Dante Ricciardi is about one month into his new position as an area scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers, who open defense of their World Series title Oct. 24 in Toronto.
“Coming on this late,” Ricciardi said in a phone interview from his home in Tampa before heading off to watch a college game, “you didn’t really do as much with the group, so it’s not really your baby, but you work for them, so you want them to do well.”
Ricciardi, the former Worcester Academy star from West Boylston, spent the last six years as an area scout for the Boston Red Sox, covering the state of Florida.
For the first part of Ricciardi’s two-year deal with the Dodgers, his scouting territory will be Central/North Florida. For the second, it will be New England and the Northeast. He is looking forward to coming home.
“Definitely,” the 29-year-old Ricciardi said. “Being around my mom (Diane) and dad (J.P.) more and the rest of the family and getting a chance to experience a new setting and scenery as it relates to the scouting stuff.”
After graduating from Bryant in 2019, Ricciardi worked as an intern in the Red Sox scouting department. The team soon hired him as an area scout.
Ricciardi was the 2024 Red Sox Scout of the Year.
“The Red Sox did a really good job of helping me get better as an evaluator,” Ricciardi said, “helping me blend more of the analytics, and helping me understand what it was that we could do really well from a scouting standpoint that could help player development and the players individually and things of that sort.
“I think they opened my eyes to a lot,” Ricciardi said. “It was very much a place where you could grow and learn and develop, and that happened, quite literally, right away.”
The opportunity with the Dodgers was appealing in many ways.
“It’s a chance to try something new with a different group,” Ricciardi said. “It’s obviously a storied franchise that has done very well recently. I think they have more of an old-school philosophy of some evaluation stuff while simultaneously blending it with the analytics. They were going to support me financially more and I have the chance to get back home. The chance to be able to do all those things and to do it with a group like this was a no-brainer. I wanted to take advantage of it for sure.”
After Ricciardi and his younger brother, Mariano, helped lead Worcester Academy to the Central New England Prep School championship in 2015, Ricciardi was a 39th-round draft pick of the Seattle Mariners.
Ricciardi, who played collegiately at Georgetown, St. Petersburg and Bryant, knew from an early age he wanted to work in baseball.
His dad’s career in professional baseball, as a player, coach, scout, general manager and executive, spanned 43 years. J.P. has always been a mentor to his sons.
“He wants me to be happy and do what I want to do,” Ricciardi said, “but growing up and seeing him do it and watching him do it, paved the way for me to want to do it myself.”
Mariano, who played minor league baseball for three years and now works for a global investment management firm, was recently inducted to the Futures Collegiate Baseball League Hall of Fame. Mariano and Dante both played for the Worcester Bravehearts.
Ricciardi is excited for the future.
“I’d eventually like to do more if I could,” he said. “One of the fun parts about building a team is you kind of have a hand in it and I think from a scouting standpoint you can get a small glimpse of that with some of the players that you draft and develop and move on to do things with your organization. I think having a little bit of a hand in player development and other baseball operations would be really cool. At the end of the day, we’re all trying to evaluate – get the right player in the right spot at the right time – and I think having this foundation allows me to do that even more so.”
Ricciardi won’t be attending any World Series games, but he will be rooting for the Dodgers from afar.
The Dodgers are seeking to become the first repeat World Series champion since the New York Yankees won three straight from 1998-2000.
“This year’s Dodgers team is unbelievable,” Ricciardi said. “You look at the talent all over the place and it’s tough to find a weakness. You watch it from afar and you see the superstar power they have, but it’s also the supporting cast of players that’s really good, too.
“I’ve been extremely lucky and fortunate to jump on with a group like this, a team like this,” Ricciardi said, “and I’m just kind of admiring it more like a fan than anything right now.”
—Contact Jennifer Toland at jennifer.toland@telegram.com. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, @JenTandG.