of prospects with legitimate chances of reaching the bigs, with seven of their players taken in the first 10 rounds of the MLB draft, but Geaney wouldn’t single out any players he and the organization had an eye on at this point in the year.

Tri-City manager Ben Fritz said most of the communication he has with Geaney happens from afar as he and his staff file game reports for individual players and talk strategy about what sorts of situations and opportunities prospects should be put in, and how players are developing and working through the struggles that come with playing professional baseball.

While development is always at the forefront of the minds of the organization’s coaches and coordinators, Fritz said his natural competitive spirit drives him to focus on winning baseball games. Striking a balance between competition and long-term development has been one of the biggest adjustments for Fritz in his first season as a manager.

“From a perspective of any competitor, they want to win,” Fritz said. “So it’s finding a balance of making sure the development is happening, and sometimes that means we might lose a ballgame having somebody do something for the long run. Ultimately, it’s developing the player in the confines of trying to win a ballgame.”

The streak continues

Luis Asuncion hit safely in his 10th consecutive game to start the season Tuesday night, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

With one out in the bottom of the fourth and Chris Mattison standing on second representing the go-ahead run, Asuncion smoked a line drive into center field for an RBI base hit to give the Dust Devils (7-5) a 2-1 lead.

Neither Tri-City nor Vancouver (7-5) would score after that, so Asuncion’s base knock turned out to be the game-winning hit.

Padres fourth-round draft pick Joey Lucchesi picked up the six-out save for the Dust Devils, his first save of the season, but the ninth inning didn’t come without its bumps.

Lance Jones gave the Canadians a heartbeat with a one-out triple to right-center. Batting behind Jones, Christian Williams looked like he got the equalizing hit with a ground ball between the right-side infielders, but second baseman Jose Savinon had other plans as he dived to his left to snare the grounder for an out and keep Jones at third. Lucchesi got the next batter, Bryan Lizardo, to strikeout swinging at a breaking ball in the dirt to seal the victory.

Tri-City starter Angel Mejia (1-0) walked the leadoff man in the top of the second, and D.J. McKnight made him pay for it a batter later. He ripped a ball to left that just caught the top of the wall to stay in the park, but Williams still managed to score from first on the double to give the Canadians (7-5) a 1-0 lead. After giving up the first run of the game, Mejia regrouped to set the next three batters down in order to strand McKnight at second.

Despite issuing two leadoff walks, Mejia turned in a solid outing, striking out five over five innings and giving up just the one run.

Tri-City shortstop Chris Baker flashed the glove that made him such a high-value prospect out of the University of Washington in the fifth inning when Josh Reavis hit a grounder that looked like it would get through the left side of the infield. Baker practically went into left field to get to the ball, and then fired a one-hopper over to first off his back foot to get Reavis by a step.

After wrapping up their three-game series with Vancouver on Thursday, the Dust Devils will begin a three-game weekend set with the Everett AquaSox. All home games are scheduled to begin at 7:15 p.m.

This story was originally published June 29, 2016 at 9:01 PM with the headline "San Diego Padres director of player development checks up on Dust Devils."