Catching the Stars of Tomorrow: The Importance of the Cape Cod Baseball League for the Major League Draft

As one enters and explores a Cape Cod ballpark, a sign in the stands grabs one’s attention: “Reserved for MLB Scouts.” The observant fan will notice several scouts sitting in the section immediately behind home plate, some with radar guns, some scoring the game and taking copious notes, some talking to interns from the home team’s analytics department, particularly before the game. At some ballparks, additional scouts take up a place high up in the bleachers to get a more comprehensive view of the field and the players they are studying. It does not take much to notice that professional baseball clubs view each Cape League game as fertile ground for future star players, as they set their sights on the collegiate players they consider choosing with their picks in the amateur draft. Yet what drives the teams to send copious resources to a peninsula in the northeast corner of the country every summer? And how can a scout or analyst determine which players should be selected, and when?

The Cape League is the ideal setting for finding college talent, as it has become the premier proving ground for NCAA players during the summer season. In 1963 the league entered an exclusive partnership with the NCAA, assuring that all players in the league each summer be currently enrolled in college; incidentally, the majors implemented an amateur draft two years later. Initially, the Cape was seen as a local league, so much that the first three players drafted from the league to reach “The Show” were all chosen by the Boston Red Sox: Ray Jarvis in 1965, Ed Phillips in 1966, and Carlton Fisk in 1967. The following year, other teams such as the New York Yankees (Thurman Munson) and Los Angeles Dodgers (Bobby Valentine) began to draft players from the talent pool of the Cape.3 Since 1985, when the Cape switched to wooden bats, the league has held the reputation of the premier summer baseball league for college players. At the same time, it has become the ideal testing ground for analysts and researchers who wish to evaluate the players found therein. In the Cape Cod environment, so many variables are controlled: All of the players are of the same age, same ability level, and same point in their careers, as they seek to be noticed by scouts from the majors. There is no effect of travel fatigue, as the players stay with host families, in the same house every night of the summer; and the longest distance between ballparks (Wareham to Orleans) is a mere 46 miles. This provides for an effective means by which players can be compared against each other in the most objective way possible. Scouts, moreover, can easily travel between games on the Cape as well, and with the staggered start times among the various parks, can attend multiple games on the same evening: For example, a scout can watch a starting pitcher in Brewster at 5:00, and then observe a hitter in Chatham for multiple at-bats starting at 7:00. The league thus offers the greatest concentration of amateur baseball talent in a small area – and the scouts have certainly noticed. In the 2024 season, a total of 415 players who had played at some point in the Cape League saw action on major-league rosters, accounting for 20.2 percent of all major-league players, and this proportion has steadily been increasing in recent years. More recently, in 2025, 17 players from the Cape League were chosen in the first round of the MLB draft, and six of the last eight number-one overall picks had played on the Cape (while the other two had a family member in the Cape League at the time).4

Given the prevalence of players from the Cape who make their way into the professional ranks, it is important to evaluate and rank them as objectively as possible. In 2019 I launched a research project with several undergraduate students to do just that. In the first stage of the project, we computed a Wins Above Replacement metric for the players, which we called cWAR, for the Cape. The league’s distinction of temporary players, those given part-time contracts on shorter notice at the beginning or end of the season when many of the big-name players are either still playing in the College World Series or have left early for the season, makes for a reliable baseline for replacement level when calculating WAR. By calculating the average number of runs scored until the end of the half-inning for each base-out state (each of 24 combinations of outs and runners on base) and using this to find the average change in run value for each type of play (such as an out, single, or walk), we found the weighted on-base average for each batter, which we converted to cWAR based on the average number of runs per game. Our initial calculation for pitchers’ used runs allowed per nine innings pitched, but we found later that wOBA allowed by pitchers correlated better with draft positions. We then modified, the cWAR metric, adding park factors and positional adjustments, and investigating whether clutch performance was a measurable skill (it is not), but still could not adequately measure fielding performance.

The main takeaway from the initial cWAR calculations was that we could identify players from smaller colleges who merited consideration from major-league scouts. One such player is Nick Gonzales, a second baseman who put up showy offensive statistics at New Mexico State University, but whom may scouts doubted since his numbers came against smaller-conference competition and at high altitude. At the level playing field of the Cape in 2019, Gonzales excelled, winning the Most Valuable Player Award and leading his Cotuit Kettleers to the league championship. His cWAR of 3.0 ranks the highest of any player included in our study (since 2012), and he was drafted seventh overall the following year after proving himself on the Cape. As of September 2025, he played for the Pittsburgh Pirates as the starting second baseman and was part of the CCBL’s 2025 Hall of Fame induction class. On the pitching side, that same year Brandon Pfaadt of Bellarmine University, a Division II school at the time, ranked fifth among all pitchers in cWAR, even though he was not selected as an All-Star nor won any postseason awards. Yet the Arizona Diamondbacks recognized his potential and drafted him in the fifth round the following year, and he had an impressive rookie season in 2023, as a starter and key member of their World Series run that year. One can still notice future star players from the small colleges; however, in recent years, several players have entered the transfer portal5 and signed with larger schools from power conferences during the summer, even while they were on the Cape.

We were able to improve on the fit of our data by supplementing our play-by-play data (used to calculate cWAR) with data from TrackMan, as every ballpark in the league is equipped with the system of cameras. The goal with this set of data is to include each player’s intrinsic skills, such as mean exit velocity for batters and whiff rate for pitchers, as these do not always immediately transfer to on-field results. The resulting model, as obtained by machine learning methods, yields a more accurate prediction for the draft, with three challenges: first, the resulting correlation is still low, particularly for pitchers, suggesting that other factors (such as statistics from the spring college season) still play a major role; second, the league began using a different program to record play-by-play data in 2024, so the most recent predictions were made using only the TrackMan data; and third, the computer has overfitted the data to the training set (based on one year’s draft position and the previous summer’s Cape League data), which compromises the model’s ability to predict the draft for the following year. Despite these challenges, we continue to make improvements to our model, as we aim to use the data on Cape League players from each summer who become draft-eligible the following year.

Yet the analytical dimension provides only one side of the story when it comes to how players can be evaluated; scouts continue to play an indispensable role. In the upper bleachers along the third-base line at McKeon Park in Hyannis sit two similarly aged scouts for the Toronto Blue Jays, Tom Burns and Tony LaCava. Burns was on the Cape for the bulk of the season and was in attendance mainly to watch a player from his hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, center fielder Maika Niu of the University of Arkansas and the visiting Falmouth Commodores. LaCava, himself a player for the Harwich Mariners in 1982 and later in the minor leagues, was there to cover that weekend’s All-Star Game, as he also traveled to the Area Code Games in California and the national team trials in North Carolina that summer. Both Burns and LaCava agree that professional teams ought to prioritize college players rather than those from high school, stating that only the very best of the high-school ranks merit consideration for a contract at such an early stage before other teams can acquire them. The former practice of a team choosing a high-school player in a later round, followed by the player then deciding to attend college, has become obsolete with the shorter draft.

But in addition to the modern draft being shorter, MLB decided that beginning in 2021, the draft would be held later in the season: no longer in early June, before the Cape League season began, but now in mid-July, concurrent with the majors’ All-Star Weekend and in the midst of the action on the Cape. Burns comments that this change means that scouts must now observe players who become draft-eligible in two different years instead of one class, and cites Jay Driver of Harvard University as a player who returned to the Cape at the beginning of the following season to improve his draft prospects. Driver, a pitcher for the Hyannis Harbor Hawks in 2022-23, was drafted by the Cleveland Guardians in that latter year after lowering his ERA, and currently plays at the high-A level. LaCava adds that in the week after the draft, their attention turns completely to the players who are rising juniors in college and the undrafted rising seniors, as the scouts aim to make their depth charts for the next draft a year in advance. Several talented players who go undrafted will often leave the Cape at this point in the season, or shortly after the league’s All-Star Game, in order to avoid injury and remain fresh for the following collegiate season, as they strive for the attention of scouts in the future.

 

 

While analysts and scouts appear to do disparate work in evaluating amateur players for the professional ranks, the two sides have learned to work in tandem toward a common goal. “There were some growing pains at the beginning,”6 quips Burns, who acknowledges that the relationship between sabermetricians and scouts is not nearly as strained as it is exaggerated in the film version of Moneyball, in which a general manager played by Brad Pitt and a fresh-out-of-college composite character, Peter Brand, berate a group of elderly scouts, concerned with signing players who can sell tickets, for being out of touch. As LaCava notes, “The relationship is seamless now. Scouts and analysts together observe players’ mental skills along with strength and conditioning and high performance,”7 the qualities that do not directly show up in a box score or a scouting profile. After all, just like the analysts, scouts must ultimately evaluate the players they observe with a number, as Christopher Phillips remarks: “Scouting in professional sports may remain one of the most financially consequential subjective judgments in the modern world: one fallible human evaluating another, with millions of dollars at stake. Nevertheless, to make strong or clear distinctions between scouting and rigorous, objective knowledge making is a mistake. The line has always been far too blurred.”8 Many Cape League teams with extensive baseball operations departments include both scouting interns and analytics interns, showing the synergy between the two sides of player evaluation. Therefore, both the computational and human elements in evaluating players prove to be indispensable, and one can see these in action at several special events during the Cape Cod season.

One such event is the annual workout day at Fenway Park, typically held during a day in June on which no games are scheduled. Busloads of players (all position players) travel from the Cape to Boston and arrive at the oldest major-league ballpark for batting practice and infield/outfield practice, with several scouts in attentive attendance. Burns, a regular attendee of the workout, says of the event, “I try to grade the arm strength of the players involved. The fielders just get routine fly balls or groundballs from the fungo hitters. I look for anything out of the ordinary … good or bad.”9 For batting practice, Burns looks for who has the best quality of contact and raw power, noting that in past years, he saw both George Springer (UConn, Wareham) and Aaron Judge (Fresno State, Brewster) hit multiple home runs over Fenway Park’s Green Monster.

As for events on the Cape, the All-Star Game, usually held on a Saturday in mid- to late July, garners the most attention, with more than 6,000 fans in attendance. The game attracts its fair share of scouts as well; however, as Burns notes, the game is more “for the fans,” and he and LaCava both pay more attention to the batting-practice sessions before the game, as that is their best opportunity to gather a larger sample of observations from each player. The league and its coaches try (and usually succeed) to bring every chosen player into the game at some point, leading to more limited playing time. For example, in the 2024 game, Western Division pitcher Casey Hintz (Arizona, Hyannis) entered a tie game with two outs in the top of the ninth and threw only one pitch, inducing a groundball out. He earned the win when his Harbor Hawk teammate Kane Kepley (North Carolina), who entered the game as a defensive replacement, drove in the winning run in the bottom of the inning. Both players were selected in the 2025 draft.

Finally, draft day itself has become an exciting event on the Cape as well, ever since the draft was moved to be during the season. Players will often find out by a phone call from the teams themselves, sometimes while preparing for a game, and others who are no longer on the Cape will be quick to talk to their host families once they find out. Scouts turn their attention to the talent still on the Cape who will become eligible the next year, while analysts measure the accuracy of their models, as I myself compare the actual results to the predictions with analytics interns in what has become an annual ritual.

Each role, therefore, of player, scout, analyst has its own task in making the Cape Cod Baseball League the premier setting for finding and evaluating amateur talent for the purpose of identifying who can make their way through the professional ranks. It goes to show, then, that even though it may be impossible for a physical road to go through a peninsula, for many professional players, the symbolic road to the majors goes through the Cape.

Fr. HUMBERT KILANOWSKI is a Catholic priest of the Dominican order and an associate professor of mathematics at Providence College in Rhode Island. He began his work in sabermetrics as the statistician for his high-school baseball team in 1997 and completed his doctoral studies at The Ohio State University. Since the 2019 season, his primary area of mathematical research has involved evaluating collegiate players in the Cape Cod Baseball League using the methods of data science. A member of the Lajoie-Start Southern New England chapter of SABR, he considers it a lifetime penance to live as a Yankees fan in the midst of Red Sox Nation.

 

NOTES

1 Namely, Mike Piazza, drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1988.

2 Michael Lewis, Moneyball (New York: Norton, 2004), 16: “In any case, you only had to study the history of the draft to see that high school pitchers were twice less likely than college pitchers, and four times less likely than college position players, to make it to the big leagues. Taking a high school pitcher in the first round – and spending 1.2 million bucks to sign him – was exactly the sort of thing that happened when you let scouts have their way. It defied the odds; it defied reason. Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to baseball.”

3 Chris Thoms, “CCBL Alumni Stats,” available at https://cdthoms.shinyapps.io/CCBL/ , accessed September 8, 2025.

4 Namely, Casey Mize, Adley Rutschman, Spencer Torkelson, Henry Davis, Paul Skenes, and Travis Bazzana. The other two are Jackson Holliday (2022), whose grandfather coached Chatham that year, and Eli Willits (2025), whose brother played for Hyannis that summer.

5 In 2021, the NCAA allowed student-athletes to transfer from one school to another without having to sit out a year, as previously required. The “portal” refers to the database in which a student enrolls when declaring one’s intent to transfer; then, coaches and staff from other schools are permitted to recruit the student. Several players arrive on the Cape at the start of the summer while in the portal, and colleges can offer them scholarships during the Cape League season, often based on their performance in the league.

6 Tom Burns, personal interview with the author, July 18, 2025.

7 Tony LaCava, personal interview with the author, July 18, 2025.

8 Christopher J. Phillips, Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know about Baseball (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019), 242.

9 Tom Burns, personal correspondence with the author, August 21, 2025.