The State of Scouting

Several aspects of baseball are changing very rapidly, and all at once. As the industry continues to trudge along the analytical asymptote toward true objective knowledge about how to measure player value, it has shifted some of its efforts away from just identifying the players it views as effective and has begun to try to create them.

Analysis and application of Trackman data, changes in pitcher usage, and on-field implementation of the fruit born by biomechanical pitching research have compounded to create a pitching ecosystem dominated by record levels of velocity, which have led to record-low rates of contact. The hitters who are forgiven for striking out more often are the ones who hit the ball the hardest and newfound player emphasis on airborne contact — immune to the shift — combined with a more lively baseball have pushed home run rates to an all-time high. As the game changes on the field, so too changes the way it is scouted.

It’s not clear when scouting became a formal, structured aspect of every major league team’s baseball operations. Some unknowing, late-19th century soul watching a game in baseball’s Northeastern cradle probably began the practice by exclaiming, “That Monte Ward sure can make a stuffed bird laugh with that curveball of his.” or “The speed of this Honus Wagner fellow gives me gas-pipes, I say!” (Should be read in the voice of an old-timey radio news anchor.)

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But at some point between when people first began to notice and discuss that some ballplayers were visibly superior to others — which probably began shortly after the game was invented — and present day, professional baseball teams realized that it was in their best interest to know and learn about athletes from countless externalities who might be able to make their ballclub better. Such a realization caused teams to endeavor to find these athletes, which then caused them to consider how best to go about doing it. As baseball has spread across the planet, this has become an increasingly daunting and strenuous task requiring an awful lot of people and money.

So complex and endless is the pursuit of comprehensive global scouting coverage that despite having had more than 100 years to practice and refine it, baseball still hasn’t come to a consensus about how best to go about it.

That’s not to say there are significant differences, scout to scout, in the method by which players are evaluated. The 20-80 scale which, it is generally accepted, was first implemented in baseball in the mid-20th century by Branch Rickey, is more of a language, like Nadsat, than it is a system of measurement. It allows scouts to communicate effectively and concisely with one another and with their bosses about a given player’s relevant physical abilities. That scale and language became more pervasive as baseball entered the 1970s and ‘80s which made it easier for teams to deal with scout turnover, since indoctrinated scouts were already fluent in the language of evaluation and easily folded into new departments.

And while scouts today exhibit important, nuanced differences in ability and style the same way any group of craftspeople do, as a job, craft, art, science, pursuit or whatever of the endless applicable words one can use to describe scouting, it has been so polished, fine-tuned, almost standardized over time, that its practitioners are mostly looking for the same things that other scouts are when they arrive at the field for batting practice.

Instead, the major differences in today’s scouting, as the landscape of baseball changes around it, are seen team-to-team, in the way scouting departments are structured and the way scouts are deployed. The way a scout evaluates an individual player is relatively uniform compared to other scouts. The ways teams evaluate the global pool of baseball players compared to other teams is often not.

There are 30 major league clubs, all with 25 spots on their active roster. Those clubs all have seven to nine minor league affiliates – there were 231 minor league affiliate teams in 2017 — each with their own 25-man roster. That means, before we even account for the way injuries press additional players into duty, there are about 6,525 professional baseball players to be evaluated at any given time. Then you have draft-eligible high school and college players for teams to scout every year – 1,215 players were drafted in 2017, but more than that were scouted – as well as the underclassmen about whom scouts must begin formulating opinions, and the players in lush international markets like Eastern Asia, the Caribbean, Brazil, Australia or the small pockets of Europe and Africa from which talent sometimes emerges.

While resources are sometimes temporarily shifted from one department to another at specific times of year, pro, amateur, and international scouting departments are usually three separate entities with independent responsibilities. International scouting is in a place of volatility right now due to a combination of recent Collective Bargaining Agreement changes that have drastically altered the way teams can spend money and pursue players, MLB’s newfound partiality toward punishing teams for infractions that it had previously ignored and the United States’ political situation as the new administration picks at the scab of its relationship with Cuba. Not all teams make international talent acquisition a priority and some are willing to bend rules and exploit loopholes more brazenly than others, but all international departments share the hardship of being tossed about by higher powers, which sometimes include foreign governments.

Though some teams prioritize certain types of players in the domestic amateur draft, scouting in preparation for the draft is fairly similar across all teams. Clubs have a bevy of area scouts who identify players and report up to cross-checkers and scouting directors who sift through the upper tier of those players. Though the lines of geographic demarcation that split up those areas vary slightly from club to club and financial creativity plays a role in the way draft boards are lined up, the way amateur departments are structured is largely the same across baseball.

Things start to get interesting once we examine the pro side. Most organizations employ eight to 12 pro scouts. ‘Pro’ delineates the type of baseball they scout, not that the scouts are themselves professional. The Dodgers employ nearly 20 titular pro scouts while Baltimore has closer to five and those teams, and every club in between, deploy them in a couple of different ways. Some teams have organizational coverage, in which a scout is tasked with top-to-bottom coverage of three to five other teams from their major league and Triple-A clubs all the way down to Single-A and, sometimes, below.

Other teams have their pro scouts cover a region of the country, focusing on minor league affiliates that are within reasonable travel distance (a relative term as most baseball travel would not be deemed reasonable by most working Americans) from their home. In a similar vein, some scouts cover leagues, which are typically composed of teams within close proximity to one another.

And those three different scouting structures represent an overwhelming percentage of big league scouting philosophies, each with its pros and cons. Organizational coverage might have a given scout jet-setting all over the country to cover all the players the scout needs to see. Covering Baltimore’s full-season affiliates? You can easily drive along a section of I-95 from Aberdeen, Md. to Norfolk, Va. and see them all. Covering the Rockies? You’ll need to fly from Asheville, N.C. to Lancaster, Calif. to Hartford, Conn., to Albuquerque, N.M. to see all of them. Such a schedule often leads to a higher ratio of travel to scouting than exists within other methodologies.

But org coverage also allows scouts to develop long, deep histories with the players in the systems they cover. Scouting an organization top to bottom for several years in a row means a scout will see a given player grow and develop, or fail to do so, sometimes from the moment the player enters pro ball. It allows scouts to develop relationships with video coordinators, instructors and others with whom they can exchange valuable information they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. It’s valuable for teams to have such detailed, context-heavy opinions coming from a single, modestly paid source and, theoretically, scouts with org coverage should be the first to spot a developmental change in a player they’ve been scouting for multiple seasons.

For example, a scout covering Boston’s entire system who has seen perpetually light-hitting Taiwanese infielder Tzu-Wei Lin over the years has the best chance of identifying the swing changes Lin made in 2017 and determining what impact those changes have on his prospect status. That scout could be able to do so long before Lin’s new batted ball profile stabilizes and makes itself known to office personnel perusing statistics.

While the other types of coverage don’t allow for such single-scout depth, they provide other advantages which, one could argue, make up for what is lost in scout familiarity. Regional or league-based coverage often exposes prospects to multiple sets of eyes as they play through a system. This allows for a larger sample of opinions on a given player and is a way to circumvent issues caused by stubborn scouts who are loathe to change their initial evaluation of a player.

No matter the department structure, about 10 scouts per major league team are largely responsible for scouting the approximately 6,000 professional players in the minor leagues. If that sounds impossible, that’s because it is, and as such teams are typically forced to pick and choose which levels of the minors to scout. This often means that clubs’ lowest-level affiliates, like Dominican Summer League teams, often go totally unscouted.

Players in the DSL, short-season and rookie leagues are seen as volatile, risky assets. Executives don’t have much job security and may not want to trade away big leaguers for players who need another half decade of seasoning and might not reach the majors before the owner gets impatient. And so some teams don’t do any scouting beneath full-season baseball, ignoring domestic short season and rookie leagues entirely. Those teams miss out on seeing about 1,800 pro players every year while other clubs scout the lowest levels aggressively. Some clubs briefly reassign amateur scouts to short season coverage after the draft while others have personnel dedicated solely to it.

The Padres sent multiple scouts to see now-elite prospect Fernando Tatis Jr. before Tatis had even played in an affiliated game for the Chicago White Sox. Chicago signed him in 2015 when Tatis was 16, less than a year before trading him to San Diego for James Shields. In a 2017 deal that mostly revolved around a mutual exchange of big league relievers, San Diego also received 18-year old Dominican second baseman Esteury Ruiz from Kansas City. Ruiz had played just 21 games of pro ball in the United States before he was traded. Prospects like this are often throw-ins, low-level lottery tickets with a high rate of failure, as many assumed Ruiz to be upon hearing of the deal. But the Padres, general manager A.J. Preller among them, saw Ruiz extensively before that trade. Scouts who had rookie-level Arizona League coverage have likened him to Alfonso Soriano while pockets of the industry still don’t know anything about him.

Scouting the lowest levels of the minor leagues isn’t at all like scouting, say, Double-A. Much low-level action occurs in a non-competitive setting during extended spring training and fall instructional league where an inning can end simply because one of the teams wants it to. Schedules aren’t publicly available, start times are fluid and can change without public announcement, rosters are frequently wrong or incomplete and teams play uneven schedules. It’s a different animal, one that requires sourcing of information that has nothing to do with talent evaluation but is still required to evaluate the talent.

One major league club, whose scouting department does org-based coverage but doesn’t typically scout the lower levels, got off to a poor start in 2017 and quickly sent scouts to Arizona during extended spring training in case the tean suddenly decided to undergo a full scale rebuild. The scouts arrived, spent much of their time just getting organized, sifting through outdated rosters and seeking out injured pitchers who weren’t yet throwing, then left a few days later without having learned very much.

Some teams shift resources around depending on where they are in the competitive continuum. Rebuilding teams are more likely to target low-level minor leaguers with scouting resources than competitive teams, who shift resources to Double and Triple-A games where depth and injury insurance can be found. But most teams fall into one of the aforementioned departmental structures and then adjust the volume of the player pool they scout based on some combination of available finances and how much the top of the front office values scouting.

Is there a best way? The Author’s Scouting Department would feature org-based coverage in full-season ball and three scouts each in Arizona and Florida for extended spring training who then kick out to scout short season and rookie-level leagues during the summer. That gives you comprehensive coverage of all domestic affiliates, including dedicated low-level coverage by scouts who are immersed in that level long enough to learn its odd landscape. It also strikes a balance between the multi-scout audits that benefit regional coverage with the depth of org coverage.

This structure ignores the DSL. There are too many Dominican Summer League teams for one person to scout and the truly talented international signees often end up in the United States more quickly than their peers, leaving little reason to dedicate comprehensive scouting resources there. Still, strong teams in pursuit of a World Series aren’t likely to let a teenage prospect stand between them and a trade that might help them win one, and so I think a single scout who targets the DSL prospects from the best big league teams is a sound idea.

As statistics and hard data have become more pervasive in baseball, scouting has occupied a shrinking piece of the player evaluation pie and now, in a growing number of ways, the two are beginning to overlap. A recent deluge of metrics measured in physical space – Trackman, Statcast data — has caused some aspects of scouting to become redundant. Many teams have already installed Trackman at their minor league affiliate locations and either exchange the data they get from it with other teams or pay to have access to a communal trough from the vendor. This is also true at the college level and at several locations at which high school showcase events occur.

Most teams, including and especially the ones at the cutting edge of player evaluation, still consider scouting a valuable tool. But as tools like Statcast become more common and refined, the scouting industry wonders what departments might look like in the future.

In 2017, the Houston Astros made changes to their scouting departments that might indicate their vision of that future. Houston fired several scouts on both the pro and amateur side, combining the pro and amateur departments under a single roof and asking the remaining scouts to scout both amateur and pro ball, focusing on one or the other as they become more or less relevant throughout the year. The rest of the slack will theoretically be picked up by video and data and the in-office personnel who dissect them.

Many in baseball don’t necessarily believe more data means less scouts or think that what Houston is doing was still several years away from being technologically viable, but they do think Houston is experimenting at an opportune time. The Astros big league club is very good, with a young core, and the farm system is of above average depth with a few premium talents up top. The team is likely to be good for a while, giving the front office breathing room should this new structure lead to poor results, results that we’re still several years from truly being able to evaluate.

There are some potential problems with this. There are concerns that Astros scouts’ areas of coverage are too vast for them to scout thoroughly, or that they’ll miss important showcases during the summer when they’ve shifted to pro coverage or that reports on player makeup will be a casualty of this structure and leave Houston vulnerable to acquiring bad people.

There are ways to mitigate some of those risks. Directors and cross-checkers can pick up showcase slack during the summer since those are the class’ elite players and they’ll ultimately be the ones sifting through them anyway. Thorough makeup reports can be done on top tier draft targets while, if later-round draft picks display troubling behavior after they’ve signed, they can just be released as most late draft picks aren’t expected to yield big league value anyway. Mostly, other teams just think they’re going to beat Houston to players by having many more scouts than they do.

The Astros will probably learn about holes they have in their new system and attempt to patch them in the coming years. Their successes and failures might help shape what future departments look like in scope and focus, even if their experiment goes awry. Many scouts are concerned, that Houston’s initial try at restructuring involves employing fewer of them. But most with hiring power think that, while scout roles might change as new data continue to become available, scouts will be important until baseball ceases to exist.