Crawford: Ask the industry: Scouts on stats
From SABR member Chris Crawford at Baseball Prospectus on August 25, 2015:
Sabermetrics vs. scouting. Advanced statistics vs. player development. DRA vs. plus-plus fastball. The geeks vs. the dumb jocks.
These are the perceived battles of the sabermetric and scouting communities. You’ve likely seen “statistic-friendly” versions of games on television, ones that show Statcast and various metrics that teams have been employing for quite some time. These of course lead to the various Twitter fights about whether or not they’re necessary, and generally leads to me logging off social media for an hour or eight.
Of course—and you should be picking up a pattern by now—this got me to thinking. Is there a great rift between the sabermetric and scouting communities? To help answer that, I asked three long-time scouts who have been with organizations long before the advanced-stat uprising how—if at all—it has changed the way they scout games, whether or not they believe there’s a battle between the two lines of thinking, and what stats they like to “use” when scouting. Their answers may surprise you.
Read the full article here (subscription required): http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=27318
- Related link: Get your copy of SABR’s Can He Play: A Look at Baseball Scouts and Their Profession, edited by Jim Sandoval and Bill Nowlin
Originally published: August 26, 2015. Last Updated: August 26, 2015.