Many years and jobs later, Ketchum Marsh ’16 still uses lessons from his time at Whittier College — on and off the baseball field — every day.
The Florida area scout for the Milwaukee Brewers MLB team played baseball for the Poets while majoring in business with concentrations in management, international business and organizational leadership. Some of his favorite classes included negotiation strategies and business law.
“You really have to teach your mind to think like a lawyer for a lot of this job,” Marsh said. “There are always negotiations, whether it's within my own organization, with my direct supervisor or scouting director, or negotiating with an agent and just trying to get more and more information out of the agent’s player.”
However, it was his minor in Spanish that helped Marsh get noticed by the major leagues.
Marsh grew up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with his family hosting college players like Chris Getz, Grant Green and Kyle Seager. He found his love for America’s favorite pastime and went to IMG Academies in Florida for high school to play more baseball than the New England weather would allow.
After Whittier, Marsh played internationally thanks to encouragement from coach Mike Rizzo. He traveled to venues in Austria, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Argentina, South Africa, Australia and Sweden for multiple seasons. In Sweden, he also coached and organized an all-star game that attracted special guests like hockey player Filip Forsberg and rock band The Hives.
Charting a return to the States, he filled out dozens of job applications for MLB teams. The Tampa Bay Rays sent him a questionnaire for a minor league and international operations internship — with half of it in Spanish as fluency would be required for the role — and Marsh landed the job. He found himself in Florida once again.
Now as a scout for the Milwaukee Brewers, he follows both professional players on the Detroit Tigers and amateur players from Naples to Pensacola along the Western coast of Florida, evaluating athletes’ skills, builds, and movement patterns. His job also demands financial acumen and foresight.
“There are some really distinct parallels between business finance and scouting,” Marsh said. “At the end of the day, we're trying to find the best return. We're hunting for future value.”
Statistically, of course, not everyone can make it to the major leagues. But if you want to work in the baseball industry, Marsh recommends proficiency in data analytics as well as being open to exploring the various related careers — from controlling the scoreboard to coaching abroad. Most of all, he stresses the need for the right mindset, something he learned from psychology professors Charles Hill as well as business administration faculty members like Fatos Radoniqi, Jeffrey Decker, Manuel Saldana, and Robert Mendez while at Whittier.
“You have to train your mind to be super organized and stay on task,” Marsh said. “Whether it's scheduling or it's chopping up advanced scouting video for the Cincinnati Reds, there's no such thing as being too detail-oriented.”
Have a good story idea? Share it with us.
