Smart Baseball

by Keith Law

  Each scout will submit a written report on any player he (or she—as of this writing the Mariners have the first female area scout in MLB) deems worthy of consideration in the draft, or any player who might be drafted high by another team even if that particular scout thinks the player isn’t very good. These reports contain both numerical grades assigned to specific tools or skills the players have, as well as text descriptions of the player’s body, mechanics, instincts, and so on. Many players in any draft class will have been seen by only one scout from each team, the local area scout, and so once the draft progresses past the fifth round or so, scouting directors rely more and more on the “pref lists” (short for preference list) each scout has submitted on players from his area.

  A pro scouting staff is usually more straightforward in structure—a handful of pro scouts assigned to cover a specific region, league, or set of organizations, reporting up to a director. But most teams also have other employees, with titles like Special Assistant to the GM, Special Assignment Scout, or Vice President of Doing Something or Other, who will also go out and see targeted players, from players on the team’s short list for their first draft pick to potential trade targets close to the July trade deadline, and whose opinions may not appear on formal scouting reports but will carry weight in the front office’s discussions on which players to acquire. These voices can be extremely valuable, but can also lead to process breakdowns, such as the team that drafted a player in the supplemental round (extra picks between rounds one and two) about five years ago because scouts who saw the player for one day liked him, while the area scout, who’d seen him a half dozen games or more, rated the player as a fourth- or fifth-round talent. The player in question hasn’t gotten out of double-A and is unlikely to ever reach the majors. Scouts make mistakes on individual evaluations all the time, but the problem with that specific selection was the breakdown of the process, giving undue weight to brief looks by more senior scouts and insufficient consideration to the scout who’d seen the player most frequently.

  One of the main challenges scouts face is projecting physical development, yet you will hear this discussed very frequently, even in my own writing about prospects, as if it’s more scientific or predictable than it actually is. We talk frequently about “projection” and “mature” bodies, a good “frame” or a player “filling out,” because these things do happen—that fifteen-year-old player in the Dominican Republic is going to look very different when he’s twenty-two—but this might be the least rational part of the scouting process, relying instead on age-old heuristics.

  A player who is projectable looks like he will fill out in a good way as he reaches his early twenties, adding muscle to his entire body—not just building up his upper-body strength like a bodybuilder might—to make harder and higher-quality contact (for a hitter) or to throw harder or maintain his stamina deeper into games (for a pitcher). Sometimes they work out as predicted; I saw Tyler Skaggs throw 86–88 mph in high school, but by age twenty-three he was in the majors averaging 92 mph before he hurt his elbow. Sometimes they don’t: The Red Sox took Trey Ball, an Indiana high school left-hander, with the seventh overall pick in the 2013 draft, betting on his athleticism and his extremely projectable body, but despite his great work ethic and some physical maturation, he hasn’t seen any real uptick in his velocity or his arm speed three years out.

  Athleticism is another tool scouts attempt to value and address, and again, although I use the term and discuss it often, I find its definition to be maddeningly nebulous and often misapplied. What we really seek when we seek athleticism is a sort of quicker quick-twitch quality; everyone has quick-twitch muscle fibers that the body uses for rapid movements, contracting quickly but also fatiguing faster than slow-twitch muscle fibers do because they consume more energy. Jumping, sprinting, accelerating an arm to throw—these all make heavy use of quick-twitch muscle fibers. What we’re really looking for when we say we want athleticism is evidence that the player is even better at that stuff than the typical player—his first step is quicker, his movements seem more graceful, perhaps he has better body control. You can see why even I, doing this stuff for more than a decade now, still find myself questioning what the term means or whether we’re using it fairly.

  One other aspect of a player’s body that scouts try to evaluate or project is whether the player is likely to get heavy or slow down to the point where he might lose value somewhere, especially on defense. Sometimes this is as straightforward as looking at a player’s height and current weight and finding out how many players with that frame and body type have managed to stay at a position (such as shortstop) in the majors. Some scouts want to see what a player’s parents look like, given the role genetics plays in determining one’s weight and shape, although that could easily be misleading—it’s not as if we’re trying to guess a player’s serum cholesterol here, and most parents don’t work out as much as a typical young ballplayer will. Underneath the guesswork, however, is a serious question: If this player’s weight increases faster than he can control it through conditioning, or he doesn’t work hard enough to maintain his conditioning, will he have to move to a position where his bat is less valuable—or someplace where he has no more value at all?

  A player’s mechanics, whether it’s how he swings the bat or how he delivers a pitch, are absolutely critical to his ability to perform, to make adjustments, and in many cases to stay healthy. Unlike a player’s innate physical abilities or his height, a player’s mechanics can change—but they often don’t. So evaluating a player’s mechanics is a significant part of scouting, although different scouts will tell you they place different weights on mechanics compared to results.

  For a hitter, the mechanics of his swing determine how soon he can get the head of the bat into the zone, how long the bat stays in the zone, and the launch angle of the ball off the bat. There’s more than one way to skin this proverbial cat; Dustin Pedroia and Frank Thomas are two very successful hitters whose swings defy conventional wisdom on mechanics, with Pedroia swinging very uphill and Thomas hitting off his front foot. But scouting is an attempt to both identify general markers of future success and simultaneously identify players who might be outliers, so at least understanding the mechanics of a player’s swing is critical even if it’s only to say “. . . but I like his bat anyway.” And there are certain things that make it harder, while not necessarily impossible, for a hitter to make frequent contact against major-league pitching, from a back-side collapse (where the hitter’s back leg bends so much that the bat path is forced upward) to a “hitch” in the swing (a sudden move downward from where the hitter sets his hands) to a “linear” swing (where the hitter doesn’t rotate his hips to generate torque and thus can’t use his lower half to improve exit velocity off the bat).

  Physicist Alan Nathan wrote for the Hardball Times site in April 2016 that “flyball distance reaches a maximum at launch angles in the vicinity of 25–30 degrees,” with the optimal angle decreasing slightly as exit velocity off the bat increases. In other words, the traditional scouting idea that a hitter needs loft in his swing to hit home runs is somewhat true, but too much loft—more than about 30 degrees above the horizontal—starts to decrease the hitter’s chances of driving the ball out of the ballpark. There’s a tangible difference between hitting in the air and hitting for power. New data from MLB’s Statcast product have allowed analysts to investigate such questions and give us conclusions like Nathan has.

  Pitching mechanics are an even bigger topic of discussion at the moment because of the unresolved questions around what is causing the higher incidence of Tommy John surgeries—an operation to replace a torn ligament in a pitcher’s throwing elbow—among young pitchers in recent years. (This rise in elbow tears has come with a drastic reduction in catastrophic shoulder injuries, which are much more difficult to fix via surgery.) Are these injuries caused by overwork, by certain pitches, by rising velocities, by bad mechanics, or by some combination of these and other
factors?

  When scouts evaluate pitcher mechanics, they are again using some heuristics developed over decades of scouting, although some of those heuristics are aimed at evaluating a pitcher’s ability to develop command or control rather than whether the pitcher will stay healthy. Scouts will look at whether a pitcher is on line toward the plate when his front foot lands, whether his arm has to come back across his body during the act of throwing (this is bad), when he pronates (turns over) his forearm and hand in his delivery, how high his pitching elbow gets relative to his shoulder (too high is also bad), how well he rotates his hips to generate torque, and more.

  As with evaluating hitter mechanics, evaluating pitcher mechanics is full of rules that are rife with exceptions. Left-hander Chris Sale does many things “wrong” in his delivery, including that high elbow in back, but as of this writing has more than 1,000 big-league innings without a major injury. Tim Lincecum was supposed by many scouts to be a huge breakdown risk due to his size and his delivery, but he reached 1,028 innings through his first five big-league seasons with a sub-3 ERA before he started to lose effectiveness. Spotting the exceptions early—both players were high first-rounders, Sale taken by the Chicago White Sox, Lincecum by the San Francisco Giants—is part of scouting, but scouts can also rattle off dozens of players with similar mechanics who got hurt, couldn’t throw strikes, or couldn’t keep the ball in the park. Survivor bias ensures we remember the ones who made it more than we remember the dozens who didn’t. While I was writing this book, Mariners left-hander Danny Hultzen, the number-two overall pick in the 2011 draft, out of the University of Virginia, was reportedly headed for retirement after years of shoulder problems; he was a very effective starter in college but came back across his body when throwing, which may have contributed to the torn labrum that required surgery in 2013.

  (We do know a few things about pitcher injuries that aren’t related to mechanics, however. The American Sports Medicine Institute has published several studies showing that young pitchers, including those as young as eight, are at exponentially higher risk of injury if they throw too many innings over the course of a calendar year, or if they continue to pitch while fatigued. They’ve also recommended that pitchers take at least three months off per calendar year and have worked with Major League Baseball on an initiative called PitchSmart, which recommends pitch counts and innings limits by age for youth pitchers. If you’re interested in more on this subject, I recommend Jeff Passan’s 2016 book, The Arm, which examines this specific subject in great detail.)

  The term “five-tool talent” is thrown around more frequently than such a creature is actually found in the wild, in part because many people use the term without understanding what the five tools are. It’s also worth bearing in mind that there are five-tool players who aren’t that good at baseball, because these tools have as much to do with raw physical ability as they do with game skills. The five tools themselves are hit, power, run, glove (field), and arm, and you can see how it would be easy for a player to have four of those, be okay on the fifth, and get the “five-tool” term slapped on him. Mike Trout, the greatest player of his generation, is a four-tool talent; he has an average arm at best, perhaps even a little less than that (what a scout would call “fringe-average” or just “fringy”).

  Four of these tools are fairly straightforward. Power usually refers to raw power—how far the man can hit the baseball, independent of how often the man can hit the baseball. Scouts watch batting practice for several reasons, including swing evaluations, but seeing raw power there is another part of it. You’ll hear a distinction between raw power and game power because plenty of guys are so-called five o’clock hitters who can put on a show in BP but not in games. Ryan Sweeney, former first-round pick of the White Sox out of a high school in Iowa, had huge raw power that he’d display pregame, but hit just 23 homers in over 2,300 plate appearances in his major-league career, in large part because his BP swing and his game swing were so different.

  Running speed is measured in a few ways; I’ve never found player times from the 60-yard dash that meaningful because there is basically no instance on a baseball field where any player runs 60 yards in a straight line. The most consistent baseline measurement is the time from when a hitter makes contact on a groundball to when he steps on first base, which can still be a little skewed by how soon he gets out of the box but is about as objective a baseball-related measurement of speed as you’ll find.

  Arm is throwing strength and doesn’t usually consider accuracy. Similarly, glove/field doesn’t always consider range so much as the fielder’s hands and consistency, although range is the most important part of fielding ability.

  The hit tool, however, is the hardest one to evaluate, especially in amateur players. A scout who evaluates international amateurs might be asked to see a fifteen-year-old player in Venezuela and put a grade on his future hit tool for when he’s twenty-three or so and ready for the majors. It’s the most important tool of the five—if you can’t hit you’re probably not going to have much of a career in the majors—but by far the one with the highest variance in opinions and the greatest potential to go awry. A hitter may hit, in the sense of making contact, but not make hard enough contact to succeed as pitchers throw harder and harder as the hitter advances through the minors. He may hit until he reaches a point where pitchers start locating their off-speed stuff, and then suddenly he can’t hit anymore. And hitters change—he can alter his swing, learn to recognize breaking pitches, tighten his command of the strike zone—in ways that render scouting reports, especially on their hit tools, to the dustbin.

  Scouts measure these tools on the traditional if somewhat quaint 20-to-80 scale (or 2 to 8), with 50 representing major-league average, 80 representing the best possible, and 20 the worst. This scale has many origin stories, but as far as I can tell they’re all apocryphal and ours is not to reason why.

  The incomplete nature of the five tools in describing a position player have led to variations in what scouts are asked to observe and evaluate. When I was with Toronto, we asked scouts to also evaluate a hitter’s plate discipline, a term that encompasses ball/strike recognition as well as ability to distinguish different pitch types, along with the other five tools. We could split the “field” tool into range and hands. I’ve heard scouts refer to a player as a 5 runner out of the box but a 6 runner under way, which sounds like useful information that wouldn’t be captured in the traditional five-tool rubric. So while we all like a player who grades out as above average or better in the five tools, it’s not a terribly complete picture of the player, nor is it any guarantee of future success.

  Scouting a pitcher is a bit easier because of the radar gun: if he throws hard, it’s a good fastball, and the radar gun often helps you identify pitches when seeing the pitcher’s grip or release is difficult. Scouts will typically put 20–80 scale grades on each of a pitcher’s pitches, perhaps adding a field for a fastball’s movement as a distinct grade from its velocity. (A fastball that’s 100 mph gets an 80 grade for speed but probably doesn’t have much movement or “life.”)

  One of the most common questions I get from readers is about the pitching terms command and control—what they mean or what the difference is between the two. Defining control is simple: it’s the ability to throw strikes, period. It doesn’t speak to the quality of those strikes, but simply to throw the ball over the plate within the strike zone—middle, edge, whatever. If you look at a pitcher’s walk rate (walks allowed as a percentage of total batters faced, preferably with intentional walks ignored in both totals), you’ll get some idea of his control. We also now have easy access to the percentage of pitches thrown for strikes by major-league pitchers and for most games in the high minor leagues as well.

  Command, however, is a more nebulous thing, as important as it is hard to pin down. As Justice Potter Stewart famously said in the Supreme Court case Jacobellis v. Ohio, “I know it when I see it,” although I don’t think he was talking about
baseball there. Command, roughly speaking, is the ability to put a pitch where you want it, to make it do what you want it to do. I think of it as ownership of the pitch: if it doesn’t land where you needed it to land or break the way you needed it to break, you didn’t command it. Control is more tangible and rarely goes away without warning, but command wavers.

  I was sitting with scouts at Matt Harvey’s major-league debut in Arizona on July 26, 2012, chatting with Mike Berger, who is now an executive with the Miami Marlins. As we were talking about something unimportant, he said without breaking stride, “He just lost it.” He’d spotted a slight change in Harvey’s delivery during his warm-ups where the pitcher lost his release point, and with it his command. Harvey had struck out ten men through five innings to that point; after that, Harvey walked two of the next three batters and was removed from the game. I was sitting right next to Berger and I didn’t spot it, but Mike’s got a few years and a whole lot of games on me and he saw it right away. A very tiny change in mechanics meant the end of Harvey’s effectiveness for that game.

  My personal philosophy of evaluation is that command comes from the delivery: if you can repeat your mechanics, from your stride to your hip turn to (especially) your arm action, then you can have command. I believe it’s more physical than mental, although the mental side of the game matters tremendously as well. But you can be the smartest guy in the world, or the calmest, and still not have command because you can’t get your hand to the same release point at the same time on every pitch. You can also command your fastball and not your off-speed stuff, and I’ve even seen pitchers who could command a curveball but couldn’t command the fastball, perhaps because they weren’t overthrowing the former but tried to go max effort on the latter. And when I’m evaluating very young players, I look at their present deliveries but also try to gauge their athleticism and body control, because as they mature physically and work with professional coaches, they’ll have ample opportunity to learn a delivery they can repeat, and more athletic players, in my experience (and thus merely in my opinion), have a better chance to make that happen.