Interesting Athletic Article - Cubs moving away from in person scouting for pro-ball and toward modeling etc.

[CubinNY]

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5894639/2024/11/04/cubs-offseason-front-office-changes-analytics-playoffs/

I'm not necessarily against the strategy, but I don't know why a team with their recourses cannot do both. Reading between the lines, Jed's job appears to be relatively safe and their goal is to become the Cleveland Guardians, kind of. 

[CubinNY]

a comment on the article says it better than I can

Patrick K.

· 6h 34m ago

A blind trust in models and analytics is how you end up with a lifeless team that meanders its way through a two month stretch where it gets its ass mercilessly kicked without seemingly caring. There are no stats that measure “fire”, “spark”, “edge” , “leadership” etc. You can’t derive those things by looking at a chart telling you an outfielder’s route efficiency or a 2B’s hard hit rate. There is a place for those and other metrics and the PhD mathematician analyzing them in a windowless room somewhere in bowels of Wrigley, but you need scouts to help you understand the qualitative side of players and prospects.

The Cubs are a premier franchise - they should be able to afford fully staffed talent evaluation departments on both the quant side and on the more qualitative scouting side. This is what is so frustrating about this franchise - the consistent desire to run it at optimal organizational efficiency rather than for optimal on field results.

[Transmogrified Tiger]

We've really come full circle if we're going to earnestly say 'stats can't measure heart' like it's 2005 again.

From the description in that article and in others previous, there is probably a shift in the weight of analytics v. scouting, but I think the bigger one is in how the scouting is done.  Video is commonplace in the leagues where they're decreasing scout activity(on top of increasing trackman data), so you could also think of it as getting a similar amount of scouting input(with admitted marginal downsides the article highlights) without having to pay the travel costs to have an army of scouts.  

Said another way, is the marginal value of in-person scouting v. video scouting greater than the impact you get when the cost difference is plowed into other areas of player development?  I'm not sure any of us can answer that but it seems very possible the answer is no.  

Could the Cubs have an army of scouts in-person and also put a lot of money into analytics?  Sure, but regardless of if the budget number has a zero added to it or not there will always be the question of how you can get the best impact from it on the margins.  Hoyer/Hawkins seem to have pretty strong conviction they'll get more gains from using that money elsewhere and that there's not a net decrease in spending, so they're betting(and with their jobs on the line) that they're right.

[Tryptamine]

You just know Patrick K was a huge fan of Ryan Theriot. 

[Bertz]

In MLB every bat, ball, player, and individual limb of every player is tracked dozens of times per second during every live play.  I earnestly struggle to think of anything on the field a scout can provide that can't be seen on camera or recorded via tracking.  Even soft stuff is generally pretty well known publicly by most fanbases at this point, not to mention player/coach movement.  MLB/Advance scouting very much feels like a "you have to do it because it's the way it's always been done" deal rather than something that actually matters.

In the upper minors, we have pretty low rent broadcasts and a lesser version of Statcast.  My understanding is teams have full statcast for the minors, but I'm not sure what the video situation is.  Soft stuff, I'd imagine you know pretty well for other teams in your league, but not as much for other leagues at each level?  I would probably want scouts in the Cal League, the PCL, etc. primarily to pick up on hot goss.  I wonder if the seven guys remaining are one for each level for full season and one for each league at the complex level?

For amateurs you desperately need scouts.  That soft stuff is absolutely essential, since work ethic adaptability, etc. are so key to future growth.  Thankfully sounds like this area's not being touched.

All in all I mostly shrug at this?  Like even the line about the Astros adding scouts misses the context that when they were in their successful run under prior leadership they were the original pioneers of this type of scouting structure and were wildly successful at it.

[Stratos]

Yeah video and data probably work well.  They'll miss some things possibly but are scouts watching a player warm up or how they interact with teammates in the dugout?  And is it worth traveling to see if they do?

The things scouts might not see on video like fielding jumps they can measure with the data.

Edited November 4, 2024 by Stratos

[Tank]

 

[thawv]

23 hours ago, Tryptamine said:

You just know Patrick K was a huge fan of Ryan Theriot. 

Perfect example of all of those things.....but no talent.