skyking162

As much as I rag on Frank and considering how often I disagree with him, he actually is a smart guy with interesting ideas. We had a good baseball discussion a few weeks ago and Frank had a couple interesting ideas about how scouts and stats aren’t just different approaches, but have different uses. Here are his thoughts, without any comment from me. Yet.

1. While statistical evaluation can help raise flags and can serve as a filter to find some undervalued/unseen talent, it does nothing in the finding of superstars. That is, statistical evaluation is more of a safety net and should be considered a secondary evaluation tool. It helps you to not screw up or miss something, more than it does to help to find something. Not that “not screwing up” isn’t a good strategy that would benefit 60% of major league teams.

2. The second thing is probably more interesting. It’s the idea that a good, unbiased, self-aware scout probably sees the same thing as most statistics. They’ve seen enough success and failure doing their job that they intuitive know what works and what doesn’t. They don’t have the sample size to statistical determine whether a guy has the potential to hit for power, but they’ve seen enough examples of other players in their past to fit this new player’s attributes to other players where things have either succeeded or failed. As much as we have to admit it, there are very, very, very few that “break the mold”. Most players come with a skill set similar to someone who has played the game before. and the success or failure of that former player is not an unreasonable projection of how this current player should perform. While not relying on specific numbers for this analysis, a scout surely takes in various data points from his vast experience.

What do you think?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.