Jon Meoli: Will Robertson coded in the clubhouse as a minor leaguer. Now he’s running the Orioles’ draft.

Will Robertson had time on his hands.

The 30th-round senior-sign out of Davidson paid back the signing bonus he received to be an operations analyst at a Charlotte, North Carolina, media company to sign for $2,500 and give pro ball a shot with the Orioles.

He was shuttling around the low minors in 2019 and eventually landed on the phantom injured list. He wasn’t hurt, but there wasn’t a spot for him on the active roster.

“I’m old for the level, I’m struggling — time to think about what’s next,” he said. But the last innings of his pro career came in the early innings of a new era of baseball in Baltimore, when Mike Elias was hired to overhaul the organization and bring data-driven decision-making to the Orioles. Only then did it dawn on Robertson, who says his only two interests were math and baseball, that his life could involve both.

“It’s just wild that it wasn’t more obvious when I was 10 years old that this was what I should want to do,” Robertson, 31, said.

He’s certainly made up for lost time. He flagged his interest in a front office role during that 2019 season and was hired for a pro scouting fellowship in 2020. After growing roles and responsibilities on the player personnel side for the first half of this decade, he was promoted in the fall to be vice president of domestic scouting. Robertson will run his first draft Saturday, bringing the perspective from his playing days and the evaluation skills gleaned in the ensuing years to a pivotal role in the Orioles organization.

“With his former playing background and his intelligence, that’s a really strong combination, and it helped him have a feel for players on day one,” Orioles vice president of pro scouting Mike Snyder said. “He is a talented evaluator. He has strong technical skills, and he can put those two together. That’s a really helpful marriage.”

Robertson is in this position because, he joked, he “was always a pretty good self-evaluator.” He was a part-time player at Davidson when he accepted the operations analyst role at Red Ventures entering his senior year.

Then he hit 18 home runs with a 1.031 OPS and caught the Orioles’ eye. He hit eight home runs with a .657 OPS at Low-A Delmarva in 2018 but wasn’t seeing much of the field in 2019.

It’s one thing for the game to pass players by. But he also had some catching up to do on the skills it typically takes to break into an MLB front office. Robertson, with a copy of “Analyzing Baseball Data with R” he borrowed from an analyst, worked on code in the clubhouse during downtime at the park.

The Orioles felt he could get a feel for how front offices work and calibrate his evaluation eye more slowly in the fellowship. It happened differently than anyone could have expected. He spent a couple of weeks in Florida for spring training, learning pivotal lessons.

Robertson showed up at a noon game in the baking heat in his office attire — with no hat. A veteran scout tossed a bucket hat in his lap and told him he had to wear it; he now understands why and never goes to a game without one. That same trip, he introduced himself to an older scout who shared that his report on Robertson as a player featured a major league role grade; he understood from that moment it was OK to be wrong.

Those experiences, though, would be fleeting. The pandemic shut down baseball shortly thereafter, and in a remote work world not unlike what he’d have been doing at Red Ventures, he helped a small pro scouting department curate target lists for the Orioles’ active 2020 trade deadline.

Robertson stayed on with the Orioles as a pro scouting analyst under Snyder, with in-person and office responsibilities. He never lost the perspective of what it’s like to be a player and how the good spells can build on themselves the same way the bad ones can spiral.

The transition, he said, “felt right pretty early.” He enjoyed the “culture of thoroughness and appreciation of the small details” that Snyder’s scouting team built, sharing an office with fellow analyst and now assistant pro scouting director Kevin Carter and lobbing ideas and questions at each other that “really elevated our own understanding.”

Snyder said the group spent a lot of time “making sure that we’re calibrated from the big leagues on down to high school baseball and the [Dominican Summer League],” which was a never-ending process that could vary based on whether an evaluator was on the computer looking at video and data or at the ballpark.

“You may be the same evaluator, but looking at it from both lenses, it shakes your perspective,” he said. “And he has a strong ability to keep all of that in mind and keep marching forward towards the best prediction that we can make on a player’s ability and future and an impact for the organization.”

Robertson became a special assignment scout in 2023, taking on international and amateur responsibilities in addition to pro scouting. He’s always been a big-picture thinker, and he put himself in the role of his bosses.

“‘What does the decision-maker need to make a decision on this player in this setting?’” he asked. “It was really trial by fire. If you were wasting time or losing the bigger picture by getting bogged down in more trivial matters, I think that would have been exposed quickly.”

That will all come in handy this weekend with the draft — an event months in the making. Robertson has seen around 100 players himself but knows he “can’t get to that depth of knowledge, that level of context, if you’re not breathing the air every day and entrenched in the community.”

He’s empowered the area scouts, who work under assistant director Chad Tatum, to emphasize what they can learn on the ground. The office staff and analysts, who work under assistant director of draft operations Hendrik Herz, are synthesizing that information with the data and video side while helping align the views on players with other segments of the organization.

The seventh overall pick Saturday and the 19 picks that follow will be the result of a process that Robertson hopes incorporates much of what the Orioles have done well under Elias. Snyder believes Robertson’s unique path to this job can only help.

“It gives you such perspective on where the value is around the league and how you can best help the organization,” Snyder said. “So, whether you’re looking at a median outcome for a player in a certain round or whether you’re targeting not just the median outcome but the sort of upside best case, sometimes those will run counter to one another, and having a pretty comprehensive background in the pro player population, that’s a big help for understanding how this goes well or how this goes poorly for a particular player demographic.”