baseball, scouts break down into groups: Amateur, professional and international scouts work for the major league clubs. There are also independent league scouts, and freelancers.
Pro scouts begin their season of work with Spring Training. Amateur scouts in the United States work revolves around the baseball seasons for high school and college, culminating with the June MLB draft. International scouts, independents, and freelancers work pretty much year-round.
Major League scouts concentrate on a certain group of clubs. Minor league pro scouts will focus on a particular league.
International scouts work in set countries or regions, often places where they are native and know both the language and all the little backwaters and eddies where potential prospects may be developing.
Most clubs set up dedicated scouting in player-rich countries like Venezuela, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. Some even travel to less baseball-fanatical parts of the world, like Australia, where the game is just developing.
Often it is a fairly predatory business in these places. Your rep is based on the players that you’ve found and signed. You’ll note, with international players, that one of the big things in their introduction, besides where they come from, is who signed them up. It is a big deal to land a hurler like Seattle's Felix Hernandez.
They sign prospects as largely as free agents, or identify players from international professional baseball clubs in places like Japan or Taiwan whose contracts can be purchased or traded.
Independent league scouts and scouts from other countries like Japan tend to scout the outer edges of the farm system and the MLB clubs, looking for older players, or players that are stuck in their depth charts, to see if any can be lured into playing ball outside of the MLB system.
THE MISSION
Our mission is to scour the ranks of baseball looking for those players talented enough to take our teams to the World Series. We whittle thousands of young men down to hundreds. Hundreds are pared down to dozens that enter the farm system. From those emerge the rare few that make the major leagues.
The best moments are when you find those “wow” players that show a lot of promise. The worst moments are when you have to put a big bucket of cold water on the dreams of some kid whose enthusiasm for the game is bigger than their ability to play.
When we find players of interest, we start their evaluation using a basic scoring system.
THE TOOLS
Scouts break down players’ abilities on to rating sheets or cards that are reviewed by the major league club. Players’ skills are divided into five basic categories: running, arm strength, fielding, hitting ability and power.
We use a numeric scale to grade each player. The scale rates the players in relation to major league abilities. It runs from 20 to 80, with 50 being termed as a “major league” average. The higher the number grade, the better the “tool,” or skill, as we search for players with above average or “plus” tools.
The more “plus” tools a player has, the better the chances the player will...
<<BACK | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | NEXT>>
