Catcherdad,
No need to apologize for anything. Its just that I’ve read what seems like a million posts over the years trying to convey what scouts have told them or they heard a scout has said, and it always seems to come down to how useless HS stats are. Accurate? Not likely. Valid? Not likely either. But, the things that attract a scouts attention a pretty much objective numbers in that they don’t involve much judgment.
What will attract attention is a lot of HRs for a position player or a lot of Ks for a pitcher. An extremely high BA or OBP will also attract attention, but not like a lot of HRs. Other than outright putting in false numbers on purpose, which doesn’t happen all that often with those particular stats, those particular numbers can usually be counted on as indicators of above average players. Not only can they be generally counted on, using MaxPreps its downright simple to break out those numbers for leagues and school size to help isolate those players so they can be compared and looked at more readily.
In the case of position players, all anyone has to do is look at the team’s schedule to get an opportunity to get to see them play. In the case of pitchers, more often than not all that will happen is a call will be made to the HC to get an idea when that pitcher will be throwing again. Until the player is seen, there’s no way many decisions can be made, and there’s no reason to see them until there’s some reason.
What I’m trying to get across is, I have no doubt scouts don’t have a lot of use for HS stats in general, but every scout I’ve ever talked to, and I talk to a lot of them every season, looks at them. Look at it this way. In our section alone(Ca-SJS), I believe there are 169 baseball schools. Within a 2 hour drive of Sacramento, there are prolly another 200 schools. That’s a lot of ground to cover in a 4 month HS season without having some way to identify the best players. There are at least 30 MLB scouts covering that area, plus prolly ten times that number of “birddogs”, so its important they do the best job of identification as possible, and even then there’s still a lot of good players falling through the cracks.
IOW, it’s a very complex process that takes a lot research, a lot of personal knowledge, and a heck of a lot of time. Anything that will help reduce the time while helping to identify the most players will be used. 