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Two news items today came out regarding scouting. So I am moving one of my posts on another thread here.
This is amateur scouting.
What does it take to scout the stars of tomorrow?
Follow AGM Randy Flores and the #STLCards scouting department as they evaluate players and pull back the curtain on the MLB draft preparation process in search of the next generation of Cardinals talent.https://t.co/sF3w54QQJa
— Cardinals Player Development (@CardsPlayerDev) August 24, 2026
Pro scouting not amateur.
This is interesting. Immediate social media reaction is cost savings ahead of the lockout.
I am not as sure, as pro scouting does most of its work in the minors, which will be playing in 2027. Maybe it is video scouting and analytics taking over. Maybe contrary to news reports, Marge Schott is still alive and relocated to Miami!
More is likely to come out soon.
The entire pro scouting dept was let go https://t.co/2bpDeUCLKw
— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) August 24, 2026
How big is each organization's pro scouting department?
Asked around and went through all the media guides to try and compile a snapshot.
It's not perfect, these numbers are not exact and some teams (MIL) use same people for amateur/pro side, but hopefully this is instructive. pic.twitter.com/3KF86S7yBe
— Jake Mintz (@Jake_Mintz) August 25, 2026
I dont know. Seems a little too much tech for my taste but i get it. When you are watching so many athletes, you have to narrow things down i guess. Id still rather trust an old guy who just has a knack for knowing things. We did have a highly rated draft though im not so sure of it. You can evaluate a draft based on the picks you made and how they turn out however you can also judge it based on picks you could or should have made but didnt. I would be very interested in how players that we had the chance to take but didnt turn out just as much as how our players we did take do. That parts pretty easy.
Always an in-exact science. The problem is that humans cannot be programmed to behave in the same way. So you look at prospects and try to put in all these variables that show the likelihood of future success, and sometimes things turn different.
Just finished Felipe Alou’s autobiography and he says it pretty simply – basically that the kid you see at 19 years old may look a lot different at 23, or 25 – sometimes for the better, sometimes not.
The Chicago Cubs have two dudes running their scouting department that never even played college baseball.
Didn't work their way through the scouting ranks.
Neither has ever signed a major league player.
They will now teach the Cubs scouts how to evaluate.
I guess anyone can…— Next Level Baseball (@nextlevelbb) August 27, 2026
I am one that doesn’t necessarily believe that every pitcher with control issues is a terrible thing. If it is manageable due to low batting average against. As long as the pitchers whip isn’t too high. A prospect that comes to mind is Clemente. He is very wild, but does not get hit. Any small improvement could make him an MLB arm.
27, I had been having similar thoughts, also instigated by thinking about Clemente, but hadn’t put the thoughts into order so well yet, so your comment is very helpful.
If you think about today’s trend in pen use, the guy who comes in mid-inning with runners on needs to throw strikes and hope for the best. But then there will be a string of one inning guys coming on each succeeding inning. That guy can afford to walk a guy and occasionally two guys, as long as he is not very hittable and keeps it in the park. If he reliably strikes out twice as many as he walks, he is golden. Assuming he’s not hittable. And it doesn’t matter if it takes him 20 pitches to get through his inning.
Any analysis of players missed would have to include all 30 teams. Every single org misses out on guys. IMO, the relevant question is, ‘Do the Cardinals miss more than other teams?’ Not ‘How many do they miss?’
You would first have to define ‘miss”.
There might be two types. Guys you don’t pick who turn out good, and guys you do pick who turn out bad. So you have to clarify which of the types to consider and then define miss.
In other words, something that sounds relatively simple on the surface isn’t at all.
To do the analysis right, they’d also need to trade off the misses against the successes. For example, if you had the most successes, also having the most misses wouldn’t matter. I get that it probably wouldn’t be that extreme, but to me, successes matter far more than misses.
I disagree wih the misses thing. I think you would find out more about your drafting skills by comparing the players you didnt take vs the subsequent player you did. I know sometimes there are specific and different reasons for taking this player over another, its not always best available but even then, that can tell you that maybe you should have. Some players are what they are and no amount of development is gonna change anything but you can learn to draft better.
There are lots of variables here that make this extra difficult. Sometimes one team’s development staff is really good at unlocking a certain type of player vs another team. You also may draft a guy that could have been great but he gets a longer-term fluke injury (e.g. getting hit by a pitch that breaks his hammate bone or running into Jordan Walker going after a fly ball). Plus, sometimes a guy isn’t taken due to character issues. Maybe he individually becomes very good, but it can be at the expense of others around him. And finally, sometimes a guy is taken because he fits the budget better to allow for a bigger pick elsewhere in the draft. Just lots of variables to consider.
I do think there can be clear-cut obvious misses when you look back at a draft 7-10 years later, but there will also be some gray areas where it isn’t so easy as just comparing one player drafted in the same round to another.
For example, in 2019, the Cardinals took Zack Thompson. That looks like a pretty clear miss vs Seattle taking George Kirby with the next pick. In fairness though, the next 10 picks after Kirby haven’t done much more than Thompson did for us. The good teams often miss too. The Dodgers took Kody Hoese, the Rays took Greg Jones, and the Brewers took Ethan Small – all first rounders.
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