Mark Conner’s staff was pulled off the road in mid-March as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the game of baseball, from big league spring training, to major college conferences, to even the most obscure of high school diamonds.
There were no games to watch. For a while, there were no calls that could be made. Nearly 90 percent of the draft pool was eliminated. The only thing Conner could direct his team of scouts to do was immerse themselves into the information already in the Padres’ database.
The only comfort was this: Every team was in the same boat.