quote:Professional scouts are wrong, what, 95% of the time in picking Major Leaguers? People that think you can pick how a kid will turn out are very conceited.
I pulled this from another thread because it gives me a jumping off point to meander around and finally express an unpopular opinion.
Professional scouts do a lot better than 5% correct, where I define correct as the drafted player eventually played in MLB. Each year roughly 1500 players are drafted, and over the course of the next 6-8 years, about 100-135 of those players end up in the show. I'm only counting those who signed out of that draft, and not a subsequent draft after attending college. That’s 7 to 9%, but a more realistic measure of correctness is how the scouts did with the players picked in the very early rounds. I took years 1997-2000, and tabulated the first two rounds, including the supplemental picks. There were 186 players picked in the first round of those 4 drafts, and 105 of those have played in MLB. For the second round, the corresponding numbers are 55/125. So in the first two rounds, the success rate was slightly better than 50%.
The pro scouts aren’t the only guys who can predict which players will succeed. These days, most draftees are actually drafted out of college, and Perfect Game had already rated them 3 or 4 years earlier, while they were still in high school. Turns out that PG has a very good idea of who will succeed when the players are in their junior or senior year of high school.
Now, what about younger players? Clearly it is harder to pick out the ones who will make it to MLB as we move away from HS upperclassmen towards underclassmen, and then to (shudder) pre-teen players. But I think that there are two or three dozen people in the USA who can pick out the players who have the talent and mental makeup to go far in baseball, even at 11 or 12 years old. Sure, some of those talented players will end up playing different sports, or getting injured, or just get sidetracked away from sports in general, so the accuracy won't be as good as the pro scouts. The guys I have in mind are the coaches or managers of elite travel baseball programs, that have years of experience in watching young players, with new kids coming in every year, and then following them over time. The more perceptive of these managers and coaches learn over time to recognize the traits shared by the eventually successful pre-teens.
Yet most posters on this site (certainly including me) have no chance of accurately identifying the pre-teen kids who will succeed in baseball. There are, IMO, 2 reasons for that. First, we don't spend a decade or more learning and revising our criteria as wave after wave of kids come through a program. In fact, darn few of us have a program, which is very different than running a team. Secondly, most of us have had minimal opportunity to even see kids who do have the requisite qualities.
For example, several posters here have commented that it is impossible to tell who is going to be good later on, and reference their son's Little League as evidence. (Here LL means LL and Ripken and Pony, etc.) However, a quick calculation shows that most of us have seen very few pre-teens who are budding college players. There are about 500,000 boys playing LL per birth year. Eventually, of that birth year, about 1500 or so will get drafted, and perhaps 5000 will enroll in the top 350 colleges and JCs. So one in a hundred will make it to one of the better colleges. A typical LL has 50 boys of the same birth year. So when we parents compare players in our LL, trying to figure out which ones will make it in college, the odds are that (except, of course, for our own sons ) none of the players will turn out to be college material!
There are some folks posting here (justbaseball comes to mind) that have spent years running rec programs. Maybe they've seen a couple of dozen pre-teen players who ended up playing college ball. It's still a small sample size from which to learn to predict who will be successful later on.
The guys running long lasting elite travel programs, where a third or more of the 12 year olds end up playing college ball, have seen enough talented players to form a basis for judging. I think that some of them learn to predict well. Actually, I know two or three who can.