The Scout Who Signed Acuna, Albies

Fired by the Braves, Rolando Petit Wants Back in Baseball.

It is ok for the religious to walk by faith, and not by sight, but the baseball scout has to see to believe.

So Rolando Petit, a scout for the Braves in 2012, had to bust through the thicket along the northern coast of Venezuela and see Ronald Acuna’s boy, Ronald Acuna, Jr., who was 14 years old. Petit had heard of the boy’s uncommon wrists, which flashed the bat through the hitting zone like a hitter 10 years older.

When Petit saw the bat speed for himself one afternoon in La Sabana, it startled him.

“For a 14-year old to have those hands and that bat speed,” Petit said, “is amazing.”

Petit stayed on Acuna for two years. Word was getting out about the phenom from the beach town, but Petit had gotten there first. He knew Ronald’s dad, and his mom. He built a relationship.

When July 1, 2014 came along, Petit signed Acuna for a mere $100,000.

You know the rest of the story. Acuna is hitting .350 with eight home runs through 24 games. He is a leadoff hitter with the dynamic duo of swiftness and thump and an early frontrunner for National League MVP.

Here is the story you don’t know.

The Braves fired Rolando Petit. He not only signed Acuna, he signed Ozzie Albies, too, which might have been better scouting work.

Major League Baseball investigated former General Manager John Coppolella in 2017 and found Coppy violated all kinds of rules with regard to signing international players. There were misdeeds with the domestic draft, too. Coppolella was banned for life from the game by MLB.

Major League Baseball severely restricted the Braves international pool of money as punishment.

The Braves then fired their international scouts, including Petit. The thought at the time was why employ scouts in Latin America when there was little money to sign players. But there was also the thought by the club that some scouts were complicit with Coppolella. New General Manager Alex Anthopoulos decided to clean house wall to wall. Petit was among the casualties.

He is still out of baseball. In September, 2020, the Braves and other teams laid off more scouts. Some of it was the pandemic, but clubs are relying more on video analysis to scout players and they are replacing scouts behind home plate at games with geeks in front of a computer in the office. Teams have 15-20 people in their analytic departments.

Petit told me Major League Baseball interviewed him for six hours in Miami in the fall of 2017 as part of the Coppy investigation. They found nothing, he said, because he did nothing.

“I was not driving the bus, I was a passenger on the bus, and it crashed,” Petit said. “It’s not fair, but it happened. I didn’t do anything wrong. What felt bad was this was the Braves, the best organization to work for. Everything I did for the Braves came from the bottom of my heart.”

The Braves would not comment to me about Petit. Major League Baseball would not comment.

I asked Petit what he has heard from MLB since the interview and he said, “Nothing.” I asked him if he has been blackballed and he said he has asked other clubs if he is on a “Do Not Hire” list and they all told him no.

So he is out of baseball. His work on Acuna was superb enough, but Albies was a find because the youngster looked, well, young.

The Braves’ future second baseman was 5-foot-5 when Petit first saw him. When I first talked to Petit about Albies in 2017, he told me Albies would hit for some power in the big leagues. The kid had grown all the way to 5-foot-8.

I thought he was crazy.

This week against the Cubs, Albies was hitting clean up for the Braves. Tuesday night he crushed two balls to the fence for doubles. Wednesday, he went over the fence with a sixth inning tater.

Here is the background on Albies from Petit.

Petit was at a workout in Curacao in 2011 where the players in the workout were required to be 14-15 years old. He looked at Albies and wondered how a 12-year old got in the workouts. He watched Albies curiously because he had something. And then Petit talked to him.

“I’m sure somebody there said, ‘What’s that silly Atlanta Braves scout doing scouting a 12-year old’.”

Albies was indeed 14, but his fresh face and height made him look like a sixth-grader.

Then he swung the bat. Rolando’s eyes were glued to Albies’ hands. The bat whipped through the strike zone and he hit the ball like a player who is 6 feet tall. This “little” guy took the barrel of the bat straight to the ball and lined a ball into the gap. Then he did it again.

“Freakish,” Petit said of the middle infielder Albies. “He had tremendous life in his body and he ran a pretty decent 6.7. When I shook his hand, it was an impressive grip for a player so short.

“I kept thinking ‘so what if he’s short, so what?’. The scout sometimes has to dream about what the player can be in the future. Ozzie made you dream.”

Petit is a disciple of Paul Snyder, the veteran Braves’ scout who helped build Atlanta’s talent base during the streak of 14 division titles and a World Series championship. Snyder always preached to scouts like Petit to look for the “common denominators”, the things all great players have. Albies checked all the boxes. In baseball, height is not one of those boxes.

Petit kept an eye on Albies over the next few months. Then Johnny Almaraz, the Braves scouting director in Latin America, came to Curacao to take a look. They huddled in the hotel after one workout and agreed, “We have to sign this kid.”

And they did and Albies grew…all the way to 5-foot-8. He may be the shortest cleanup hitter in the Majors this season.

**

Scouts in Latin America do their best work with 14 and 15-year old players. This is where you must see the hands, the body life, the overall athleticism, Petit said, because these players do not stay anonymous for long. You have to get it right when they are children, just 14, because other teams will come along and see the obvious when they are 16.

“That first time I saw him I knew I had to sign him,” Petit said of Acuna.

Acuna is a contradiction in the batters box. Look at all his accessories, from the chains around his neck, to the garish color of his arm guard, and shoes, to the belt that twinkles red and green around the back of his waist. Yet, his pose in the box is with a quiet bat. He is not waving the barrel menacingly above his head, as if he is threatening to unload on the pitcher, which he does often enough.

The bat is still…and then in a burst…it is not. It whips through the strike zone. Gary Sheffield had that bat speed, which so ferocious, Braves third base coach Fredi Gonzalez would back up down the third baseline in foul territory because Sheffield hit screamers.

It’s what people talk about most with Acuna…the bat speed and the 110-mph missiles.

You would think signing the two biggest young stars in the franchise would guarantee Petit a job for the rest of his career with Atlanta, or with another team. But the politics in baseball can be ruinous and who is to say I have it all wrong and Petit was mixed up in the Coppolella hijinks. The fact is I haven’t found anyone who said the Braves Latin scouts were dirty.

The guy who signed Acuna and Albies remains adrift in the game. It’s too bad. Great scouts like Petit can beat analytics all day, every day. They are the ones who see first.