Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1529: Presenting Future Value

Episode Date: April 18, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley speak to FanGraphs’ Eric Longenhagen and ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel about their new book, Future Value: The Battle for Baseball’s Soul and How Teams Will Find the Next Superstar, touching on topics including the best kinds of scouting stories, how technology and data have confirmed or overturned traditional scouting beliefs, how […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1529 of Effectively Wild, a Fangrafts baseball podcast brought Dammit! Palsvars because we will be devoting the entire episode to an interview with them. They are the authors of Future Value, The Battle for Baseball's Soul, and How Teams Will Find the Next Superstar. Brand new book, Kylie McDaniel, now of ESPN, formerly of Fangraphs, and Eric Longenhagen, still of Fangraphs, have written this book together. So guys, congrats on joining the co-authored book club. On behalf of myself and Sam Miller and Travis Sachik, we welcome you to the club. I really enjoyed this book, learned a lot, had a lot of things that I thought I knew sort of confirmed or reinforced.

And I went to scout school several years ago, not to brag or anything. If you guys need any pointers on scouting at any time, I can let you know based on my extensive scout school experience. But scout school is sort of like the, I stayed at a holiday inn last night of learning things. Like you learn some things, but it was a two-week program and there's only so much you can learn in two weeks. But because I blogged about that experience for Grantland, I still get people sometimes contacting me to say, how can I go to scout School? And I have to say, well, you can't because it doesn't actually exist anymore, at least in that form. And also you had to be sponsored by a team. So I don't know what to tell you. But I think if I get that question now, I will tell them to go get Future Value because it's basically Scout School in book form, except broader than that. So thanks for filling that need and also hello and congratulations. Hi guys. Hey man. Thanks. Yeah. I don't, it's, it's nice that you said it was an honor to have

us on here. I don't know if you saw how dirty the sweatpants I currently have on are and how like long and unkempt my hair is that you'd, uh, you'd want to rephrase that. Eric, it's really nice of you to be wearing pants. Yeah. that in and of itself is like a rarity. I saw that New York – what was it? New York Times article or something where it was like, hey, people stop wearing sweatpants at home. I was like, yeah, that's an upgrade for me. Any kind of cloth barrier between my loins and the air in my house is like more than is necessary at this point. So kudos to those of you who are panted.

Eric, your hair is spectacular. So the longer the better, as far as I'm concerned. So this is a book that's very broad in scope. It is about scouting and how to scout and how scouting works, but it goes beyond that. And so I think one of the questions that both Meg and I had as we were reading was, what was your intended audience for the book or audiences? Because there are chapters of the book that are directly addressed to aspiring players, to aspiring scouts, to aspiring front office people. So how did you sort of pitch this and envision it? Who's the target audience? I think originally we had discussed the sort of likely people that would

want the early version of the book was all the people in the hotel at the winter meetings is how we described them because it's you know everybody in a front office like scouts that are sort of connected to the front office and maybe more open to sort of a holistic view of baseball as opposed to just the I go to a game view of baseball and then you also have the media that's sort of you know really in the in the trenches and then the you know aspiring or the job seekers that seemed like the initial group and then i think we realized as we expanded this to include a couple more topics than were sort of originally included like the one you're talking about with players or specifically

a job seekers chapter i think we then realized like oh it might be like kids on the showcase circuit or kids that aspire to be in travel baseball and it probably even expands to people that kind of like baseball and their neighbor might be a D1 player or like a grandma that's always watches baseball at home and her kid wants to be in a front office one day. And we kind of realized like, oh, like it could be a much bigger group. And I think the part that we may aspire to the most is sort of that in the NBA think fluencer red money ball, otherwise don't really interact with a lot of baseball content. And guess that would be the biggest sort of crossover audience that I think this would appeal to. I don't know if it'll be in those people's hands, but I think it could apply there

as well. Yeah. And I'll say that Kylie was the one who was really driving the logic behind who would be interested in this, who's sort of got some skin in the baseball game, would be interested in this who's sort of got some skin in the baseball game, who hasn't been advised properly or who may be taken advantage of. And we might have the opportunity to alert them of that type of thing in the book. And I think that especially applies to like the travel ball parents and players, you know, who are probably sold that their child has an opportunity to do something more in baseball than is realistic, given their talent level. Like it's, to play major league baseball is so incredibly difficult and takes much more talent, I think, than most people realize. And I think that that

tends to come across in the book. But yeah, that, it took a while for that style of writing where you could pick up the book and have like three or four chapters that really apply to your interests and some others that don't. So you kind of pick and choose almost like an essay book. That developed over time. That was not something that when our publisher Triumph Books came to us and said, hey, will you guys write this book? There hasn't been a book about sort of the state of the industry baseball scouting in a while. That was not initially part of the discussion. It was something that developed much later. I'm curious with those kind of various constituencies in mind and then your respective backgrounds, obviously, you two have written

together in various forms into various depths for a long time and did until the mouse kidnapped Kylie. How did the two of you decide who was going to tackle the different chapters that apply to different constituencies? Because I think that you two wove your respective voices together really nicely in this, but there are chapters where at least I, as someone who has edited both of you for a while, could say, oh, like I can tell Eric kind of took the lead on this, or this has that distinctive Kylie flavor. How did the two of you think about divvying up the different chapters and the different topics here? It was about both of us.

I think it was pretty intuitive for the two of us. We've worked together enough, like sheer hours and just over a number of years, that we know what each other's strengths are. And both, all of the book was collaborative, but who took the first pass at a given chapter or topic in the book was just sort of informed by our experience and level of expertise relating to the various categories. So like Kylie has more experience doing July 2nd stuff, like he's the one of the two of us who would go to the Dominican Republic to take video and see players during showcases during our time

working together for Fangraphs. And so like it just made sense for Kylie to work on those parts of the book first and vice versa. Like I'm on the backfields more often than Kylie is because I live 10 minutes from three teams facilities and no more than 45 minutes from half of baseball's facilities. And so like I'm just on the backfields more often and it makes sense for me to write some of that stuff.

But then we would trade and expand and revise and share and we're constantly updating each other on as we fleshed out parts of the book that we had done so. say is we were lucky enough to have experienced with working with each other the entire time is that whatever we were working on that was co-byline. We were constantly reminding each other of stuff that we had thought about just through the writing and reviewing each other's writing, such that we could expand. And I mean, Meg, you have first-person awareness of this. This is part of the reason so much of the stuff that we wrote together was so lengthy. And so that applied to the book too. But yeah, Kylie, do you have any other thoughts on that? Just expanding on what you said. I think there was, there you go. Just expanding. See? Yes, and. But there was one pass that I think Eric took

through one of the pro scouting chapters and it was like 8,000 words or something. It was almost as long as it was in the book. And then I went through and made, there's a couple of grammatical things here and there. And then there's three or four things that I added. Like, oh, he goes into something about the hit tool and mentions three components. And oh, there's one more component I think you could mention. And I remember you sent me a message like, this is fantastic. And I was like, you wrote like 85% of it. And it happened the other way too, where it's like the 15%, the other one of us added, just made it that much better. And then also in the course of doing a little little bit of like a line edit on you know a next read

and then also like maybe rewording something if it got like a little too far into one of our voices to you know bring it back toward you know something between the two so that it isn't quite as obvious who wrote which part but yeah i would say in general i mean it kind of happened i think the opposite way with the international stuff that i just went through and wrote everything i thought needed to be covered and it it was like 20,000 words. And the publisher was like, I mean, we should probably do this into two chapters. It's like really long. And then Eric came in and was like, all right, you forgot this.

You forgot that. You should expand here. I've got a story that fits here. And I was like, oh, yeah. And I think it probably ended up being about like who took the first pass. It was probably pretty close to 50-50 in terms of words. So, yeah, it was good that we had already done that before. So I think we were able to land on that process a little more quickly. Neither of us had ever written a book

before. And so sort of wrangling the thing in its entirety and kind of trying to wrestle it to the ground was difficult. We weren't sure how to go about doing it. And if we were to ever do it again, I think we would probably go about it differently just having learned some of this stuff the hard way. Yeah, I'm curious. You guys wrote this while you were also compiling reports on draft prospects and going to minor league games and seeing fall league action. This was happening concurrent to your regular day jobs. I'm curious how doing both simultaneously changed the way you look at the normal writing normal writing that you do? And if anything kind of moved around on that, or if, you know, you just realized like, wow, it's been nice to be able to

sit here and write a folly report and then, you know, bang out 500 words of the book. It was a lot of, it was certainly stressful. And my, it was sort of like, it has increased, like if I were going to the gym and lifting a ton of weight, like it's sort of increased my musculature for like doing work, my capacity for doing stuff. Nothing feels very stressful from a work standpoint anymore because of having to juggle this and our day jobs and other stuff like that certainly sort of brought something out of both of us, I think, that is probably good in the long term, but was certainly stressful to go through. And yeah, I do kind of relish in the idea that I can just, you know, take one org list at a time now and like think about stuff on one track rather

than multiple at a time. And yeah, there were certainly days when I was in the Fall League stands, like writing this book between innings and going to a coffee shop between Fall League stands, like writing this book between innings and going to a coffee shop between Fall League games and sitting and writing for a couple hours. And yeah, it was a lot to do. And part of me wants to do it again and part of me really, really doesn't. And I've got like, you know, I've gone gray in some spots because like, I don't know if it was because of this book, but it definitely started around the time that it was crunch time for the book. And yeah, it has a real, there's been a real physiological response to having to do it. Yeah, I'm familiar with that love-hate feeling when it comes to book writing. So one of the best parts of a book about scouting is scouting stories. And you have scouting stories

sprinkled throughout really every chapter here. And if the whole book had been just a scouting director told us about the first time he saw so and so i would buy that book so that can be the sequel but i wonder what's your favorite genre of scouting story because you have some in here where it's like you know the first time kylie saw vlad jr or the first time someone saw wander franco for instance and you're just amazed at the talent. Or then there's the draft room story about we can't believe this guy fell to us or our pocket was picked and we were going to take this guy. And then you get the whole alternate history of, wow, this superstar could have been on that team. Or there's just like, how did I discover this player for the first time?

There are so many classic scouting stories. So I wonder what your favorite type is as people who hear scouting stories constantly. My favorite in the book is the Howie Kendrick story and is generally that type of story. That's not really feasible anymore because data and technology and video are so pervasive that the idea that a scout from a team or a couple scouts from a few teams would be the only ones who would have seen a player enough to have a fully formed opinion that that player was good, that's probably not likely to happen anymore. The platonic ideal of this is Peter Gammon's toe Nash story, which I've talked about several times over the course of my writing career is

like a thing that is part of why I'm doing this for a living. So yeah, the Howie Kendrick story in the book, which I, you know, envision in my head, a scout shows up at the field, sees player, is sort of lit up by that player's ability, and then looks left and right and sees that there are no other scouts at this game. And what that feeling must feel like, if it were ever to be true again, it's got to be so incredible to know that you are the only one sort of staring at this ray of light. Right. Yeah, there's another great one in that genre, the JT Real Mudo story, sort of the same thing, where the Marlins and you have Stan Meek who helped draft him, discover Real Mudo and just amazed by what an incredible talent he is. And no one knew about him and no one else knows about him. And then it's like, how do we get through the next three months without anyone picking up on our interest?

And it's like, you know, Roger Ebert wandering into a bar and seeing John Prine in 1970. And then, you know, it's this fully formed songwriter who's no one's ever heard of and he's a mailman. And then he writes the review and everyone flocks to to see this guy but when you're a scouting person you don't want anyone to flock to see the guy you want to hide him as long as possible so you can steal him so i agree those are my favorite stories and i'm sort of sad that those stories are very uncommon now because as you mentioned it's really hard to find someone that no one else has found at this point yeah i would uh i would say the story that i i liked the most was the Scott Olson one. And we sort of lucked

out. I mean, taking a step back for a second, when Triumph kind of pitched us the book, and we talked to some people in the industry, like trying to decide, like, do we want to do this? What should the book be about? Do we want to see if other publishers are interested? And we were sort of told like, oh, there's not going to be like a huge like bidding war for this book, because A, it's already like a specific sports book, audience but uh they're all you're also not pitching like a narrative element which is essential for at that stage to get sort of publishers involved or agents or things like that which i guess uh you and your co-op yes but we hadn't like planned out that much but then what ended up happening was if we talked to i mean i

don't know how many scouts are like quoted in the book but let's's say like 10 or 12 or like, you know, quoted multiple times. It turns out all of those guys have been scouting for 20 or 30 years. And almost all of them have either gone head to head with each other. They're friends with each other. They used to work with each other. Like their stories started intersecting with each other in a way that we weren't expecting. We realized like, oh, like the three or four guys that are quoted the most, especially ones that have like worked in a number of different areas and with some of these other people or have been friends with these guys, like those are our characters, which we weren't initially sort of planning on because we weren't quite sure how it was going to play out.

And so the story about Scott Olson was I was, I was asking a scout, tell me about a guy that you saw when you were trying to hide your interest to other teams. And the short version of the story was two or three teams out of the 30 knew about Scott Olson as a high school pitcher in Illinois. And the sort of like first part of the story that I was told when I asked that prompt was, oh, I knew that there were two other teams that knew about him. And so when me or the other two scouts went to one of his games, we would always try to hide in case a fourth team showed up. They wouldn't know that we were there to watch him. They would think that they just stumbled onto something and it wasn't important. And one game this guy went to, he saw the other scout and he knew the third scout was there but he couldn't see him and then he saw him hiding in the bushes

and then we lucked out that the people we were talking to included uh that scout who was an early i think it was the second year scenario scout that year he became a scouting director his cross checker is now a top agent and their scouting director has become an international scouting director and all three of them were quoted in the book and so we got to see like that specific story from all three angles and i think another interesting part of the real muto story was stan mc's reaction wasn't we need to make sure other the other 29 teams don't know that we like this guy it was also we can't let the kid know because if he knows we really like him he might then go solicit an agent the agent

will find out how much we like him the price goes up like we need to keep this a secret from everybody like we need to act like this conversation never happened. Like I'm surprised if this was happening today, there would probably be burner phones involved. Like the idea of sort of like the espionage area of scouting has always been like interesting to me. And I think it's probably interesting to everyone. It's why there's so many spy stories on TV and movies. I'm curious. So throughout the book, you guys are grappling with not only baseball as it happens, but some of the unsavory side effects of that, whether it's service time manipulation, or some of the shady dealings that can go on in the J2 market, or just the general insecurity that scouts

are facing as technology encroaches on their territory. And I'm curious how you balanced the project of describing baseball as it is to help illuminate it for people who don't know, while also maybe wanting to kind of give your own perspective on how it should be and what shape you'd like the industry to take eventually. Because obviously we all like and know scouts and we want there to be scouts in the future. So how did you guys think about balancing those two things? It was pretty difficult. I can't say that we had a discussion specifically where we talked about tone and balance. I do think that what we try to get across in the book is that we get to, baseball is such that we collectively as the people who

care about it, whether or not you are like part of the industry or not, get to shape it and have some say in the way it looks. And that's because of it exists away from things that are truly essential to our society, that some of it can operate at a level that is less efficient than it absolutely can be for like the quote unquote greater good as I define it or Kylie defines it or any of us defines it. And so, yes, I do think that having scouts around is better if for no other reason than because stories like the ones we just mentioned exist. And things are trending in baseball in such a way that in some respects are moving away from the aesthetic that I prefer, both in the way the game is played on the field

and the way that on-field product is generated by people in front offices. And so I think some of that comes across in the book, while also sort of acknowledging that the way things are evolving naturally based on the forces at play is also kind of okay, and that we shouldn't necessarily overreact to those forces because, you know, remember when Phil Humber was throwing like perfect games and stuff? And I know that at that time I was working at Baseball Info Solutions and we all in that office thought that baseball had changed, that we were entering a dead ball era. And now the last couple seasons, that couldn't be more, feel more untrue. And so these things

change very, very quickly and we should look at them with a broader scope so that we're not overreacting to things that are occurring in a short window that might not be reality for long term. And so I think that all the gnashing of teeth that I want to do about what might happen to scouts, you know, my perspective on that is also kind of tempered by the fact that all things sort of, you know, you need to take a long view because ultimately that's the things are going to pan out. And I think the book talks about how ultimately we all need scouts. I think even the data-driven analysts in front offices realize that the scout report variable is an important one. And so I think that unless some of these cost-conscious orgs,

like what Houston did under Lunau and what Milwaukee might be doing under Stearns, what we have yet to see whether Baltimore will do under Elias, where scouts more or less go away in favor of video, I don't know how widespread that's going to be, but I don't think every team, even if they realize the cost-cutting measures, I don't think every team is going to enact something like that, and I don't want them to. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because Jason Parks always used to say that

a scouting report is a snapshot of where that player is in time, and part of it is just evaluating how good is that player today, the present value, but then, of course, book title plug, you have to care about the future value too. And that's really maybe the more important part of scouting, at least at most levels. And that's the tough part because I think a lot of scouts can say, how good is this guy today? You could almost just look at his numbers, at least at some level, but so much of it is about the long-term projection. And that's kind of what you had to do with this book, too. It's just what's the state of the industry right now and how has it gotten here, but then also where will it be in five years or 10 years and 20 years? And that's the really tough part to project into the future because, as you mentioned in the book, everyone thought scouts were going to go away right after Moneyball, and the opposite happened.

Teams got interested in information and data, and scouting reports were data. And so people hired scouts, and more international markets opened up that you needed people to scout. And so for a time, at least, the scouting ranks really swelled. And only now are we starting to see that contraction that people were predicting 20 years ago, it seems like finally happening. But who knows what the next revolution or the next unanticipated change is. And so I would imagine that's pretty tough because you don't want this to be a book that is only relevant in 2020. You want it to have a life and a shelf life. So that's something that I think you consider, but you have to hedge as any scout does when you're projecting future performance of anything.

You know, I tend to agree with the, I guess, yeah, it was either Parks or Goldstein who had the snapshot thing. I think the eyeball look is important to project in abstraction, body types, and the way they develop is an important part of any sport, any athlete's longevity in any sport, I think has to do with their frame, their athletic composition. And I think that that's only a thing that can really be assessed visually. And I think scouts give important context to any look. The way a hitter or pitcher performs could be dictated by how long they've been doing that thing or their geographic location and how that's impacted their ability to be polished or not. Like there are all sorts of things that having intelligence that cannot be quantified and put a player in context is valuable.

And I think that scouts are the primary thing that give you that. And yeah, there is a whole section in the book about basically how scouting as an industry is impacted by the status quo of the rules of that environment and how those rules we anticipate will change. You know, it's as basic as there being robotic strike zones in the near future and therefore catcher framing becomes a thing that we really don't have to worry about. But how that changes as we look at catchers, we really – we can try to anticipate but really don't know. Like so there is stuff in the book like that about how over the next, in the near future, how we think things will change and how that might impact scouting. I think it's pretty unusual to the week before your book release be handed a topic for a new afterward or perhaps part two of future value. I'm curious how some of the

conclusions you reached about the future of the industry might be changing given some of the new draft rules that we've seen in response to COVID-19 that seem like they're likely to project forward and might sort of preview an international draft you've you've been handed the afterward for the paperback edition it's right there for you I mean that might be another book make yeah it's interesting because we had some thoughts uh toward the beginning of the book about how we felt about the astros both as like a strategic point of view but then also like the specific implementation that they had um taken and we knew some people that worked there and used to work

there and had specific stories about like how things had gone there were a couple that didn't get in the book and we weren't quite sure how to attack that because it gets into the level of salacious if you just let every source say whatever they want which part of us was like well people should know what the industry thinks but if you just go find like a fired astro scout who's super old school like that's going to represent a pretty extreme point of view and it's not like luna or talbin was going to go on the record and talk about how that scout was wrong and they're right and all you know all those sorts of things so it's like okay well maybe we'll just throw out the extremes how do we attack this and then everything happened and then it was like oh this is now a

little bit easier to attack because there's like a bunch of reports we could cite and then say like oh in addition to that we also have heard or indications for multiple years was that or you know sort of expound upon that we were I think lucky that all of that started happening and basically the big news um was at least referred to in the book. It had already happened at that point. The open-ended part we left was, you know, sort of the Red Sox and Alex Cora, which I guess still hasn't really been resolved. So obviously that wasn't going to get resolved before the book got published.

But I think there's also a number of things, like obviously with this sort of mini CBA that was just agreed to and what the next CBA will be. And I think pretty clearly to anyone paying attention, the selling out of amateur players via the draft international, even minor leaguers. Obviously, the trajectory of those things have changed. And I think most of the things we thought would happen are happening and are probably going to happen more quickly. And there is an argument to be made that the reduction of scouting staffs will now accelerate

as a result of this. Because I think the way that at least I've talked about, I think I've talked to Eric that the reduction of scouting staffs will now accelerate as a result of this because i think the way that at least i've talked about i think i've talked to eric about it before is basically there's a bunch of teams that were looking to do this but were worried about pr well now they can lay people off or furlough people or reduce scouting staffs and not get the bad pr because they're losing money or not making as much money as they thought or however you want to frame this and then there's some teams that didn't maybe want to do it but are thinking about it 10 years from now they would they're kind of dipping their toe in maybe they don't have the gumption to really take what could be a negative pr hit from reducing scouting staffs

and now they might have they'll be basically forced into a draft this year that has more data proportionately than reports and so they're going to find out what it's going to be like against their will and that may embolden some teams to then, instead of doing it 10 years from now, do it four years from now. And then the expense would probably be like more entry-level area scout types where people just get double and triple areas. There's a number of teams already doing that. So there's a lot of, I think, and I guess going back to the way that the draft and international work, I would imagine that by the 2022 season, there will be an international draft and there will be a domestic draft. They will both have trading effects and they will both have hard slotted picks with no negotiation. I think that's where we're headed. And I think it'll happen, you know, within a

couple of years. And I think obviously if the day, maybe after the 2022 draft, when both of those things have happened once, I think that would be an interesting like area to look back and say, hey, when, you know, two years ago during that pandemic, all of this stuff got sped up in a way. I think that, I mean, I don't know if it's the timetable for a paperback afterward, but I think that may be like the reasonable time to be able to look back at this and sort of have context. But obviously six months from now, we could probably guess what's going to happen or what will happen as a result of the things that have just recently happened. Gives you plenty of time to write the sequel. Years and years. Yeah. Electric Boogaloo, I believe, will be.

So there's an ongoing debate about how much information to arm scouts with. There's all this data out there that in some cases makes what scouts do redundant or technology can do it better. And sometimes scouts can still add something that the technology can't, at least for now. And so that's the question. Do you tell scouts all this stuff so that they know going in? Or does that bias them in some way? So I'm just going to read a paragraph where you sum up the state of that debate. You wrote, there are varying opinions among in-office analysts and decision makers with

data access as to whether or not their boots on the ground scouts should see and use the data. Those opposed think it poisons the well of objectivity and that scouts will draw predetermined conclusions about players based solely on the data once they've been indoctrinated, and that's something they can do at their desk without ever setting foot in a ballpark. Others think arming open-minded scouts with this knowledge will better enable them to see how and why pitchers with non-traditional stuff are succeeding as they map on-paper measurables to their visual evaluations, and that they'd be better equipped to see how their own player development staff might be able

to change pictures for the better once acquiring them. And that's something that kept coming up when I spoke to former Astros scouts for the MVP machine. Even those who weren't really bitter about it and understood what the Astros strategy was and thought, I can see why they're doing it, we'll see if it works long term, but it hasn't really backfired in a big way yet. Even those scouts were sort of frustrated that they hadn't gotten more insight into what the front office was doing. And front office was so secretive and maybe just didn't want those influenced evaluations. And yet you would think that you want to educate scouts about what to look for, particularly if you want to scout players who are going to be coming into your player development system and might have certain attributes that can or can't be improved.

So if you guys were running a department, which way would you go? our own work and the way that's developed over the last couple years, I'd have to say that I would weaponize my scouts better by teaching them how all this stuff works. If you're the Astros and you know you're going to fire all your scouts, then of course you're not going to tell them because they can take that knowledge to other orgs, right? And that is part of the dilemma that you're faced with because scouting in general, there's going to be some turnover. And ideally, the quality of your employees are such that there will be and that they'll move on to higher positions with other teams. And so imparting that knowledge onto them, especially a few years ago when the gap between

what Houston knew about this stuff and what other teams knew was probably bigger. You know, I could see how you could think that that was a bad idea, but if you were just trying to make your scouts better at this, I think that almost certainly having them understand all this stuff and it just, again, enables them to make projections that are more abstract. What can you do with pitcher X's stride direction that will impact their arm slot and make it more vertical so that their fastball plays better? Like that is not a thing that you understand how to do unless you know how and why someone with a backspinning fastball is better and like are shown examples of why this is working and such. So I am team educate your scouts. Yeah, I think there's a lot of reduction happening in these conversations because I think if you were to go to, you know, Jeff Luna, Mike Elias, David Stearns, the guys that are sort of at the forefront of reducing scouting staffs and handing it to analysts.

I think if there was a sort of silver bullet scout where you could pay them a higher salary for scouts, say $100,000, and you had eight of them and call them all A-plus scouts, which is already getting outside of the realm of possibility. But let's assume you knew they were A-pluses, it was proven, you knew they were going to stay A-pluses, you could pay them a reasonable rate for what they were giving you. And instead of having like a 12, 15 person pro scouting staff, like a lot of teams have, or at least some teams have, if you could have six or eight and then just make them go scout the players that you are like most interested in, or the teams that you're most likely to trade with, or the players specifically you're most likely to trade for. And at that point, you could then have less need for analysts because this super scout would apparently would do

the scout's job and the analyst's job. And you could sort of trust that report as though it was handed to you by whoever you trust most. I think most teams would take that if they were, if they said, instead of either doing the 12 or 15 scouts and you kind of have to do some stuff with these reports or you have one or two scouts or five or whatever it is, and you have tons of analysts, they want the best information for the,

that they can trust the most with the least noise for the least amount of resources. And I think there is a way to do that. That is a, you know, a version of the sort of traditional approach to scouting. The problem is, like any area, there's a lot of scouts that are not that and are almost actively against that in a way that they think that the thing they saw that one day should stand more than the 130 games they didn't see that TrackMan did see.

And so the tension between those a lot of times is, well, we'll, as the GM of a team that takes that point of view, well, we'll just take the cheaper guy that has more certainty and more data, the analyst, and we'll just cut the scout out of it. And I think there's a way that if you, if you want to take the point of view, that is the very sort of, you know, Lunau, McKenzie, Ivy League, NBA point of view, and people with that background, I think there's a way to try to, as Eric was saying, train your scouts to make them, you know, maybe B plus scouts if you can't find A plus ones. And those B plus scouts can replace the need for some of the analysts and they can get you to that answer more quickly. And when there's something that doesn't add up in terms of this guy's performance and

how he seems to be valued by his team, there's a makeup thing that is very clear, but you didn't know because you didn't send a scout there, that B plus, A plus scout can go actively go find you the answer and be sort of a one-stop shop for all this information. But if you're inclined to want to approach this like a management consultant, you can just look at things that scouts can't predict, look at your worst scouts, look at a bad decision made driven by scouting information and say, oh, this is all stupid. Let's, you know, that's where the reduction comes in, where you can kind of be intellectually dishonest and just say that it's bad because you can easily justify that if you really want to. You can also justify that there's a bunch of teams run off of models that are making a bunch of bad decisions if you really want to stack the deck.

Neither one of those is actually true. It's just you can make that disingenuous argument if you want. that sort of Ivy League NBA management consultant point of view is sort of winning out because I think when you're making a presentation to ownership, that argument is presented in their language in a way that is very easy to quantify. Whereas I think the scouting point of view doesn't necessarily get presented in that same language or with the same sort of oomph intellectually because it involves like some gut feel and you got to trust me and stuff like that. And people that became billionaires by being ruthless businessmen don't always love that, especially if they don't understand baseball as well as they understand the business that they've made billions of dollars on. Yeah. So it's sort of ironic that at the forefront of the saber revolution, some of our like nerds

without communication skills struggle to get their message across. And now the way that those, the quant types go about communicating is actually advantageous when you're in the room with owners. Well, and I think one of the things the book does a good job of illuminating is sort of what can happen to scouts when they are not able to catch up. I would encourage everyone to read the passages that sort of bring the human side of scouting that concern Rod Fredly. But let's put your sort of career advisor hats on for a hot sec. I don't want to give away the full content of the job seekers sections of this because there's so much good stuff in here. But if you were with all of those potential communication complications and varying skill sets and way to wait all of these things sort of in mind, what's the one thing that you

would advise aspiring scouts to sort of prioritize in developing their skills? And then of course, the longer answer can be found in future value available for purchase now. But if you were going to kind of point people to the starting point of that list, what's the thing that you would highlight? I have a little bit of a wrap on this one. but I think the general idea is if you look at the people that have succeeded in baseball, especially in front offices, but you could say it as scouts as well, there's some combination of played pro ball, played high level college, their dad owns the team or is friends with the guy that owns the team, something like that. Went to an Ivy League school, have an advanced degree, got a sponsor that is sort of sponsoring them up the chain as they're an intern. It's some

combination of those things. Most people that are successful, especially in front offices, but also in scouting, have some combination of those things. Almost no one has just one of those. So if you can accumulate those things, do it, because it's sort of an under advantage in a way, if you can stack those things up. Absent that stuff to in a pool full of people with sort of seemingly similar skills to separate yourself is somebody needs to be able to look at a resume or an email and see a couple sentences or a couple items that will immediately move your resume to the top and get you an interview so you can then use your people skills to stand out and for us that had that had always been learn SQL or other database languages, even if you're a scout, because that is actually the kind of scout people are looking, a lot of teams

are looking for now and learn Spanish because that's useful in almost any part of baseball. And we've expanded that idea now, I think, to include any sort of on-field skills in terms of just like hitting fungos where you could, you know, then market yourself as an extra coach or throwing bp and i think the last one would be being familiar with either operating edgertronics rapsodos the sony camera that we use like any sort of the advanced technology that everyone's using or be the guy behind the scenes or gal that can process or edit this information and make it digestible for coaches at the front office. Like that's the suite of skills if you can't get those qualifications, which I had zero of those when I got into the game. And I kind of got lucky that I was able to hang around as long as I did before, you know,

things kind of broke through. Those are all the things that are on the table. Get as many of those as you can. So you write a lot about makeup in the book and for good reason, because that seems like an area where scouts can really still contribute. That's something that a machine, at least for now, can't accurately assess. And if you're a scout who can identify a player who has the personality, the mentality to exceed what seems to be his projection or fall short of it, that's very valuable. If you can identify a player who's open-minded and willing to make some player development tweak, that's extraordinarily valuable. minded and willing to make some player development tweak, that's extraordinarily valuable. And the question then becomes, how good are scouts at judging makeup in advance? Because I don't think anyone disputes that makeup can be very important, but it's sort of a separate question. How good are we at actually determining makeup? Because, I mean, just think about your daily life. There are

probably people that you think you know well, and then it turns out that you don't actually know them well. And if you're a scout and you're mostly observing a player from afar or through secondhand observation, that's even tougher. And obviously a lot of players are at an age where they're still cognitively developing. And so they're literally different people. Their brains are different a little later in their careers than they were earlier on. And so I had a scout when I asked about makeup and the fact that some teams seem to be de-emphasizing makeup, brought up Brandon Martin, who is, you know, I mean, this is the most extreme example. It's almost unfair to cite it. But Brandon Martin was the Rays' first round pick in 2011.

And the scout was saying, you know, some scouts gave Brendan Martin good makeup grades. And for those who don't know, Brendan Martin basically had a complete psychological breakdown in pro ball. And then after he was out of baseball, was tried for triple murder with a baseball bat. So that's the most extreme example you could come up with. And obviously there are cases where it's very clear that someone has great makeup or terrible makeup, but most people are somewhere in the middle of the bell curve and maybe it's tough to tell. So how good are scouts at determining makeup and how good are teams in general and our psychological evaluations that teams give to prospects, something that is actually predictive? Yeah, I think you described it very well. Makeup is kind of problematic. The definition of it

depends on who you're talking to. And there are teams who, yes, who think that the level of variation scout to scout as to how good they are at nailing the makeup is enough that they're willing to sort of punt on it altogether. If not altogether, then like in like the later rounds of the draft when your expected return is small anyway. So yeah, it's incredibly difficult. Again, you touched on the cognitive development. That's another huge aspect of it.

You're talking about teenage kids, many of whom have not had to deal with any sort of adversity, certainly athletically, to this point in their lives. How they're going to respond to that, we truly don't know. But they're likely to face it at some point just because of the talent in the rest of pro baseball is so strong. So yeah, I think, and again, I think you laid it out exactly, Ben. It is an important thing. It certainly seems to have an impact on how some individuals over or underperform relative to their talent, but how each individual

in baseball defines makeup is different depending on who you talk to. That's a problem when we're all trying to communicate with one another the way we do with like the 20 to 80 scale. And I think that young people develop in such a way that is unpredictable, period. And that is just who we're dealing with across the entire player population. So it is super difficult. And like, yeah, how would you even, it applies to everything, right? Like if Meg, you have to hire a writer to work for the site. One of the things you're trying to assess is what kind of worker and person they are and what that means to you is probably different than what it meant to Dave Cameron or Carson Sestouli and anybody else who's running a website. And so I think that this is like a problem in hiring and trusting people, period, let alone one that baseball teams are forced to reckon with. One thing that you talk about is the way that spending on talent,

whether it's amateur talent, international talent, has been artificially depressed. And whether it's the draft or the slot system or international spending limits, all of that, it's so clear that the value of these players on the open market is so much higher than it actually is in reality once these limits are imposed. And you mentioned like the last draft, what was it, the 2011 draft before the spending limits were imposed, the spending on bonuses that year was higher than it was for the next like four years. And that's not because the players were worse. It's because there was this artificial suppression. So owners are constantly doing everything they can to limit spending. I wonder

how you think baseball should balance that, the fact that this is just sort of a strange, immoral system period that we wouldn't really put up with in our own lives, but we just think, oh, it's a draft, it's sports, that's how sports works and has often worked, with the need for competitive balance and the fact that, you know, there have been eras of baseball before you had a draft or before you had spending limits where certain teams were able to just sort of splurge in a way that other teams either can't or wouldn't. And you mentioned, for instance, the fact that the Yankees seemed to be in line to sign Wanda Franco and then the spending limits changed and they weren in line to sign Wanda Franco, and then the spending limits changed,

and they weren't able to sign all the players that they wanted, and the Rays got Franco. And maybe that's for the best, that other teams are getting that talent, that it's not all just the Yankees and the Dodgers getting those guys. So if you were to do away with a draft, or just to say it's a free-for-all, anyone can spend on anything, that's obviously a lot better for players and fair for players.

But can you do that and still preserve competitive balance? Or is competitive balance concerns just kind of a canard that the owners use as a way to impose these limits? I don't know, the least friction and like most equality in amateur baseball being something close to what actually was happening in international baseball, which is in the same way that, you know, draft pools are given out based on, you know, scale to the draft picks and how the record was last year. I think if you were to hand teams bonus pools for the draft based on that, so, you know, the best, the worst team gets the smallest pool, the best team gets the biggest pool, the best team gets the smallest pool, and then just have like, I guess, an auction. So if a team has the most pool and they just want to spread it across 40 players,

none of them with the top 15 bonuses, they should have the right to do that. If you are partial to making that magnet mechanism, just being that every draft pick can be traded, that's a little less, I guess, liquid, but I think the, the sort of, maybe not the goal, but a nice by-product of mechanism just being that every draft pick can be traded that's a little less i guess liquid but i think the the sort of maybe not the goal but a nice byproduct of whatever the new system would be that if you know you or i or eric or meg takes over a team from scratch and there's a bunch of you know big leaguers that are older that whose contracts are about to expire that you want to trade for young players and maybe your system is all one sort of player and you prefer a different sort of player, you should be able to turn over every player in your organization for something for a player

or asset-related, draft pick, whatever, close to what their value is. Ideally, it would be a more liquid environment with a little less restriction, and that would also apply to the pay of players. So that if Casey Mize is in a draft and people like he's very clearly the best player and he's now capped at roughly seven million dollars if he's worth 40 million dollars some team should offer him pretty close to 40 million dollars maybe more than 40 million dollars and the teams obviously value these players in similar ways that like you know craig edwardsworth has valued them and it's just a it's just a function of the you know the cba and the players union that's keeping that from

happening but i mean if we're gonna you know pie in the sky like everybody gets paid what they're them. And it's just a function of the CBA and the players union that's keeping that from happening. But I mean, if we're going to pie in the sky, everybody gets paid what they're worth, I guess. And so a 22-year-old rookie might get paid $30 million if he's really one of the best players in the league. But obviously, that's not how it works now. And I can't imagine it ever working that way. But I mean, that would be, I think, much more equitable. And I feel like if the teams are playing just as much money to get just as many players, I don't think they really care what it looks like. It's just there's so much friction between where we are now and that sort of more equitable distribution of money for labor. Another thing on the topic of budgets and spending, I think people are very aware of the difference between teams' payrolls, and you have your high

payroll teams and your lower payroll teams, and that's very obvious. Some teams go out and they get Garrett Cole and others don't. And that really sticks in fans' minds. But there are other differences when it comes to resources and spending in other areas. And granted, spending is constrained in a lot of areas that it didn't used to be, like the draft and like the international market. But in the book, you detail some of these kind of under-the-radar-for-most-fans areas where some teams invest and others don't, you know, whether it's technology, whether it's the size of your scouting staff or your player development staff. Or, Kylie, I remember you writing a few years ago about the Yankees spending on minor league free agents and getting the cream of the crop there, which is not something that many mainstream fans would even notice. So what are some of those

areas that are not that apparent to the outside fan, but whether because teams are smart enough to invest there or wealthy enough to invest there, they're getting an edge that's significant, but maybe not so obvious. Yeah. So, and similar to what you talked about in the previous question, the gap is starting to narrow between the teams at the top of that scale and at the bottom because of league legislation that is being imposed and driven by the bottom of the league from a spending standpoint who doesn't want there to be a huge gap between what the Dodgers and Yankees are putting into these types of buckets, whether it's acquiring data or spending on minor league free

agents or what have you. So yeah, most of that stuff is outlined in the book. I'd say that the one thing that you didn't mention specifically there, Ben, was the data aspect of it. Until this winter, we were still at a point where there was asymmetry in the amount of data that teams were getting on the amateur side. Teams could essentially pay to have technology installed at junior colleges and several years before that at like big D1 schools in exchange for exclusive access to that data. And then policy was instituted to force that data to be shared. Rather than the Cleveland Indians having the incentive to catch up to the Cubs by installing, paying to have a junior college trackman unit installed somewhere of their own, they just kind of complained. And the owners were just like, yeah, well, if we, this is a way for us to save money. If we all just share this data, you guys decide how you chop it up and analyze it. But we all share this data.

And then you're saving, deferring costs among all 30 teams rather than having some sort of tech arms race. And so there are lots of little nooks and crannies where teams are operating in this way, whether it's with data acquisition or what you're doing at your facility, the way you're spending money on feeding and housing your minor league players. I think ultimately team's goal will be to make that equal across the board so that teams like the Yankees and Dodgers aren't outspending everybody. But at this moment in time, it is still like those small corner case things like nutrition and tech, what data you're acquiring,

what video are you buying, what are you getting from third-party vendors, what are you willing to spend on that type of stuff, Or invest in your own infrastructure to produce on your own, and teams are outspending some in some areas and not in others. And yeah, these weird little operational budgetary things that exist. There are still discrepancies between the teams, but I think the owners would like those to go away. I want to preface this question by saying that we love all of our readers very much, and we appreciate them asking us questions, but it is not uncommon for you, Eric, and I don't think this was uncommon when you were still at Fangraphs, Kylie, for you guys to get questions in your chats that resulted in you saying, hey, go read this thing that's been

at the site for a while, whether it's the primer on the 2080 scale or other explainers on sort of your approach to scouting if there is one question that you get very frequently that indicates sort of a misunderstanding of how scouting works on the part of readers and fans that you hope this book sort of remedies once people have read it what what would that question be what's the thing that people get wrong most often that you hope they walk away from future value knowing the answer to and never have to bug you about in a chat ever again? Sure. Yeah. So I've thought hard about this on my own. What should we really expect people's knowledge foundation to be at any given moment? Should I have expected someone who's new to Fangraphs to browse it enough that they would have stumbled upon any of the foundational stuff that Kylie and I have written, stuff that we would not like to

constantly be revisiting and would just hope that it's sort of installed in most of our readership already. Like, you know, a six CD changer in a car from the early 2000s. Like, I just hope that you have the backup camera by now. So I guess at this point for me, and this is like an ever evolving answer, but at this point it is what like FV means and what it applies to. Like I have folks in the chat who are like, Hey, is this guy's tool grade maybe a future? This FV, FV, you know, future value doesn't apply to each individual tool grades. It is just the all-encompassing player's value at any point in time. The way that's defined is lengthy and that is on the site and in the book, but it does not apply to individual tool grades. Future value is just about the player's overall profile and where

their value exists on the continuum right now. Yeah, I didn't answer the question because I wasn't sure if that was a good point, but that was actually the thing that came to mind was people referring to tool present and future grade. We, you know, represent as like a 50 slash 60, meaning a present 50, future 60, and people calling that 60, the future value of the, of the hit tool, which is like, it seems like a very minute, annoying thing for us to harp on. But if you start calling every future tool grade, future value, it then gets super confusing. If you do it in a way that doesn't, if you don't fully explain what you're saying, it then gets super confusing. So yeah, that was one. Right. Because then what future value means is gone. Yeah. And if you say future value of 60 and you're talking about the

hit tool in that context, somebody could just see that sentence and think it means something else. So it's just, it's good to have the term straight so that everybody understands each other. And I would say the other one is that future value is not just averaging the five tool grades together, which is something that's in the primer. But I feel like it's one of those things that I get, I get asked a lot about like, well, why is this guy 50? And even some scouts are like, well, I think this guy's a future roll six. Like he is, he's in a ball. I think he's going to be like a, you know, borderline all-star roll six or a 60 using the 2080 versus the two eight. Why do you have him as a 40? And I was like, well, it's hard to like exactly explain that.

I get that that doesn't make intuitive sense, but if we just call every guy in a ball, that could be a six, a six. And then there's a guy in the big leagues. That's a six. Like, obviously that's not super useful. So we have to sort of map this to essentially trade value. It isn't exactly what we're trying to do, but that's what it ends up mirroring. And so the further away you are, the more discounting there is from what we think the guy's going to be and what we have the future value as. I think that's the easiest way to explain it. But I think that sort of concept of like a discounting of what we think the player will be, his future value being discounted for how far away they are, how much risk there is in

their profile, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But I think if you click around the board for five minutes, you get that. If you just sort of look at all the different terms and try to line everything up and look at the tool grades, I think that makes intuitive sense. But I get that not everybody is open to exploring the board in such a curious way as I am, since I just think about this stuff nonstop for the last 20 years. Yeah, there's a lot of advanced level stuff in here, baseball 301 or 401, the intricacies of roster rules, but you also do define batting average and say what it is and how you calculate it. So I think you do a pretty good job of being mindful that people are coming to this with a different level of knowledge and

you may have to hold some hands to get people into this subject. And much like the Beatles, we want to hold your hand. That's what the hair comp is right now. That's what I'll just start doing. I'll just start wringling it down in front of my face. Thank you, Kylie. I found my answer. Maybe I'll be chased through the streets by all these people walking and jogging in my neighborhood now. There's a certain short-sightedness, I think, that comes into play with some teams, a lack of consideration of future value. And it's sort of like, you know, with spending on NASA, for instance, in the U.S. budget

where every dollar you spend on NASA more than pays for itself. There's a dividend of more than a dollar because of all the innovations that are developed as part of that spending. But people still don't spend on NASA because it seems sort of extraneous or you can't necessarily see exactly what the dividends will be before you do it. already have some sort of facility. And that's not nothing, obviously, but when you think about that in terms of here's what $10 million buys you on the free agent market, and here's what $10 million potentially gets you on the international market, where you're getting an unbelievable amount of surplus value from these players in their first six years of service time, it seems like a no-brainer. And yet it has been a tough sell to ownership at times. So if you were on one of these teams that has a stingy owner that just either doesn't want to spend or isn't open-minded enough to see what you would get from

spending in those areas, how would you sell that to them? I guess I would take the bad cop posture, which is you're looking to hire me as your GM because you just fired your last one. Do you want to win or not? This is what the smart teams do. This is what the successful teams do. If you ran a football team, would you chase away Bill Belichick or Bill Belichick's ideas? There's other ways to win, but that one is proven to win, especially when done by that guy. In the same way that, you know, we pinpoint some teams in the book where it's like, you know,

whether it's a Rays or the Dodgers or the Yankees, like you can kind of, you know, add or subtract some teams depending on how you feel about certain things. But I think the important thing to look at for those sorts of teams is they're not all scouting. They're not all analytics. They're not tiny scouting staffs. They're probably closer to the biggest scouting staffs they're probably closer

to the biggest scouting staffs but it's not like they just try to you know get at it with numbers and they invest in these areas and some of them like the Yankees have tons of money and are capped in some areas and so they spend that money somewhere else they have more resources than other teams but the Rays have maybe the 30th most resources if not definitely bottom five and they do this correctly like there's a reason why Haim Bloom is in Boston, Andrew Friedman's in LA. Now James Click is in Houston. Matt Arnold is now the number two in Milwaukee. There's a reason there's a bunch of them there. It's because Tampa Bay is doing it better than everyone else. If you sort of do a pound for pound, you know, dollar for dollar sort of adjustment, they're doing the best job. And so if Bob Nutting with

Pittsburgh or, you know, whoever else that or whoever else that recently hired a GM and is not as successful wants to explain to me why things should be run this way, it's like, okay, you could then be the first team to ever succeed doing this, or you could just copy what's working. It's very simple. And I guess I'm in a good enough situation that if an owner told me to screw off after I said that, I'd be like, okay, fine. Because having a job where I'm just constantly stressed out that my boss is an idiot and I'm eventually going to get fired because he's hamstringing me, I wouldn't want to be in that situation anyway. So there you go, owner. If you'd like to interview me, that's what's going to happen.

Was that how you're, did you interview for the Astros GM job and not tell us, Kylie? There's a reason Jim Crane doesn't return my calls. Yeah, it's kind of amazing to me that anyone preserves an advantage in any of these areas because as you mentioned in the book, most scouts are on one or two-year contracts and most people who are the bosses of the scouts are typically on pretty short-term contracts too. And granted, it can take some time to tell if a scout is good or if an executive is good and obviously if a player is good, but an executive is good and obviously if a player

is good but you seem to have a sense of who does this well and who doesn't and if you're a team that doesn't and you're reading this book and thinking well we should be more like that team you could at least in theory go snap up that team's people you know people rotate from team to team and if you offer someone a raise or a better title, you can go get them. So how is there sort of an institutional advantage that persists for some teams year after year, despite that turnover across the industry? Some teams were very good. Tampa was actually one of them that before Andrew Friedman left, they would under title guys and give a lot of guys the same title when it was clear to people that were a little

more plugged in they knew like oh there's three guys with this title i guarantee you this one of those three is making twice as much as those other two and it's way more important and if you have to pick a new you know a future gm from this group it'll be that guy a lot of teams have done that and continue to do that as a sort of way of protecting their intellectual property and also their talent without having to you know pay and promote them as quickly as you want, either because they don't want to trying to save money or they just have too many people above them that you just don't have enough titles to give to people. Cause eventually people want titles and power, I guess, power more specifically more than if the money's the same everywhere else. And I also think the other

thing, which I bet I've wondered that question many times when you, when you do like one of these, like, you know, pull the industry who's doing the best job, or this team made the most money, quote, in terms of signing the correct players or drafting the right players or the right free agents or they tend to have the best scouting staff. It's like, why don't people just steal two or three people and exactly copy what that team is doing? Some teams are doing that. I won't call anybody out, but there are some teams that I don't think are as creative as others that just hired three people from successful teams, maybe three people from the same successful team, to just sort of copy what they're doing, which I think is pretty smart, if not a little shameless. I think most teams want to trailblaze and do it their way and be sort of written about or regarded as like the new Bill Belichick or the new Andrew Friedman or the new Brian Cashman. And so I think they have enough hubris to think that they're going to figure it

out, which, you know, could happen and there's probably greater rewards if they do, but it's probably unlikely if there's already a couple of different ways that things are being done correctly. You should probably pick one of those ways if you can squelch your ego enough to do it. Yeah. One thing you wrestle with in the book is in this era of advanced player development and imbalance between teams when it comes to player development, how do you evaluate prospects differently? If a team goes from a bad development team to a good development team, does that mean you increase that prospect's rating or your expectations for them? Or is that strange? Because maybe he goes to some other team and now you downgrade them.

So that's something that I don't think you have a definitive answer for, as you wrote. But another aspect of that that was really interesting to me was the idea that teams that have a reputation for being good at development then have sort of a secondary advantage where it becomes easier for them to get players because players want to go to those teams that have a track record of improving people. So you mentioned that like draft prospects might have different signability numbers for different teams based on how good they are at development. So how big an advantage is that aspect of having a good player development department? Yeah, it's certainly an advantage. It's probably unquantifiable. It depends on the individual. I know even just in the last few weeks in talking to agents about how their side of the business is handling changes to this year's draft and what they anticipate will be beyond that, that one agent said that the idea of the draft being shorter and a larger sample of an amateur class being able to pick their employer, he likes and thinks is actually a sneaky advantage. And now he was actually confused as to if his incentive is truly at this point to try to get his player drafted as high as possible or wait the way some undrafted NFL free agents do,

would rather be undrafted free agents than be a seventh round pick. So they have a chance to pick where they think they're going to be developed best, or they think they have a better pathway to playing time. If the minors shrink, then a pathway to playing time, rather than you are just part of this giant pool of players and the cream rises to the top, like an actual pathway where you can see what prospects are blocking your way becomes a little easier to see because it's not as long of a pathway anymore. And so I think that that is going to change the way agents and their clients make decisions coming out of college, you know,

as long as international players have the opportunity to pick their employer. But again, the draft as a thing is just what prevents this from occurring a lot of the time, especially with elite talent. And so maybe for minor league free agents, it'll be more of a consideration going forward. And certainly, I think we've seen big league free agents make decisions in part based on if not who develops better players, but who gives them a better chance of winning. And often those teams are just the same. So I had another question about the way that new technology and player development has impacted scouting, which is what are some of the areas that the availability of this data has

confirmed beliefs that scouts have held forever? And what are some ways in which it's overturned? Because it seems like there's more of the former in the book where you say that this thing that Scouts have always thought, yeah, it turned out that's true. But I guess there are also cases where that turned out to be less true. And there's also something you point out, which is that being able to put a number on something that was once intangible can really change how much weight you give to that aspect of performance. It's like catcher framing. Everyone knew that was a thing. It was a skill that catchers were taught to have. But once you could quantify it and you saw how much it was worth, suddenly everyone placed

a priority on it. And that can be true of other skills too. I think tunneling is a concept that scouts could see visually. You mentioned catcher framing. I think defensive instincts as tech improves and seeing quantifying reaction times becomes a thing that is more pervasive throughout baseball. I think that'll be a thing that is confirmed by the tech. And then on the flip side, the thing that I think scouts have been wrong about traditionally is like fastball playing and horizontal fastball

movement, which I think is just much, much easier to see from the scout seats where you're sort of elevated what technology is quantifying as vertical movement and what we now kind of know is better for fastball playability is like a flat approach angle. Those are two things that scouts have traditionally been biased against that the tech has said, no, like the scouts have been wrong. So it is sort of a mixed bag. But yeah, in general, I would say catcher framing is a huge one. Defensive instincts is what I think will be next that we quantify with some scale. There are probably others.

Kylie, can you think of any? Yeah, I would say in general, the short of a guy hitting 40 home runs, scouts generally were against the guy trying to lift the ball when he wasn't hitting tons of home runs because they just saw it as a bunch of outs and, you know, trying to be a showboat and whatever. And I think obviously there are limits to what a lot of them derisively call a launch angle, which, you know, it's a whole separate thing. But the concept that there are guys like, you know, Francisco Lindor, who don't have big raw power, but have enough hit ability to know when to elevate and where, and can hit a bunch of home runs that they wouldn't have big raw power but have enough hit ability to know when to elevate

and and where and can hit a bunch of home runs that they wouldn't have with a more traditional approach I think that sort of just lifting the ball for the sake of lifting the ball with certain other skills present is actually a good thing which I think a lot of traditional scouts still talk about it being you know stupid and you can always cherry pick an example of a guy that did that and ended up not helping him but. But it's not as bad as it was perceived by a lot of scouts. And a lot of them still haven't come around on that. Do you think it's more helpful or hurtful to have a type? Because in this book, you talk a lot about this organization tends to go after this type of player, that organization goes after that type of player. Obviously, it depends on what the type is.

Like if you have uncovered an actual advantage when it comes to a certain type of player that tends to outperform expectations, then theoretically that's very helpful. But also you could get maybe married to this type of player to the extent that you're biased or you're overlooking other players. And I wonder whether if you have an optimal approach, there should be no discernible pattern because you're just taking the best talent and it doesn't necessarily have to fit a certain mold. Pattern recognition for talent acquisition.

Yeah, no one's ever asked if it's good or bad before. I haven't really considered whether or not it was good. I do think the concerns you raise are relevant. I think some teams clearly have taken advantage of, almost always we realize that these patterns exist when they are working out for a team, when prospects are panning out. So Cleveland has what I would call more of a two-year, year-and-a-half window of importance in their amateur player evaluations. They are more likely to end up with players who were good as sophomores in college and had a dip as a junior or high

school players who were big names on the showcase and maybe had a bad senior spring. They're more likely to end up with those types of players and the youngest of the young high school players in a draft class. And they execute that plan well. It to me is an indication that they use a model driven approach and that the model is just geared to take a larger statistical sample or like suck out some recency bias, I guess. And like that has worked. That is what gave them Shane Bieber who had a good sophomore year and lousy junior year. It is what, you know, he has given them Ethan Hankins who was a big time prospect the summer before

and then had some injury stuff during his senior spring. So I think that part of the reason that we are picking up on those signals is because it is what is driving teams success, at least as far as prospect evaluation is concerned. But I do think that it makes it easier to kind of have some idea of what your opponents are going to do in a draft or in some sort of talent acquisition environment. And like for game theory reasons that that might be a disadvantage in the long haul. Do you think that that could lead to some biodiversity problems? We've talked about this before in particular systems where, you know, all of the Astros

pitchers kind of look this way, all of the Dodgers hitters look a particular way. Obviously, some of that is player development intersecting with scouting because you're picking players that can be molded into a particular type. But do you think that those teams run a risk of having guys who are easier to figure out or because they're the Dodgers and the Astros, will they just pivot when those biodiversity problems start to present themselves? I think the two points of view on that would be, A, you are the Dodgers. We've identified as a team that's very good at adjusting swings in a specific way. So you should take a bunch of guys who you think can be adjusted in that specific way. And if you end up with a bunch of guys with similar swings or similar potential then who cares like whatever loss of biodiversity you get because you're leaning into

your advantage go for it and i think with like the astros they do a lot of like uh high spin four seam fastballs up in the zone high spin curveballs down in the zone there is a negative of that if that's all you do because then your bullpen in the big leagues will be all one type of guy and it seems like there is some value in mixing up looks it's not like they don't have joe smith or you know tony sip or various other guys that are you know even i guess even left-handed would be a difference than a bunch of right-handed guys that do that but i i think there is obviously a positive in leveraging whatever advantage you have if it is somewhat obvious what that advantage is like if somebody steals the you

know the dodgers hitting guys and now they're doing the same thing then all of a sudden there's less value in that approach because now there's multiple different teams bidding up you know those prospects or players and then there's also the negative of well then you get all players of one type often as eric's talking about like cleveland will get a lot of high school players of one type and the college players of a different type and so your system system will be full of one type of player so at low way you have a lot of this at triple a you have a lot of that doubling triple a are not quite as strong and i mean all things being equal you'd like to have things in waves where there's prospects at every level at every different position and it's almost sort of random

your next like call up to the big leagues will be i think it's a little bit overrated because i think these players are sort of liquid enough as assets if if we want to talk about them that way, that you can swap this A ball hitter for a comparably useful double A pitcher that might be up more quickly. So I tend to agree with the approach if we have to choose one over the other, which obviously we don't, that if you have an advantage, leverage it as much as you can. And then if it creates a biodiversity problem, you can probably fix that by the time it becomes an issue, which would only be in the major leagues because, you know, having too many slap guys at AAA, like if they're good, nobody really cares if your AAA team is one-dimensional. But your big league team, you wouldn't care.

Yeah, you don't want everyone to be Max Muncy even if Max Muncy is very good. Can you be an introvert and be a successful scout? I kept wondering that as I was reading the book because there are so many reasons why I couldn't and or wouldn't be good at scouting. But I think that's one of them is that it just seems like there's so much talking required. And granted, I'm a podcast host, but when I'm not podcasting,

I'm not really talking that much. But to be a good scout, like you have to talk to everyone in your area to make sure you're not missing everyone. You have to talk to rival scouts. You have to talk to your fellow scouts. You have to talk to people back in the office. You two, I don't even know how you do it because, I mean, scouts have together ranked like 1,200 prospects, and those are on the board. And to rank that many prospects, you have to then have many more prospects that you are aware of enough to know that they're not prospects. And that's on top of all the big leaguers that you have to know. And so you have to be constantly checking in with people with organizations, people who've seen these players.

I don't know how you are ever not glued to the phone. And found the first times that i was uh writing and sort of working from home and doing all this stuff to me being on the phone doesn't count toward or texting people doesn't count toward that extrovertedness time and so i found that i naturally fell into my day being on the phone all day at a game all day at the game. I'm, you know, two or three people I'm talking to, but we all take breaks from each other. So it's not really, it doesn't run up that much for the three hours. There might be 30 minutes of talking to people in like a contained way. And then all of my friends that had nine to five jobs would finish and we'd meet at the bar or the bar, make it sound like I'm on friends. We'd meet someplace.

Um, and they would note how much energy I had. And I would basically be good from like the six to eight 30 would be the rest of my extroverted time. And then I would be like, all right, I'm done. I'm going to go home now and like start, you know, start the next day. And so it worked out that doing that sort of schedule worked for me. And then working in an office where it is like, you know, closer to a nine to five, not it's more than just that, but people can stop at your desk at any time. And I was always in sort of like open seating situations, I would be dead by the end of the day. So if I was going to do like a nine to five, and then go to a seven o'clock game, I would couldn't work out like it just didn't work. So for me, what you're describing actually

isn't an extroverted action. And going to a game is like, you know, one fifth or one sixth or seventh, an extroverted action so i can make that work and i said answering your other part of that i've done this and i think eric has done this so long that what seems daunting to have opinions on 1200 players when you had opinions on 1200 of them last year and you've been keeping track with 600 of them of them in some you know active way you're just trying to fill in some holes, it's way easier than starting from scratch. Because if neither one of us knew anything about any player, but we understood scouting

in some weird alternate universe, it would be way more difficult. Because a lot of times when you talk to a source on the phone, and you have to say, tell me about that guy, but you're doing a list of 50 and you have to ask about 70 guys, and every time it's just like, open-ended, tell me about that guy, it's really hard, because it just takes 7 hours hours and it also is taxing on the guy you're

talking to because he's like well i just feel like i'm just reading you everything you don't know anything whereas a lot of times i'll have a call it'll be like the guy we have number one is this we think he's a b and c and they'll be like yeah and then maybe d all right next guy and that both makes the call shorter to where you can actually get to the 70th guy but also they trust to tell you some stuff because they know you already know a bunch of stuff. And so they sort of feel like you're in the trenches with them. And so it's much easier to talk to them in that way. I'll add to what Kylie said and note that like, I would also classify myself as introverted as well. I do think that being a scout benefits from some kind of charisma,

your ability to what it's like for the family and the player to be with you in their living room during in-home visits, what it's like for you to sell a player in a room full of your peers and bosses, what it's like for you to be on the phone with a college coach or recruiter to try to get some information or talk about players. All of that stuff is meaningful. I think what it means to be extroverted because of all of our different means of communication now, like they are endless, that what it means to be extroverted is probably

different. I'm much more comfortable talking with someone, anyone like on the phone than I am like just tweeting literally anything. Like there's just something about my proclivity for communication that, you know, I'd rather do full frontal nudity on Instagram than like tweet anything basically. So like everyone is going to have a different form of intro and extroversion depending on the medium that we're talking about. And I'm not sure what's going to be meaningful for scouts or for us going forward. I think that more and more it is – it behooves us to kind of unveil ourselves online. And if that is a thing that is going to dictate how well Kylie and I are received going forward, then good luck to both of us, I suppose. I guess kind of related to that, I mean, you guys are pretty clear at the beginning of the chapter conveniently labeled how to scout that a lot of scouting is beyond just the technical expertise surrounding baseball is experiential knowledge that you can't really gain until you do it inform your perspective on scouting and player evaluation as a pursuit as doing things right.

And I'm curious, you know, what were some of the pitfalls that you each experienced, things that you goofed that came to inform your perspective on scouting down the road? Because, you know, as much as you're both brilliant, I'm sure you didn't do everything right right away. You know, as much as you're both brilliant, I'm sure you didn't do everything right right away. I'm sure Dylan will have edited out like a five-minute chunk of silence here as we contemplate our mistakes that are so few and far between such that they can't possibly be at the forefront of our minds. Were you talking about my mistakes when you mentioned a distinct Kylie flavor to parts of the book? No, I meant that in a positive way. Okay, just checking. Yeah.

Go ahead, Eric. I have some individuals who I certainly missed on at one point. Sometimes I was able to correct myself before they were big leaguers or no longer rookie eligible big leaguers. I would say I had great dislike for Beau Bichette as a high school underclassman. He was, Kylie, you and I saw him together at the area codes. He was soft bodied and heavy footed. I did not think he was an infielder period. His swing was a total mess and just completely unworkable in my opinion. There is, if you like Google, if you know, YouTube, Bo Bichette and my last name, there's probably some video that I took from that time period where you can at least like have a look at what it was I saw. But that, you know, that taught me by the time he was a prospect

like late, I had no choice but to walk that back because he's clearly incredible. And so like that taught me, hey, bodies have reverse projection at 15, 16, 17. These guys have the time, like the genetic timeline. The youth is on their side in such a way that they can transform themselves athletically still. And so that is a thing that I consider now when I'm watching prospects who have mature bodies, mature looking bodies at a young age. You can still like they have plenty of time to reconfigure that. So that is one thing that I that I learned the hard way. The other is definitely like the Aaron Sanchez type of pitcher.

The revelation that it was so simple and I felt so dumb when I realized, yeah, pitchers with because of the way the the baseball bat traverses the hitting zone, of course pitchers whose stuff is vertically oriented are going to have a better chance of missing bats than guys whose stuff moves more horizontally in such a way that it mirrors the baseball bat moving through the hitting zone. Like, no shit. So that was another big epiphany like eureka moment where i was just like wow no wonder i was wrong on so many of these guys with like vanilla three quarters deliveries whose fastballs no matter how hard they were really didn't do anything from a movement

perspective and then like to dovetail off of that the use of high speed video has been beneficial because it's shown us that hitters more often than not are missing location and not timing and so prioritizing pitchers in my evaluations whose stuff moves more than it does disrupt timing has been another like thing that i'm sure there are countless examples of guys who i was uh wrong about because of i had no i didn't know that yet yeah and i would say from uh from when i started scouting which i think is probably i would guess common for most people starting out scouting is when you can confidently watch a guy throw a curveball and be like, that's a 60. You get really excited then when you see a guy, especially like, you know, 18 or 19, where the stats don't matter quite as much, and you're like, well, that guy's got a 65 fastball

and a 60 curveball, and he threw one 55 changeup, and he's 6'4", so this guy will obviously have all of those pitches and be a starter in the big leagues and be, you know, number one or number two starter. And then it turns out, like, you know, number one or number two starter. And then it turns out, like, you say that to the guy that you were sitting next to at the game. And he's like, that guy couldn't throw a strike. And he was yelling at his teammates. And, like, his body's a mess. And what do you do?

But you didn't look at any of the second level things. You just gave him three grades. And you just assumed everything else would work. And so then you then slowly learn. This is, like, in my mid-20s. Where it's like, okay, this guy shows a ton of BP power. And he looks pretty good in infield. Watch how he swings. And, like, watch his, like, timing. slowly learn this is like in like my mid-20s where it's like okay this guy shows a ton of bp power and he looks pretty good in infield watch how he swings and like watch his like timing and like

watch how he when he boots a ground ball does he boot it in the same way or is it sort of like a one-time deal and like the pitcher like don't just watch is it a strike or not like kind of watch how he operates where the guy sets up and all the like finer things and then of course by the time i was i think much better at dialing in on those sorts of like how he does it as opposed to just the tools itself you're on a guy like Bo Bichette where at that event I saw the same stuff Eric saw and I was I then looked past like oh he might be able to play the infield he has 65 raw power as a 17 year old he gets into a couple balls and hits them a mile and he also has not to mention the bloodlines but also like all of the training and resources that anybody could have so he's probably going to mention the bloodlines but also like all of the training and resources

that anybody could have so he's probably going to tend to get better at these things more quickly than some other guys and so i guess he bichette is actually a good example of a guy where once i had gotten off of getting excited about it about a guy just because of his raw tools that was a guy where i probably should have gotten excited just because of his raw tools and then some sort of secondary things but kind of look past some parts of it but i think that's sort of like the you know the sort of art of it is sometimes you have to just look at raw tools and then some sort of secondary things, but kind of look past some parts of it. But I think that's sort of like the, you know, the sort of art of it is sometimes you have to just look at raw tools and ignore everything else. And if the makeup's good, then he'll make the improvements. And sometimes the tools are incredible, but all the other stuff tells you that you should just ignore the tools completely. And there's no hard and fast rule for how to do that,

which is why this is not easy. So one thing that's not in the book, because how could it have been is, hey, what happens if there just isn't a baseball season? So I wanted to ask you a question about that, because as we speak, the major league season is still very much up in the air, and the minor league season seems even more likely to be canceled. And there are so many ramifications that could come from that with player development and scouting and everything.

But I want to read this question from one of our listeners, Robert, who says, I have a question about how teams would handle a canceled minor league season if this happens, but there is still a big league season. How do you think teams would approach top prospects who weren't necessarily expected to spend time in the majors this year? Do they put them on the presumably expanded big league roster, but avoid playing them like old school bonus babies so that they have access to coaching? Or let them get big league experience ahead of schedule and hope it doesn't negatively impact their development? Or leave them in the minors to the extent that there are minors and just eat the missing year of baseball playing? This seems like a complicated intersection of developmental and service time concerns that I haven't seen addressed yet. So I was curious about your thoughts, thinking of guys like

Wander Franco, Julio Rodriguez, and Adley Rutschman who have a 2021 or 2022 ETA. And just piggybacking on Robert's question, if there is no minor league season, if there are no games, does that mean we'll go further toward the trend that some teams have embraced where they think games are a little less important and that you can replicate in-game conditions or even improve upon them in some cases with drills or focused practice? So will we just see teams train in a way that they have to because there are no games, but maybe they think is advantageous in certain ways anyway. I don't remember who I was talking to about this, but yesterday I was asking someone a version of this question. And they had some insight I didn't have about how things may play out. So don't take this as reporting, but more just like what some people are thinking may happen. But they were saying in the world that at some point this summer there are games with no fans there is no minor league season and there was some version of like the you know 40 50 60 player roster to you know account

for you know injuries or pandemic expansion or you know whatever else i was asking you know what would a rookie ball guy do and they were like well as i understand it these guys would essentially just stay home and i'm like oh they wouldn't i for some reason i imagine they would just go to the complex and play inter-squad games and train they're like well no because then they'd be like 200 guys in the same place that's not really gonna help this stuff and i was like yeah i guess you're right so i'm like i then asked like sort of about like you know the wander franco adly regimen like what about the top prospects who they want to the team wants to give resources to but won't maybe not i mean franco might be the biggest at the end of the year but

like a guy who will not be there the first half of the season or Joey Bart, but might be there in the second half of the season, that guy will obviously get onto that 60 man roster. What about some high school guy that was a first round pick last year, who obviously has 0% chance of being in the big leagues, but is one of their top 10 prospects. And he was like, yeah, I think that's what will happen. If it's a, let's say it's a 50 man roster, like sort of, you know, a full AAA roster to go with the big league roster. It'll be, you know, those extra 25 guys will be 15 guys that can be up-down guys, and then 10 prospects that probably aren't good enough to play in the big leagues, but maybe one of them randomly will be, and then the other nine will just be guys that they want to make

sure get resources because the other guys will just be training at home, which is obviously not an ideal outcome. But I guess in that scenario, which, you know, who knows if that scenario will be how things play out, I think that's how teams would handle it. That eventually there would be, you know, in the parlance of, you know, Fangraphs and I guess now ESPN, if there's a 45 FV prospect that's in rookie ball, he probably won't make the cut. But every guy that's a 50 and up probably would. And I think my very last question is scout yourselves. I guess that's not a question, that's a statement. But I'd like you to evaluate your own scouting abilities, each of you.

So do you have certain strengths or weaknesses? You talk in the book about how some scouts are maybe specialists when it comes to hitters or pitchers. Do you consider yourself one of those? And are there any biases that you're aware of that you have to fight when you're watching players? Oh, man. how much time you got buddy first everyone has to remember to put on pants you gotta put on pants step one yeah often arrives pantless i would say i don't necessarily now because i think i've identified like for instance catchers

was the hardest thing for me once i got past that sort of boba shett phase where looking past the tools to like how it's done and paying very close attention to like strike throwing intent and like how did he miss that pitch as a hitter and things like that catchers was the next thing that was tough and i had a lot of former catchers that i would like specifically when you know i'd be with the braves and there's some scout went into the room they'd be like oh, oh yeah, he played minor league ball as a catcher. I'd go find him and just go talk to him for 20 minutes and be like, please explain to me how to evaluate catchers. Why is this so difficult?

Because it's obviously like has almost nothing in common with identifying like who's a good shortstop or center fielder or even really a pitcher. And the thing that I was told was like, it's feet and hands are the second and third most important things, just broadly speaking, how those things work. And the most important thing is between the ears, which obviously, from the perspective of like a Fangraphs writer, if I can't go talk to them after the game, I have to go ask other people third hand how the most important quality of this player works. Which, you know, like judging the hit tool of any hitter is hard enough. Imagine if you couldn't watch them hit. That would be pretty, pretty challenging.

imagine if you couldn't watch them hit that would be pretty pretty challenging but i would say like for like today i think i think i've like kind of gotten over the hump at least with catching although it's probably the hardest thing still is guys where i have almost as much information as the teams do whether that is an amateur player where you know say he's going to go fifth overall and i know a bunch of guys for teams that are picking 30th overall who know everything about him and don't mind telling me because it won't interfere with their pursuit of the guy because they're not going to get him there are instances like that in the draft i won't say which guys um but there's certain guys where i feel like i might know more than some teams know usually teams that are not competitive for that player and there are instances in minor league ball where i mean obviously eric and i have

revealed through what went on the board we will get little swatches of TrackMan data. And for certain players, if it's, you know, for instance, a top prospect that's in AAA that is not going to get traded, a team won't mind telling us like, hey, this guy's in the 15th percentile of this and the 8th percentile of that and the 50th percentile of this that won't necessarily get published. But just to explain to us, these are the good and bad qualities that he has. I think for players where I have that level of information, where it's basically the amount of information a decision maker for a team may have i have a lot of confidence in that projection it's not always going to be right

obviously but then when there are certain guys where it's a pop-up guy in the draft i don't know anything about him personally i don't really know his path that well i haven't seen him three times over the last three years i talked to scouts who were either tight-lipped or they don't know much about him it's just like well i you know i'm just throwing a dart in the dark at this point. For me, I would say that the use of heuristics is mandatory when you're give you the baseline is the thing that I'm constantly seeking for ways to do better. What is it about Pete Alonso and Reese Hoskins that separated them from the right-right first base only population? And so like with alonso and with both of them really it's like okay it's plate it's plate coverage right so like my visual

thing that they have that most of the other guys in that bucket don't is like really exceptional plate coverage and so it is like little things like that at this point that i'm working on some of the individual tools that have very little to do with the profile but are traditionally evaluated as one of, you know, the pillar tools like arm strength. I've even considered either reducing or like doing away with altogether on the board as a way of saving space, because whether or not their arm is good is sort of implied in what position they, it says they're projected to play on the board. If you see someone at shortstop or in right field, you can assume that their arm is pretty

good. Is that like really truly meaningful? And am I focused enough on scouting that tool in person to accurately put an arm strength grade on the entire player population? These are the things that I'm tussling with and still feel that can be improved in my own work. Yeah. It's interesting in the book, you mentioned that like one of you is a little more liberal when it comes to certain grades. I forget whether it was raw power or game power or something. And

so I assume that you have slight little quirks and things that you're each aware of from having worked with each other for so long and can kind of mentally adjust the way that a team does when it knows a scout well and knows that it's a conservative grader or a generous grader. Does either of you feel like you can scout injury risk? Because that's something I always wonder about. Obviously, there are a lot of teams that are putting a lot of resources into trying to assess injury risk and high-tech stuff and mechanics and biomechanics, and you don't necessarily have access to all of that. And it's something that I always wonder when you see a team that is very healthy for a while

or has a ton of pitcher injuries in a short span of time. And I always think, is that scouting? Is that player development? Or is it just bad luck? And I have no way to answer that question from afar. The way that the Rangers list shook out for me, it was just up on the site last week. Yeah. Like I certainly don't feel comfortable scouting injuries. The way I weigh injuries in an individual's profile is have they been injured a lot already? I just, it just seems that the players who are going to be injured a lot going

forward are the ones who have been injured a bunch already. And so that gets factored in. But as far as the visual evaluations, yes, there are pitchers specifically whose deliveries and bodies scare me sometimes. But like Max Scherzer probably would have been one of those guys at one point. And Chris Sale too. I'm trying to separate good weird versus bad weird, both from a how the stuff plays perspective and can this guy throw strikes and stay healthy perspective. There are certainly still pitchers who I see and I'm just like, wow, this is a mess. This really scares me. But I tend to lean on injury history as a way of evaluating that stuff. And I think we're still a little ways away from being able to, you can see

when a player's stuff is starting to wane within the middle of a game. And teams, I think, are getting better at identifying biomechanical markers throughout a game that might indicate a pitcher is of growing risk of getting hurt within an individual start. But as far as visually watching someone and anticipating it, I still think we're generally pretty bad at it. All right. Well, we've been talking for quite a while, and yet we really have only scratched the surface of this book. It's a very extensive resource, and there's been a lot of internet brain drain when it comes to both analytical types and scouting types because teams are plucking people away from sites such as Fangraphs, for instance. And both of you have worked for teams in the past and may one day work for teams again.

worked for teams in the past and may one day work for teams again. But for now, we have the benefit of your knowledge and wisdom, and it is preserved for posterity in the book, Future Value, The Battle for Baseball's Soul and How Teams Will Find the Next Superstar. So everyone go check it out. You can also find Kylie on Twitter at KylieMCD and at ESPN and on SportsCenter because he's a big shot now. And you can find Eric at Fangraphs, churning out prospect lists, and on Twitter at Longenhagen where he may not tweet,

but he may post full frontal nudes. So go check that out if you're interested. Thanks, guys. Yeah, let me know if that's the thing you're into, folks. Definitely tweet it at me where I'll totally see it. Man, you are in the right place the internet is pornography big on the internet there's some buzz growing buzz it's an emerging market got helium all right thanks guys that will do it for today and for this week thanks to all for listening if you're interested in buying future, there's a link to its Amazon page on the show

page that includes a Fangraphs referral. So if you want to get the book and help support Fangraphs, click on that link before you buy, if you are purchasing from Amazon, of course. And just as many progressive teams today are sort of unifying the scouting and player development processes, you can unify them on your bookshelf. If you also pick up the new paperback version of my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players, it is cited in Future Value. And I think the two make a good pairing so that you will understand the scouting process and also what happens after a player is drafted or signed. understand the scouting process and also what happens after a player is drafted or signed.

We got a few responses to our discussion on our last episode about the Bill Henry impersonator, the man who for decades pretended to be a different Bill Henry, the Bill Henry who had been a big leaguer. There have been other cases. There was a New Jersey man who impersonated Yankees outfielder Dan Pasqua in the 80s. There was also a New Jersey man who impersonated Yankees outfielder Dan Pasqua in the 80s. There was also a New Jersey man who impersonated Jabba Chamberlain about 10 years ago. I don't know that anyone would necessarily impersonate Jabba Chamberlain now to impress people in the tri-state area. Pretty low reward scheme the Jabba Chamberlain impersonator had going. He got a free sandwich and a bottle of water from a bagel shop, got free drinks from time to time for pretending to be Jabba, water from a bagel shop, got free drinks from time to time for pretending to be Jabba, allegedly,

supposedly impressed women by claiming to be Jabba. Jeff Sullivan also tweeted an article recently about a former Marlins pitcher named Mike Anderson, or really a former Mets pitcher who tried to be a Marlins pitcher by claiming to be a different person. It's an entertaining article. I will link to it along with the others. There's also a 1983 Sports Illustrated story about a man named Arthur Lee Trotter, who habitually repeatedly impersonated athletes, the story said. Trotter has been arrested 23 times since 1954, mostly for fraud, forgery, and impersonation. His most recent scheme at the time was pretending to be Bill Russell, the former Boston Celtics center, but there was one problem. He looked nothing like Bill Russell. Reading from the story here, on July 16th, police arrested him for attempting

to pull a confidence scam after he allegedly told a woman he was Russell and sold her a $2,500 share in a restaurant chain that had never heard of him. The police were listening in an adjoining room of the woman's house when the following conversation took place. Woman, you don't look like Bill Russell. Trotter, I got into a car accident and had to have plastic surgery. Woman, you don't look like Bill Russell. Trotter, I got into a car accident and had to have plastic surgery. Woman, I was expecting someone much taller. Trotter, I had 10 inches of bone surgically removed from my shins. I wanted to fit easier into my new Mercedes, and I was tired of having my legs hang off motel beds. Trotter offered to show her the scars. The cops offered to show him the parish jail. Once he got to jail, though,

he switched his story. He was no longer Bill Russell. He was former Packers and Dolphins tight end Marv Fleming. I will link to that on the show page too. You can understand why a con person would try to impersonate an athlete. Most of them are trying to do it for monetary gain, and the Bill Henry we spoke about last time was not. He was just doing it for the stories, which made that a special case, but still, on the whole, pretty reprehensible. One more reading recommendation and one more link on the show page. Jason Stark wrote an article for The Athletic this week that was very much in the Effectively

Wild spirit. It was called The Home Run That Broke Baseball Reference, and it was about an event that happened on September 26, 2008, when Benji Molina hit a home run, or hit a ball over the fence at least, but didn't actually score the run because it was a disputed call whether it was actually over the fence or not. This was the beginning of the replay era. And Emmanuel Burris came out to pinch run for him because he thought Molina was staying at first because Molina didn't realize the ball was hit over the fence.

So Burris ran out, replaced Molina, but then the call was reviewed, and it was actually a home run, but the umpires ruled that Molina was already out of the game, and Burris was in as a pinch runner, and you can't put a player who's been replaced back into the game, and so you have this impossible scoring decision where one player hit the ball over the wall, but wasn't the one who scored the run, and this is different from the Gabe Kapler case where he hurt himself on a home run trot. Kapler wasn't the one who hit that run. And this is different from the Gabe Kapler case where he hurt himself on a home run trot. Kapler wasn't the one who hit that home run. He was already on base.

So anyway, Baseball Reference and other sources have had to figure out how to score this unique event. And it breaks all the software that people use to score games. So RetroSheet handled it one way and Baseball Reference has handled it another way. It's a fascinating story and Jason talked to all the principals involved. So go check that out. And of course you can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Ted Livermore, Samuel Thomas Reed, Demo, Adam Kurtzer, and Joe Steele. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively

wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email at podcast.fangrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have as happy a weekend as possible, and we will be back to talk to you

early next week. Magic and Kareem with the Hall of Fame votes Yeah, on paper, on the go With the Hall of Fame votes On paper, on the go Yeah, with the Hall of Fame votes