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=== Field Scouts ===
Going back not to 1975, but to 1925, scouts have always been willing to use "Player Families." When a scout tells you that a 19-year-old Ken Griffey Jr. reminds him of Willie Mays ... well, friends, that is the marvelous human brain deploying its own PECOTA system.
The scout wouldn't put it in these words, maybe, but the scout's PECOTA system has matched these players through the following attribute-algorithm :- )
| GRIFFEY JR |
MAYS |
| CF |
CF |
| Tall and strong |
Tall and strong |
| Speedy, 20 SB's |
Speedy, 20 SB's |
| 35+ HR's |
35+ HR's |
| HIT (.300) |
HIT (.300) |
| Graceful |
Graceful |
| Plays 4 yrs ahead of age |
Plays 4 yrs ahead of age |
etc.
There is one huge advantage to this subjective system, and one huge disadvantage. The human brain is far more complex than any computer. But! It is nowhere near as subjective.
The wise man doesn't panic at that last point, because he doesn't believe that baseball has been "solved" by science anyway. "Objective resolution" isn't the goal here, because it's not feasible.
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=== Moneyball, Dept. ===
Bill James gave an interview after the movie was out, and somebody asked him what he thought of the scouts...
Bill said that the movie deserved an award for the casting alone. "If you put ten guys in a room, five real scouts and five casted scouts, I would not have been able to tell you which were which" ...
Ten, twenty years ago, the scouts were so territorial that it provoked a huge over-swing of the pendulum. Non-scouts reacted by claiming that scouts don't know anything, or at least not very much.
They know a ton, and their intuition absolutely will catch things that computers can't. A lot of things. Riddle me this, Batman. What computer would have known who Felix Hernandez was, at age 14? Scouts did.
The younger the player, the skimpier the performance resume, the more the domain belongs to the good ol' field scout.
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=== "Hitter" Families ===
If you've been paying SUPER close attention, this section might not surprise you ... :- )
James did a sensational job of drawing up a dozen or so pitcher families ... the Tommy John finesse lefty who eliminates everything but the single. The Power Righty Who Will Give You The Walk. The Super-Polished Pro who has every weapon except a big fastball. etc.
Bill never drew up hitter families. Dr. D never refers to them, either. If you ever did try to draw them up, I'm guessing you'd have 30 to 50 of them.
I mean, take the Mariners' great hitters in 1997. Isn't Edgar Martinez in a family distinct from Alex Rodriguez, since Edgar hit the ball line-to-line and had a .450 OBP? Wasn't Junior in a different family than Jay Buhner, since Bone fanned 150 times a year?
Here you have four great hitters, all home run guys with walks, and yet they're obviously four completely different kinds of hitters.
Scouts don't refer to hitter "families." They set prototypes individually. Maybe Trayvon Robinson is trying to be Curtis Granderson. That's as far as they go.
That'll do for us too. Just my opinion, y'know.
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=== And Now For Something Completely Different ===
Check out
this article and tell me what y'think about the scout lingo "bad face." How many baseball players, quarterbacks, or soccer players have faces like Steve Buscemi, John Clayton, or Dr. D?
Nick Franklin has a great baseball face.
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