At the time, Andrew Tinnish thought the twinge he felt in his left shoulder was the end.
It was 1999 and the hard-throwing left-hander — a walk-on star of Brock University’s burgeoning baseball program — was pitching through the pain to keep his job with the Quebec Capitales, a middling club in the unaffiliated Northern League.
But the shoulder injury that cut Tinnish’s fledgling pro career short after just a single season eventually led the Ottawa native to a more fruitful second life in the game — one that has seen him rise quickly through the Blue Jays’ organizational ranks from lowly intern to one of Alex Anthopoulos’s most trusted advisers.
He moved into Anthopoulos’s inner circle midway through last season when after three years as director of amateur scouting he was promoted to assistant general manager, a title he shares with Tony LaCava and Jay Sartori.
Anthopoulos says it was “only natural” to have Tinnish take on a larger role with the big-league club given his wide range of experience and rare combination of scouting and front-office talents.
That has been the key to Tinnish’s ascent: a willingness to take on any role while absorbing as much new information as possible along the way.
“He’s like a sponge — big time,” says Jeff Lounsbury, Tinnish’s former coach at Brock.
Since joining the Jays on a summer internship in 2001, Tinnish has done a little of everything. He has fetched coffee and filed paperwork, analyzed statistics and worked on contracts, scouted both pros and amateurs, and for the last three years run the Jays’ draft — the fruits of which played a pivotal role in the club’s off-season bonanza.
Tinnish even threw batting practice in 2002, after the club fired manager Buck Martinez and nobody on Carlos Tosca’s new staff could pitch.
“Maybe I wasn’t the best at any one area,” Tinnish says, “but I was comfortable in a lot of different areas.”
Like Anthopoulos — who famously began his career with the Montreal Expos by sorting players’ fan mail — Tinnish’s path to the Jays’ front office is an unlikely one. His achievements all seem to begin with an unlikely shot in the dark.
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