After working two internships in baseball during college, Jeremy Zoll took the GMAT exam to prepare for a different path if he couldn’t land a full-time job with a team.
He never needed his backup plan.
“My GMAT score is expired now,” said Zoll, smiling. The Haverford (Pa.) College grad, who was a catcher and team captain on the baseball team, landed a job with the Los Angeles Angels out of school, working as an advance scouting coordinator. He spent two seasons on the Dodgers’ player development staff before joining the Twins in 2018 as their farm director.
Zoll was hired by the Twins in part because of the way he interviewed to become Cleveland’s farm director during the previous year. Falvey left Cleveland before Zoll interviewed, but he kept hearing about him from friends when Zoll finished runner-up for the job to James Harris, now the Guardians’ assistant general manager.
“When we went through the interview process and we started doing the references, we thought, ‘This is a guy to bet on,’” Falvey said.
Zoll modernized the Twins’ player development system. He hired more minor league coordinators. He doubled the number of hitting and pitching coaches at each minor league affiliate. He helped create velocity-based training camps for pitchers during the offseason — one reason why the Twins have success turning pitchers drafted in the late rounds into big leaguers.
Falvey lauded Zoll for his ability to connect with people who have worked in the sport for 30 years and people who took a nontraditional route and haven’t spent much time around the game.
