If Duncan Webb seems a little conflicted over this World Series, one can hardly blame him.
Webb, who grew up in Lynn, played Wyoma Little League and starred on a state championship baseball team team while at St. John’s Prep, has strong ties to both the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers.
A 2000 graduate from The Prep who played baseball at Amherst College, Webb is the current director of international player development for the Dodgers. Previously, until he joined the Dodgers two years ago, he was the assistant director in the same category for the Red Sox.
It was his Amherst days that got him to think seriously about baseball for a career. A group of alumni from the school — including former Red Sox and Orioles general manager Dan Duquette and Ben Cherington — had matriculated into Major League jobs and talked to the team about their experiences while the players were in Florida.
“Up to then, I played baseball because I liked to play. But it piqued my interest to see the number of alumni who had gone onto jobs in baseball,” said Webb.
Finally, he reached out to Cherington, who was on Theo Epstein’s staff on the Red Sox (and would ultimately become general manager himself when Epstein left to work for the Chicago Cubs).
“I’d studied in Spain, and I knew Spanish, and told him I’d love to go to the Dominican Republic,” he said.
There, he encountered, among others, the likes of Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers and Christian Vazquez, all of whom have helped the Red Sox make it to the World Series.
“You look at the Red Sox,” said Webb, “and you see 12-13 home-grown products. When I see Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley Jr., and some of the others, I see a lot of guys who have come up through their system.”
Being with the Dodgers for only two years, he’s not as familiar with some of the players on the Major League roster.
Still, he said, he knows where his loyalties lie.
“I’d like to see us (the Dodgers) beat them,” said Webb. “But I also want to see all the players I helped develop do well too.
“The Red Sox are a tough team,” he said. “I’d like to see the Dodgers win, but at the same time I’ll be happy for all those guys (Red Sox) if they win, too.”
For the Dodgers, Webb oversees player development at the club’s Dominican Republic Campo La Palmas, which just underwent a $10 million renovation. An outgrowth of the original Dodger Baseball Academy in Vero Beach, Fla., that dates back to the days of Branch Rickey (1948) and ran through 2008 when the Dodgers left the facility, the camp is all-encompassing, Webb said.
“We do on-field and off-field development for roughly 75 players,” he said. “I oversee the camp, and we have a farm director and a program director. My role is to make sure we do in the Dominican Republic what we do in other facilities like this.
“We provide the players a lot of education,” he said, “more than simply teaching them English. We give them a chance to finish their high school education, since a lot of them left to play professionally.”
The only difference between school and the camp is that the periods are reverse, Webb said. The players learn baseball from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., and go into the classrooms after that.
In the past, many of the more renowned Latin American Major League players found their way to the camp, including both Ramon and Pedro Martinez and Adrian Beltre, Webb said.
“We’re hoping that within a few years, we’ll look more like the Red Sox, with more home-grown players,” he said.
Webb stresses none of this is unique to either the Dodgers or Red Sox, “especially since Major League Baseball started mandating an education program.”
But, he said, “there’s a wide range of what teams choose to do with the players. It all costs money and the Dodgers have the resources to invest in that kind of a program.”
What is Webb’s ultimate goal?
“I like player development, and teaching,” he said. “I love the challenge of developing young players. There are many things within player development that I like to do.
“The game’s changing,” he said, “and while the wealth of experience of working for 30 years in the game is still important, so is figuring out how to marry the analytics with that experience. I’m interested in that, and if you want to be successful, you have to learn how to do that. The Red Sox and Dodgers have.”