Standards of professional Baseball Scouting (I promise it's interesting)

Standard of Baseball Scouting

            Professional baseball has been played for over 150 years. In all facets of the game, baseball is covered with tradition.  But who isn’t aware of this, its “America’s pastime!” There’s nothing more wholesome than going to the ballpark with your family! Just like your parents did and your grandparents! It’s a culture that prides itself on being a constant throughout time.

But despite all the fanfare and nostalgia, something we have to remember…Baseball organizations are a business. So a logical person would assume that the business would have an extremely sophisticated way of obtaining the best talent in the world (the whole crux of their business model). Well guess what logical guesser! The standard for talent scouting is almost exactly the same in present day as it was in baseball’s inception. There is nothing sophisticated about it in any way (until the early 2000's..but Ill get to that).

The sport is bogged down in archaic forms of scouting based solely on word of mouth, intuition, and opinionated guesswork. A typical baseball scout will go watch a player and will rate them on a multitude of abilities that they (in all of their professional wisdom) perceive. The standard grading scale is from 2-8. A 5 is the typical “Major League” ability and an 8 means they should probably just go to the Hall Of Fame right now.

This is a typical sheet a scout uses

            When organizations go about selecting players to offer contracts to, they basically take a bunch of these reports and disseminate who they believe has the most likelihood of being a successful baseball player. Many times it is obvious to any person who follows baseball when a player has exceptional talent. But how often can bold face guess work and intuition be the best way to go about investing hundreds of millions of dollars in talent?

            It took until 2001 for a General Manager (A GM is the person who has the most authority over scouting and player acquisition) in Major League Baseball to think “HEY! Maybe there is a more sophisticated and reliable way we can invest our billions!” That man was Billy Bean, GM of the Oakland Athletics. Some of you may be familiar with the movie Moneyball in which he is the main character.* Bean decided that since his team was one of the worst in baseball (and by far the most poor) to screw tradition and scout players with a new standard! He wanted to find the value that everybody else was missing with this archaic form of talent scouting. So what he applied is a form of scouting now called SABRMetrics (or Moneyball for short).

            Money ball is all centered on vast amounts of data collection and a computer. Instead of valuing a player by guestimating his potential, he used computer models to disseminate  which players were the safest investments, much like an investor on Wall St. would do. In his first year applying this new scheme the Oakland Athletics set an MLB record for most consecutive wins. Thus a new standard was born. The Boston Red Sox applied Moneyball theories starting the next season, and by 2004 they had won the World Series. This all but proved that Moneyball is the new standard to scout player talent. Today almost every organization has adopted their own form of Moneyball strategies to their clubs. While nobody would venture to say it is the pure standard at which every organization develops talent, it is unmistakable the affect it has had on scouting (as well as baseball as a whole) and has no doubt shifted the standards to a much more data centered source.

*This novel and movie are based on a true story, and if you are interested at all by this idea then you should check them both out. They do a much more detailed and entertaining job of describing this intriguing story and the movie was nominated for a litany of Oscars so you know it’s good. It also has Brad Pitt in it.