Good weather is predicted this weekend in New Jersey, hardly a given this time of the year. Mostly sunny, temperature about 55, practically balmy for an area where baseball can be very iffy in mid-March. Seton Hall is playing at home, and Rockies scout Mike Garlatti plans to be there.

When he returns home, Garlatti will follow a pattern that began with the start of Cactus League play. He’ll check the Rockies box score, looking right away for second baseman Eric Young Jr., whom Garlatti signed. Once he leaves Seton Hall, it won’t take Garlatti long to get updated on Young, because it’s an easy drive from Edison, N.J., where Garlatti lives, to Seton Hall’s campus in South Orange.

Craig Biggio came out of Seton Hall, as well as Mo Vaughn, Matt Morris, John Valentin, Rick Cerrone, Rockies reliever Jason Grilli and Tigers uberprospect Rich Porcello. So did John Morris, Charlie Puleo, Pat Pacillo and Kevin Morton. Had he signed any of these latter, lesser names, Garlatti would have been happy for a very simple reason. They all played in the big leagues.

This is Garlatti’s 18th season as a Rockies scout. He’s an original, a member of former scouting director Pat Daugherty’s first staff in 1992. Since then, Garlatti, 43, has signed one player who has reached the major leagues. That was outfielder Angel Echevarria, a 17th round pick in that initial 1992 draft who went to Rutgers.

Garlatti’s territory runs from Washington, D.C., to Maine and includes the eastern portion of Pennsylvania and part of New York. It’s a big area, by no means barren but realistically a lot more fallow than fertile when it comes to finding future major league players.

Garlatti is pretty sure he has another one coming. The Rockies took Young in the 30th round out of Piscataway (N.J.) High School in 2003 and signed him before the 2004 draft after he went to a junior college in Arizona. In scouting parlance, Young was a draft-and-follow, a category that enabled a club to have the rights to a player until one week before the following year’s draft but a category that no longer exists. Garlatti said that when he first saw Young in high school, he was anything but an eye-catching player.

“He was very raw,” Garlatti said. “He was very crude. But he was also a guy that never played fall baseball. Up here, fall baseball’s big. He was playing football, so never played baseball in the fall. He wasn’t around a lot in the summer because as he got a little bit older, he followed his dad around a little bit, so he was not like a mainstay at the showcases, at various tryouts or even in the local leagues.”

Young’s dad, of course, was former Rockies second baseman Eric Young. When Garlatti was an assistant coach at Rutgers in 1989, the elder Young was playing there, but playing center field not second base.

“A few of the scouts said, ‘Could you play him at second?’ ” Garlatti said. “And we couldn’t play him at second because he couldn’t turn a double play and he didn’t throw good enough to turn a double play. So we would hit him some ground balls before games, but he never played a game at second base. And as soon as the Dodgers drafted him (in 1989 in the 43rd round), I think they just put him right at second base, and his bat really was what allowed him to stay there.”

Villanova offered Eric Young Jr. a football scholarship. After the Rockies drafted him in 2003, Garlatti said, he went to Young’s house, no more than 20 miles from Garlatti’s, and sat down with Young and his mother (“who’s a great lady”) and spoke to them about professional baseball, the draft-and-follow rule and explained everything they needed to know. Young’s father was playing for Milwaukee then.

Garlatti told Young that whenever he decided he wanted to play baseball, Garlatti would do everything he could to get him into a junior college. And Garlatti assured Young, “There’s not a junior college in the world that won’t be interested in you.”

Garlatti got in his car and his cell phone range before he reached the end of Young’s street. It was Young, telling Garlatti, “Find me a junior college. I’m going to play baseball. I’m not going to go play at Villanova.”

Garlatti began looking around, checking his junior college connections when Young called one day to announce he was going to Chandler Gilbert Community College, just outside Phoenix in Gilbert, Ariz., and asked Garlatti for his opinion.

“And I go, ‘Eric, that’s fine,’ ” Garlatti said. “ ‘I was kind of hoping you might stay on the East coast because it’d be a lot easier to get there to see you play and to make sure everything’s OK and deal with the coaches and all that kind of stuff.’ And I said, ‘How did you pick Chandler Gilbert?’

“And he said, ‘Coach, you told me I wasn’t good defensively and I needed to work on my defense and I figured I could get a ground ball 365 days out of the year out of Chandler Gilbert because of the weather.’ And I’ll never forget that. I’ve told that story to a million kids.”

Young began his professional career at Rookie Casper in 2004. After signing with the Rockies but before going there, Garlatti picked Young up and the two of them drove to Yankee Stadium where the Rockies were playing a series in early June.

“I remember Vinny Castilla was on that team and Todd Helton and they remembered me,” Garlatti said. “They don’t know I’m Mike Garlatti, but they know I’m a scout and they remember the face and they were real good to the kid.

“I remember him going out and taking (batting practice) and walking around the clubhouse like he knew where (stuff) was. He said, ‘I was in this clubhouse with my dad.’ It was a big thrill for me. He was not fazed by it. I was probably more in awe of it than the kid was. I’m telling you, he was more comfortable in there than I was.”

Young, a switch-hitter, will turn 24 on May 25. He’s a leadoff hitter, who led the minors with 87 stolen bases three years ago and ranked second among minor leaguers with 73 steals two years ago. He has never hit below .290 in a full-season league and enhanced his value by playing center field while leading the Arizona Fall League in batting, stolen bases, runs scored and on-base percentage last year.

There are questions about Young’s arm, questions that haven’t hindered him to this point. He’s competing in his first big league camp and is scheduled to begin the season at Triple-A Colorado Springs. Garlatti proudly said, “He’s come such a long way.”

That’s putting it mildly. Garlatti said, “You should have seen him throw in high school. I’m telling you, he couldn’t reach first from where a second baseman would play. The one thing he always had, he had the work ethic beyond belief. He was an athlete and he had the work ethic and he was a focused guy.”

Shortly before Young is ready to start his season with Colorado Springs — the Sky Sox are scheduled to open April 9 at home — Garlatti will be in full-draft mode. High school baseball in New Jersey doesn’t start until April 1. The weather is always a variable then, maybe more foe than ally, and it can be more problematic at that time in New England. As the draft nears, Garlatti will crosscheck players in Canada.

Players Garlatti has signed for the Rockies include pitchers Chris Buglovsky, Colin Young and Cam Esslinger, who went to Seton Hall. The latter two rose to the Rockies 40-man roster. Seven years ago, Garlatti signed a player out of Seton Hall, a little left-handed reliever by the name of Issac Pavlik taken in the 10th round, who as the scouts say, had a little giddy-up on his fastball. Pavlik got as high as the Rockies high Class A Visalia club in 2004. He spent virtually all of the past four seasons pitching for the New Jersey Jackals in the independent Can Am League.

Such sagas are the scouting norm, particularly for someone working a cold-weather territory like Garlatti’s. But his glass is never half empty. The search, the quest, the belief that he’ll find a future major leaguer are simply givens for Garlatti. Amateur scouting is a profession of optimism. There’s no other way to last. And Garlatti knows all about hope. He has twin 8-year-old boys, one of whom is autistic.

In addition to Young, Garlatti’s stamp is on two pitching prospects, a pretty good one in Cory Riordan, drafted in the sixth round out of Fordham in 2007, and Daniel Houston, a Florida native who went to Boston College and was taken in the seventh round last year.

Will they make it? Garlatti, of course, doesn’t know. But if he wants a reminder of the improbable, all he has to do is harken back to 1989 when Eric Young, who played 1,730 games in the big leagues between 1992 and 2006 and made an All-Star team with the Rockies in 1996, was playing center field at Rutgers.

“It’s kind of funny every once in a while when you turn on ESPN and see his dad. I think about those days when I was coaching him and then to think about Eric Young Jr.,” Garlatti said. “He’s one of those guys, he’s going to hit good enough and run good enough, like his dad.

“The credit goes to our player development (staff). They deserve an awful lot of credit. But the work ethic, the intangibles, the bloodlines, the athleticism– those kind of things you can’t teach, he had. And you cannot underestimate those.”