Analytics And Scouting: Better Together
Today, we look at the benefits of balancing a baseball diet with analytics and traditional scouting approaches.
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Pregame Pepper - Bob Costas On Analytics
Leading Off
Marry, Don’t Divorce Analytics And Scouting
By Jeff Kallman
When the opportunity arises, I argue that analytics divorced from scouting means the child is torn unnecessarily between two contentious parents. Scouting can’t tell you everything about a prospect’s potential deep value, and analytics can’t tell you whether you’re going to get a committed baseball avatar or a first-class jerk. By which I don’t mean players having, God help us, fun playing the game.
Analytics can turn baseball’s lingo into something between poeticide and gobbledegook. Let me go as analytical as I please, as if you could stop me. But don’t ask me to eliminate the skyrockets, the moon drives, the bullet liners, the frozen ropes, the seeing-eye grounders, or ducks on the pond. Don’t go there about “contact hitting” unless you can show me a batter who can breathe a base hit or home run.
Don't ask me, either, to surrender the Rex Barney fastball (Barney, to future Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax, when Koufax asked if he really had one: Sandy, you have it, but the difference is that you can control it), the Blue Bayou fastball, Uncle Charlie, Lord Charles, the 12-to-6 curve, the butterfly pitch (if you have to ask, you never saw or tried to hit one off Hall of Famer Phil Niekro or a boy in a schoolyard), the radio ball (You could hear it, but you couldn't see it, said managing and scouting legend Birdie Tebbetts of Steve Dalkowski's heater), the cheese and the yakker (Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley: I showed him the high cheese, then punched him out with the yakker), or pulling the string (the changeup).
In a splendid new book telling the stories of some of baseball's most legendary scouts, Baseball's Endangered Species, Lee Lowenfish begins by blaming the Moneyball generation for this century's "lack of kindness to traditional baseball scouts." Mr. Lowenfish believes Moneyball author Michael Lewis "came under the spell of Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane and his statistically oriented assistants" who'd decided, seemingly, that what we now call analytics might replace the old world scouts.
Fast forward to 2016, when baseball's government dismantled the Major League Baseball Scouting Bureau and, within the next year, the Astros began dismantling its scouting ranks profoundly enough. The scout may have become an anachronism, but don't jump to the wrong conclusion because the Astros overloaded in analytics and underloaded in scouts begat Astrogate. Not every team that's gone all or near-full analytics fostered Astro Intelligence Agency-style roguery.
"I look for dogs who play checkers," said an Angels scout (Greg Morhardt, who discovered and signed a future Hall of Famer named Mike Trout) of his art. "We're looking for the unique." Mr. Lowenfish's book tells the deep stories of his predecessors who found the unique, the beyond unique, and the extraterrestrial. Folk such as Charley Barrett (co-architect of Branch Rickey's pioneering farm system), Paul Krichell (the Yankee hunter whose trophies included Hall of Famers Lou Gehrig and Whitey Ford), Red Murff (reliever turned scout, and the discoverer of Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan), and Paul Snyder (shook off a stroke at 40 to help Bobby Cox build the Braves' 1990s dominators, leading the troops who unearthed Hall of Famers Tom Glavine and Chipper Jones).
Analytics's number one function is telling you what you weren't able to see because you can't watch every inning of every baseball game every day. Not to mention that you can't possibly have seen the actual games played by the greats and the not-so-greats of the distant past. Its number 1A function seems to be telling you the truest depth and meaning or lack thereof of what you just saw in the game(s) you were able to see.
Anyone who says he or she has a problem with the greatest depth of information in the thinking person's sport for which statistics are its lifeblood, you should tell them you have a problem with them.
But analytics can't tell you the half dozen parts of the backside of its six parts. It can't tell you what Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog identified when speaking strictly about whether this or that player is worth this or that cache of money: You have to get twenty-seven outs a game to win. How's his defense? How's his arm? How's his running? Off the field, will his PR kick you in the ass? Just how high is the talent worth the risk of an unstable personality? (One thinks now of the scout whose one-word assessment of Barry Bonds, on a scouting report, was, Asshole.)
It would be splendid for baseball to re-think its scouting positioning without dispensing with analytics. The analytics departments whose subdivisions include assessing high school and college players would do the scouts in the field a wealth of wonder. The scouts, in turn, can tell them how acutely the numbers match the young men and, more significantly, whether the young men are mentally and emotionally as prepared for the professional game as the numbers alone might suggest.
"There are no scouts in the Hall of Fame," lamented Birdie Tebbetts, major league catcher turned manager turned scout. "At one point they came to me and said, 'Birdie, we'll open up a section in the Hall of Fame to honor all scouts.' Not good enough. Not at all. Because the Hall of Fame is intended to honor individual achievement."
Well, now.
If the scout turned master builder turned color line breaker, who also may have been the grandfather of analytics as we know it, could be elected to the Hall, and if certain analytically-friendly other executives could be, then maybe the Krichells and Barretts should be, too. And analytics should say "I do" to scouting, before God and His servant Stengel, until death do they part.
Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who writes Throneberry Fields Forever. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Met fan since the day they were born.