Sam Donnellon: South Jersey's Barr brings in Giant baseball talent
SAN FRANCISCO - When John Barr left his well-paid and promising job with Merrill Lynch to become a baseball scout in 1984, his mother-in-law offered one piece of advice to his new bride.
SAN FRANCISCO - When John Barr left his well-paid and promising job with Merrill Lynch to become a baseball scout in 1984, his mother-in-law offered one piece of advice to his new bride.
"Leave him now," she said.
Marianne Barr stuck it out, though, understood her husband's passion for baseball was worth the two-thirds cut in pay, at least to him. Nearly 27 years, four kids and five major league organizations later, the Audubon, N.J., native and current Haddonfield resident is in his third season as a special assistant to San Francisco Giants general manager Brian Sabean, in charge of their drafts and minor leagues.
"I wasn't the best player in Little League, I wasn't the best player in high school," Barr said as he purveyed AT & T Park. "I wasn't the best player on my Brooklawn American Legion team. But I might have been the most tenacious. I'm not sure anybody loved the game more than I did."
Which made leaving the big, promising brokerage job an easy call, despite the drop in pay. While his mother-in-law - herself the wife of a Triple A minor leaguer - was offering her unsolicited advice, Barr sought counsel with his father.
William J. Barr and his wife, Catherine, now deceased, had instilled the love of the game to their only son. Both were huge Phillies fans; both could passionately extol the virtue of hitting to the right side of the field with a runner in scoring position and less than two out. When Catherine Barr died in 1990, the last song played as her casket was removed from St. Rose of Lima Church in Haddon Heights was "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."
"I asked my dad what he thought of moving into baseball, cutting my salary and all that," Barr recalled. "He looked at me and said, 'John, I started my own business when I was 40, when I had kids to feed. I was a prisoner of war. That's risk. What you're doing is just living life.'
"And that's how I lived it. I just decided to go for it."
It's the life of a vagabond, major league baseball scout. Barr has raised his family in South Jersey, but the harsh truth is he's done a lot of leaving over the length of his marriage. He estimates that he spends more than 200 days a year on the road. He's held myriad titles, from Orioles scouting director (his picks included Mike Mussina and Ben McDonald) to assistant general manager of the Padres in the early 1990s, to the scouting director who oversaw the Mets drafts of the mid-1990s.
From 1997 through 2007, Barr was the Dodgers' scouting director, drafting such guys as Jonathan Broxton and Russell Martin, part of the young core that competed for the National League pennant against the Phillies in 2008 and 2009.
By then, Barr was with the Giants. And "I rooted for the Phillies," he said of those two National League Championship Series.
"What can I say? I marched down Broad Street in the Mummers Parade once. I'm a Philly guy."
Well, yes and no. His eldest daughter, Katie, a junior at West Virginia University, is working for the Giants' public relations office during the World Series. His wife and two high school-aged daughters, Eileen, 18 and Mary, 16, are here wearing black and orange. Standing next to him as he said this was his youngest child and only son, Blake, wearing a Giants hat and a Buster Posey jersey.
The fifth pick of the 2008 draft, Posey was Barr's first pick for the Giants. A shrewd choice, it represented a sea change in team philosophy. After years of drafting pitchers with high picks and signing aged free agents to play in the field, Posey is one of few significant home-picked young hitters to star for the club since the 1980s days of Will Clark, Matt Williams and Robby Thompson.
(Pedro Feliz was not drafted. Bill Mueller and Marvin Benard were, the latter in the 50th round.)
Barr was aware of Posey in high school, told him once he would have picked him then if he had a pick high enough to lure him away from Florida State. Once with the Giants, he did.
In 2009, the Giants picked Brandon Belt, a 6-5 power-hitting first baseman/outfielder who spent much of this season with Double A Richmond and is expected to fill one of the spots now inhabited by Pat Burrell or Cody Ross. In June, San Francisco used its first pick to select speedy centerfielder Gary Brown, of Cal State-Fullerton.
Barr won't say this, but those who have covered the team will. Since he arrived in 2007, opinions about the Giants' front-office acumen have turned 180 degrees. Once civic whipping boys, Sabean and manager Bruce Bochy now seem to be heading up a golden age of baseball in the Bay Area.
And Barr?
"I'm blessed," he said. "I always wanted to be a player on the field. But I wasn't very good. And to be able to do this. To be part of a group of people who bring together a team like this, to compete on a big stage. It's special.
"So now you know: A kid from South Jersey was able to compete with everybody in the world. And that's my thrill." *
Send e-mail to donnels@phillynews.com.
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