Cooper: Teams Cutting MLB Scouts Are Losing Their Hidden Edge

New rules allowed teams to adopt “ground effect” aerodynamics to stick their car to the road. Numerous other teams saw great results in their wind tunnel and computer simulations, but when they took the car to the track for the first race of the season, they found their cars weren’t nearly as fast as expected.

That’s because any time they ran as low to the ground as planned, the cars bounced up and down excessively due to aerodynamic-induced bouncing.

Red Bull didn’t have that problem. Why? Because Newey was around the last time Formula 1 used downforce in the early 1980s, when teams struggled with the exact same bouncing issue. So he designed the new Red Bull car that had a little less impressive results in the wind tunnel and computer models, but a suspension that ensured the car avoided issues with bouncing up and down.

Red Bull won the next two world championships in blowout fashion.

As we go through yet another rough fall of layoffs for baseball scouts, I am reminded of Newey’s ability to blend experience, foresight and some healthy skepticism. Being able to use modern tools and blend it with hard-earned wisdom is a perfect combination. It’s a way that teams can use evaluations from pro scouts and scouting departments in a healthy, productive way in the 2020s.

This year, there seem to be more layoffs and reorganizations than usual. That has cost a number of scouts their jobs.

In conversations with front office officials from a few different teams, it has been noted that the cutbacks in scouting—especially to pro scouts, who evaluate professional players, particularly minor league prospects—are not as much efforts to save money as they are decisions to move money around from one department to another.

For example, no team employed biomechanists just a few years ago. Now they are viewed as a key to being a cutting-edge team. There have long been team doctors and trainers, but there are a lot more people working in sports performance departments these days, and nutritionists are commonplace. The tools to gather, collect and organize the data are also expensive.

So when presidents and general managers of teams are asked to slow the rise in the costs of various departments, scouts have gotten the short straw.

But used properly, pro scouting can be a difference-maker for teams, which is something analytically-savvy teams like the Rays have shown for years. Scouts can serve as the quality assurance department. They can be stock analysts. And they can sometimes be a secret weapon.

The quality assurance work is one that makes many teams uncomfortable. It requires letting scouts raise concerns and poke holes in their performance models.

The intention shouldn’t be to disprove or disparage modeling. Pretty much every MLB team has models to project draftees, minor league prospects and major leaguers. They have pitch models that can grade every pitch for every pitcher in pro ball—and college baseball, as well.

Models are attempts to quantify what happens on the field and predict how players will play for years to come. These are useful tools and indispensable for teams in the current era of the game.

But every model has its flaws. They require tweaks and improvements as problems become apparent. Letting scouts raise questions and drive discussions on where the model seems to be missing something can help improve those models more quickly.

As an example, most public—and according to conversations, many private—pitch models struggle to properly evaluate changeups, which often means that scouts’ grades and pitch models disagree on changeup quality. Deception plays a role in the success of a changeup, which is something that’s difficult to quantify. When scouts and models disagree, an opportunity to improve the model arises.

Using scouts as stock analysts is an updated way of doing what scouts have done for years, and is always a way teams can prove to themselves the value of their pro scouts.

The goal with performance models and scouting reports is to project years into the future, which means that you have to wait years to learn about the accuracy of your model or your scouts’ reports. But there are things that can be tested before then. Much like Baseball America prospect rankings, teams have their own internal valuations on prospects (and big leaguers). Analytical models attempt to predict which prospects will blossom and which will wither.

Scouts do the same thing, but they can serve as a check on the models. Scouts can predict which players are going to be more valued a year from now and which players they expect to regress. A year later, a team could evaluate its scouts’ predictions. With a good staff, teams will find that the scouts are right significantly more often than they’re wrong, and it creates opportunities in trades.

MLB teams are in a never-ending race to build the best models. But if everyone is looking at the same analytical data, with the same biomechanical information, it’s hard for a team to figure out advantages. And when they do find them, the advantage is often fleeting.

The data leaves fingerprints, so when one team finds an advantage, other teams can reverse-engineer it by studying the data. One team’s secret advantage quickly becomes commonplace. This was evident in how quickly one-knee-down catcher setups spread around the majors.

If a team has an evaluative advantage from scouts, it’s not as easily replicated.

Analytics are valuable. So are scouts. The teams who figure out how to mesh the two together the best have a big advantage.