Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 691: Chris Long on Analytics’ Role in the Draft Room

Episode Date: June 9, 2015

Ben and Sam talk to former Padres Senior Quantitative Analyst Chris Long about how teams can use stats to improve their performance in the amateur draft.

Good morning and welcome to episode 691 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello. Hello. Draft last night And we will bring you some Hard hitting analysis of who won Every round and what the best picks Were in roughly Five years from now we will get around to that When we actually know the answers to those questions Right now we

Wanted to take a Slightly more effectively wild approach To talking about the draft And you've probably heard a lot In recent days about draft boards and area scouts and cross checkers and just how much scouting labor and manpower goes into the draft. And probably you haven't heard that much about the analytics side of the draft because that's maybe a more recent addition to how teams draft players. It's not talked about so much, but we wanted to talk about that with someone who did that,

who worked on that for many years. He is Chris Long. He was the Padres' senior quantitative analyst from 2004 to 2013, long time, and consulted for the Padres and many, many teams in many sports, including the Sonoma Stompers. So he's a friend of the show and the team. Hi, Chris. Hi, how's it going? Good. So I want to read a quote, which was in the Joe Sheehan newsletter yesterday. And Joe was writing about how he's kind of just butted out of amateur draft analysis, as Sam

and I have. We were never really in it, because even though we're interested and we realize it's very important, it's just not our area of expertise. And Joe wrote, the draft is for scouts and the people who love them, an area where analysts, people like me who work at a remove, have little to contribute. There was a time when I thought performance analysis stats could drive scouting, but I no longer think they can. You evaluate amateur baseball players by their skills, by their bodies, by their physical projection, by their health, and yes, by soft factors like ability to take direction, to learn, to work through obstacles. So in your experience, how true is that statement?

I mean, I would disagree with it. I would, you know, scouting is a very, very important part of the process, but you can't, you know, you can't ignore any information you have about the players. I mean, that's just, you're just, you know, putting yourself at a big disadvantage. You're just putting yourself at a big disadvantage. I found it to be extremely helpful. If you don't use the analysis as part of the actual picking of the players, it still helps you tremendously in just narrowing down who the scouts need to go take a look at. Because you have a finite number of scouts, and they can only see so many games.

So you have limited resources, and at the very least, you can optimize that. So if I'm looking for a Major League Baseball player at the AAA level, I'll probably just look for the guy who has the good numbers, the good traditional numbers. If he's getting outs in the major, in the minors, in the high minors uh if he's getting outs in the major in the minors in the high minors he'll probably get out in the outs in the majors and vice versa so when you're looking at college stats is it kind of the same thing where you're like looking at the stats that are and sort of trying to project what they're going to be or is it more like a bank shot sort of a thing where you're using the stats to build a profile of a player. You're looking for kind of particular characteristics within the stats where maybe the guy doesn't have a good ERA or even a good strike out to walk ratio or whatever, but maybe

you're zeroing in on what that kind of player is. It's really, it's a matter of trade-offs. Like if you have a pitcher that throws really hard, I mean, you're willing to deal with like a higher walk rate, you know, and other issues because you have something that's foundationally good. And so he projects to be a stronger prospect because he has something that most pitchers don't have. And then, you know, hopefully you can work with it or, you know, work with him enough that you can lower that walk rate a bit. Maybe he can just stop throwing 99 miles an hour and just, you know, take it down a notch and still have an above average fastball. And then suddenly, you know, he's hitting his spots in the zone. So it's really a question of tradeoffs. I mean, a higher strikeout rate for hitters, that's okay if you have more power. You can deal with a lighter hitter so long as they're

a plus defender or they are a good defender at a premium position. So it's really a question of trade-offs. Younger players, you can accept worse performance because they have more growth. So it is complicated. You're trading off this and that, and that's what the scouts are doing. And whether or not they realize it, they're putting all this together when they give an overall evaluation, as opposed to breaking down the tools individually. So what percentage of your work hours, as the head of the Padres stat department, which maybe when you started was just you, I don't know. But how much time did you spend on the amateur draft and at what point of the year did you start ramping up for that?

I would say it was probably overall a good third. And it really started ramping up roughly a month before games would start. You wanted to make preparations because there's always returning players. Like who are the best returning players, the best freshmen and sophomores or JC players that are going to be back this year? Just so the scouts can have a head start. Gather biographical information, talk to coaches, talk to the other people they know who might have information about the players.

I mean, you don't want to go see a guy who has some background issues, and you're not going to draft him anyway. So there's no point in going to even see him play if you can eliminate him immediately. And did you start working on the draft when you started working for the Padres? Was it immediate? Was it unusual for a stat person to be working on the draft at that time?

Was that a tough sell? Did you kind of have to, you know, persuade people that you should be involved in that process? Or were you brought on to do that from the start? I mean, I started working on it immediately. For me, it was, it has always been the most exciting part of baseball from an internal perspective. Because if you do well in the draft, you know, the organization is going to do well. And if you well in the draft, the organization is going to do well. And if you fail in the draft, the organization is pretty much toasted. And the complexity is just astonishing because you're dealing with so many players,

so many variables, so many schools, so many different levels of play, so many different parks. It is just the closest thing you're going to get to working on a very big complex problem on that pre-major league level, anything below major league level. It's really as complex as it gets. So yeah, the very first draft was we had data and I put together some crude stuff. And for me, the top two players were Chase Headley and Alex Gordon, and Jacoby Ellsbury was the other guy that I really liked, along with Brett Gardner. So they've turned out to be pretty good. So, yeah, that was all in all. I mean, even the very first draft, it helped.

It was, you know, it started out as more of a guideline. What players are interesting. If they're doing something interesting, you know, what's the explanation? And then it evolved into more predictive, it evolved into more predictive, especially once Sandy Alderson and Paul DePodesta became part of the organization. Then it became much bigger. And how big a part of the decision to draft Headley was the analytics? Would he have been a padre regardless?

Did all the scouts love him too, and you were just confirming that they should love him? Or did you bump him up the draft board? He got bumped up the draft board just enough that we were able to get him. I mean, he was going to be gone like the next pick. So he got bumped up just enough. So generally speaking, though, in a broader sense, how much did you feel that you were listened to and how frustrating was it when you sometimes felt like you weren't listened to if that ever came up? And I guess what lessons did you learn about making yourself heard?

Yeah, it really comes down to your communication skills. And that took me a very long time to learn. You know, like when I came in, it was like, oh, everybody's gonna sit down at the table. Everybody's gonna talk and come up with ideas and discuss the ideas and then make a decision as to what's the best idea and go with that. That's just not the way it works at all.

It's, you know, very much people have to be comfortable with you. They have to be comfortable with how you're saying things to them. You know, it has to be something they can relate to given their experience. I mean, these are people that have been in baseball for decades, you know, some of them 30, 40 years, and they understand things in a particular way and they understand things very well in that way. And just trying to get them to suddenly start thinking about things differently is asking a lot of anybody. That's a lesson that took me, unfortunately, too long.

It shouldn't have taken me as long as it did to figure out. So it really is communication. And you'll get listened to if you can explain things in a way that people can relate to. Obviously, it's important that the GM listen to you if you're going to be heard. But did you find that you had to sort of work the whole room? Did you find that you had to kind of convince everybody at that table so that you would have maybe more credibility and it wouldn't seem like you were outside of the kind of mainstream at that table? I mean, there's certainly there are people in the organization that I could talk to. We could relate to each other much better. talk to. We could relate to each other much better. For example, Sandy Alderson and Paul DePodesta, very much similar kind of thinkers. Grady Fuson was a relatively easy person to relate to.

No, that's not what I saw in the totally accurate Moneyball movie. Yeah, that's not right. Yeah, the Moneyball movie didn't get Grady Fusong. I really did him a real injustice. I mean, he's not like me, but he understands things in his own way. Similar ideas, but just expressed differently. So he was an easier guy to talk to. There's a lot of history behind the baseball draft.

A lot of, I guess you can call them biases, but biases can be positive and biases can be negative. I mean, if it's a true bias, it helps you, and if it's an incorrect bias, it's going to hurt you. So there are both of them, and you have to understand when a scout really loves a player, I mean, there's usually something to that because they have this huge amount of experience and you really have to understand why they love a player so much. Whereas when a scout is kind of going with his experience, but in a softer way, you know, then it helps to be a little skeptical.

And what did you find were the biases that maybe the numbers could help to correct? Definitely, you know, players coming from a smaller school, there's a bias against certain defensive positions. First baseman, left fielders, and those guys were, you know, defensively limited. So they had, like, real nowhere to go if they couldn't play the positions. But surprisingly, second baseman, you know, were a position looked at very skeptically because they're viewed as, well, you're already playing second base, so you're just a failed shortstop. I mean, why aren't you a shortstop in college? So somebody who's already a second baseman is kind of viewed as,

well, is he going to have to be moved to third base? And if he gets moved to third base, I mean, is the bat really good enough to be a to third base. And if he gets moved to third base, I mean, is the bat really good enough to be a third baseman? So there's a bias against second baseman as well. But, you know, shorter, fatter, anybody that looks

strange, bold-aged. Players that just don't look like major leaguers. I'm just curious, have you ever put your quantitative brain into like i mean it sounds absurd to think that bowleggedness would you know be a significant predictor of baseball talent but uh you know as i think we've learned over the you know the years some of the things that we thought were just old school uh nonsense have turned out to have some wisdom to them did you ever test uh bowleggedness

or anything you know like that did i mean you had access i i think ben and i and everybody at bp is at some point you know dreamed of a world where we had access to thousands and thousands of scouting reports and we could look to see whether certain buzzwords that we think of as nonsense words might actually be predictive of something. If every scouting report on a guy who has a weak handshake, that guy turns out to be either drafted 10 rounds too late or 10 rounds too early, it'd be telling. And you had access to thousands of scouting reports. Did you ever wonder about any of that scouting hoo-ha?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, if I were in charge of it and doing it from the ground up, I mean, everything has been done the way it's been done for so long. You know, the tools are the same and the scales are the same and what the scouts evaluate are the same. It's something they're very comfortable with. But there's actually quite a few of what the scouts are required to evaluate and report on. It turns out to be mostly noise. There's some things that the scouts do very well, and there's some things that you really shouldn't, you know, really waste your time asking about because nobody can really tell.

I mean, a scout can look at a guy and they can tell if he's athletic. They can tell if he's fluid. They can tell, you know, they can just see how he looks, how he moves. But when you start asking things about, like, even defense starts to get tricky because, you know, what a scout is really evaluating is mostly the athleticism at that point because they're not going to see a player make many defensive plays. You know, are they going to see him one game, two games, three games? I mean, how many balls is the center fielder actually going to get to? And is that like a real measure,

that limited look? Is that really going to tell you? Or is the scout just basically watching the player run, watching how fast he is, looking at his arm, how strong it is? Is that what he's really evaluating? So we always hear about area scouts. They spend the whole year traveling and looking at players, and then maybe they can go in the draft and not get a single player that they recommended or wanted.

And it's a big deal if you can get an area scout a player. And was it similar for you when you're sitting in the draft room? Are you just really hoping to get a guy? There's a guy that you really love. You think the stats make him undervalued or you know show that he's undervalued and you're just dead set on getting that guy and if you recall you know any instances of those guys in any particular years whether they worked out well or worked out terribly i'd be interested in hearing about those too. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Like every year you go in and there's like these guys that are pushed, you know, way far down the board.

And it's like, you know, this guy's numbers are great. I mean, you should just take a chance on him. It could be players just also higher up. And when you start liking players that might be fourth round, third round, and above, that starts to get really difficult. It's easy to convince somebody to take a chance on a guy in the 22nd round. Yeah. Much harder to convince somebody to take a guy in the fourth round. And forget about the first round, because those are picks that uh the scouting director's career could depend on if he screws up that first round pick just on any kind of consistent basis he could

that's his job so i mean is he going to trust some guy just walking in with a spreadsheet you know to help you know help potentially help him with his career, or is he just going to go with what he knows? So is there anyone you championed that turned out really well or turned out badly because you got him and it turned out that there was something about him that wasn't captured in the numbers? Yeah, I mean, it's not fair for me to just you know give you names of guys i liked that um turned out great right i mean they're they're it goes both ways um

i like to at least imagine that overall it was a it was a you know a solid positive like the 2008 draft was uh i thought it was you know turned out well for the padres draft was, I thought, turned out well for the Padres. It was just unfortunate we didn't sign Jason Kipnis. He was a big-time performance guy out of Arizona State. Absolutely, if you look at his performance, absolutely tremendous. Everything that you wanted in a player. Hit for average, took walks, didn't strike out excessively, hit for power, had speed.

He was a center fielder at Arizona State. He was later moved to second base. Of course, also, I liked Alan Dykstra. Same draft. And Alan just had tremendous power, lots of walks, relatively good strikeouts. And, you know, relative to strikeouts. And, yeah, he didn't work out. He, you know, it's kind of difficult to kind of point out exactly why certain players succeed and why others fail.

I mean, Allen was like a tall guy. He had maybe a longer swing. guy. He had maybe a longer swing. It also turned out he had a medical condition, which was vascular necrosis, which I think is the same thing that ended Bo Jackson's career. I think in the end, though, the vascular necrosis actually didn't hurt him. He just didn't quite blossom into that player. I mean, his minor league performance was good. I think he has a career 400-plus on base percentage in the minors, made it to the majors for a brief period of time, the Rays, but never became a solid everyday major leaguer.

Whereas, of course, Jason Kittness, he's turned out to be basically the second best player in that draft. And how different would, say, the top of your draft board look compared to a scout's draft board? I mean, were there regularly guys that you would have very low in the draft that every scout loved, or was there generally a lot of agreement regardless of the approach that you used? I would say it was probably more disagreement than agreement. You know, it was, for example, somebody like Nick Schmidt versus Todd Frazier. And I was always, if there was like a position player that I considered to be a low risk with a good ceiling, to me, I always loved taking those players versus even a, especially just like in kind of an average pitcher, you know, nobody that was like dazzling you just get if you if you can actually

nail uh like an above average hitter in the draft they're just going to return more value most likely and a lower injury risk uh they you know they just don't have the same kind of issues that you have with pitchers i mean if you if you hit the right pitcher, Chris Sale, that's tremendous too, but it's just harder to do that. Chris Sale was really, really good in college. I mean, he was amazing. He was right behind Bryce Harper for me. He was up to basically close to 100 miles an hour, 13 strikeouts per nine, one walk per nine.

I mean, the performance was just ridiculous, as well as the velocity. He just was really tall, and he weighed like 80 pounds. Oh, man, he just looked like a strong breeze we just break him in half so but man he is uh he's been great yeah so two things one thing we've talked about in the past on this show is how well how poorly one would do if if one used only publicly available draft rankings say um so you know you take baseball america and keith law and kylie mcdaniel and you you get a consensus wisdom of crowd sort of thing from all of those rankings and of course all of those rankings are informed by what people with teams tell tell those writers so would you be the worst team? Would you be the

median team? Would you be above average? So that's one question. The other is, it's, you know, probably a false dichotomy to say stats rankings versus scouts rankings. I'm sure you combine them and maybe we will ask you about that but if you used only your spreadsheet essentially uh would you do how much worse would you do if at all than than a purely scouting based ranking yeah it's an interesting question you know the the thing about the draft is it's basically like a zero sum process so for every winner in in the draft, there's probably a loser, a team that could have picked that guy that didn't. For example, Mike Trout.

There were basically 20 or so teams that were losers because they didn't take Mike Trout. And he turned out to be one of the best players of all time. But the question is, were the Angels smart or were the Angels lucky? And that is a question you can only answer if you're privy to their internal process. So it's really not a question that can be answered. You could look at the returns teams have gotten over many years. That's probably the best thing you can do. But it's really kind of like that internal process

that gives you the most information. How, as an organization, did we rank these players and how did they turn out? Where did we make our mistakes? And were they mistakes that we could avoid in the future? Or are they just mistakes that nobody could avoid? But I think an answer to your question, I think if you went with the publicly available rankings, I think you'd probably do just about the median. And I can't give you a hard answer to that, but I think you're basically going to do just about average.

So maybe that's not something that teams would be comfortable thinking about, that on average, you know, they could spend $20 and use a website or whatever and not spend $6 or $7 million on, you know, the expenses and plus anything else that it takes to kind of actually get the draft, to actually go through that whole process. And it's also a question of, I mean, you want your own guys looking at these players. You don't want to trust somebody you don't know. Again, it does come down to your job and your career. Yeah.

And if you went with purely stats-based rankings, do you think you would be competitive? I guess you'd have some embarrassing misses probably, but overall? Yeah, it would probably be pretty ugly because the one thing you absolutely need is, for example, pitcher velocity. Absolutely have to have that. Guys can get away with stuff in college that they're not going to get away with in the minors or the majors. You need to know their velocity. Also, their pitch mix.

Do they have an above-average off-speed pitch? Or are they just getting by with blowing guys away with their fastball? Are they just, do they have, there's like one player out of New Mexico, Danny Ray Herrera. I don't know if you remember that guy or not. Do. Danny Ray. I mean, he was a real short starter for New Mexico.

Unbelievable pitcher for New Mexico. And that's one of the hardest pitching environments in in college but he had a 80 change he basically had this one pitch that was major league level you know one of the one of the best change-ups in baseball and that's how he's able to do it so uh he was taken in like the 44th round and he ended up as a major leaguer for a while, until he had some actually off-field issues, unfortunately. That's the kind of stuff you need to know. If he just had junk that wasn't going to play at the major league level, he's not a prospect.

If he just has that one pitch that's a major league pitch, you know, there's a chance. You'd be pretty, yeah, generally speaking, you're going to be pretty embarrassed. I mean, the guys at the very top are going to be good, but then very quickly it goes wrong. I believe, if I'm not mistaken, every player whose name you've said so far was a college player. Is it just completely hopeless to apply this stuff to high school particularly it seems like i hear about how they're all playing year-round in travel ball against elite competition uh scores of games a year is there anything remotely useful out of that stuff or is the record keeping too bad and is it are they simply too far away from the majors for it to matter that much well you have you have other information, especially now. I mean, you have, you know, basically you're going to have workouts

or you're going to have showcases, and they're going to have like a portable track man unit. So, I mean, the amount of information you have available now is just, you know, leaps and bounds better than it used to be. So, considering all that information, absolutely. I mean, you know, knowing how fast the spin is on a pitcher's ball, you know, fastball, that's incredibly valuable, as opposed to having to just watch it and trying to guess based on how it breaks and things like that. There's, you know, high school statistics in general, they don't play as many games.

The competition varies dramatically. Record keeping isn't so good. But even so, I mean, this is just my opinion, you absolutely want to look at their performance numbers. look at their performance numbers. Like if you have a high school hitter that is mediocre, I mean, you better have a really good reason to draft a high school hitter that can't hit. You know, there's got to be something amazing about that kid. I mean, it only gets harder as you go through the minors and up to the majors.

So typically, you know, the best prospects in high school, their numbers are ridiculous. Like Javier Baez, he had something like three strikeouts his whole year as a senior. That's the Javier Baez I know. No strikeouts. Yeah, but that's the thing. I mean, if you are striking out a lot in high school, you don't really have a chance. But if you're not striking out in high school, there's a chance.

Oh, my gosh. He hit 771 with 22 homers and 83 at-bats and 20 doubles. Half of them, more than half of his played appearances were extra bases. That's exactly what you tend to see from the guys that are real big prospects in high school. They're just insane. He slugged 1807. He slugged 1048 as a sophomore. So yeah, that just, you know, it's not just him. I mean, you can look at some of the other, you know, really great high school prospects. They all had just ridiculous numbers because they were so much better than anybody they were facing. And that's why they were taken in the draft.

And that's why they were top rounders. But, I mean, if you're looking at a high school guy in one of those early rounds and he's not hitting like that or he's not like pitching ridiculously i mean there's got to be something in your mind as to how he's going to develop you know why do i think he's worth giving a million dollars to even though he's striking out like 25 of the time in high school you know what is so amazing about this kid and it could be just pure raw athleticism maybe he's more of a football player than a baseball player adding every every layer you add onto that story makes that that player riskier and riskier and you have to keep that in mind he also walked in more than a quarter of his flight appearances his his on base percentage was 840

all right so uh last last question i have for you is that um i somebody recently wrote something for me and then we didn't run it but we might something about sort of like looking at how health is by far like by far the biggest indicator of how successful a draft pick is that really it almost doesn't matter if you turn out to be good or bad. Really what matters in the aggregate is whether your guys turn out to be healthy or not healthy. And that really seems like something that would have the potential, even at the high school level, to be a rich place for quantitative analysis to take place, particularly if you can figure out what a player's playing schedule was from the time he was 12 years old on.

So how much information is a team able to gather on that sort of a thing? And would you say that it is kind of underweighted at this point or our team's really putting a ton of effort into trying to predict which 17 year old is is going to have a bad labrum or a torn ucl four years in the road i mean it is it is a part of the draft they do carefully look at video and rightly or wrongly, they're judging kind of injury likelihood. The problem with it currently is it's not really scientific. And that's something that's there. That's they're trying to change. But how would you even begin to approach that?

Because you know, you have to carefully record all this information over a very long period of time. Even then, there's going to be some selection bias because you're only looking at a particular kind of player anyway. You're not looking at all players. With pitchers, it is really like one of the holy grails of baseball. If you can only draft pitchers, or if you know which pitchers not to draft that are higher injury risk, that's incredibly valuable. If you know how to prevent pitchers from becoming injured once they're in your system, again, that's just incredibly valuable. There are companies that are working on products that I think are going to be helpful,

like biomechanics, like a company like Modus, for example. You might end up getting data from them that might really help you with that. But it's just so incredibly complex. It comes down to so many factors that you can't even see with your eye the elasticity of the soft tissue, the tendons and ligaments, how they're attached, where they're attached. Again, the workload these players have gone through, even back when they were like 10 years old, you don't know. So it's just incredibly, incredibly complicated. But hopefully at some point you're going to be able to do more with it,

and it just has the going to be able to do more with it and it just has the potential to be hugely valuable i mean not just the teams but to the players certainly in the best interest of agents anybody involved the sport nobody wants to see a great player have his career cut short due to some injury you know like mark prior that was just a real tragedy that he wasn't able to pitch more. How much of your work was scouting scouts? I assume that you had to incorporate or wanted to incorporate scouting reports

into the numbers that you had, but you must have had to decide how much to weight a scout's opinion, can determine whether you should trust him or whether maybe he rates a certain skill more, more generously than another scout would, or then he does some other skill. So how much of your work was doing that? And generally how, how does one do that? For me, it mostly was, you know, this is what based just based on their performance. I mean,

I incorporated some of the information from the scouts. For me, like, the most important things were power ceiling, you know, what defensive position the scout saw the player as ultimately. The velocity was one thing that basically at that time you only had from the scout. They had to sit there with their radar gun. So that's, you know, now it's a little bit different. There are, you know, kind of, I guess there are companies out now that are kind of recording this information,

and there are other services too that you can actually get the velocities from them. But so that's basically what I did. You could certainly go much further with that. And, you know, I did some more work along those lines, but it was nothing that was actually used with the draft. Ultimately, it's all information. I mean, the best system is going to take all of that and put it together and give you this is like the organization's belief. And I think maybe that's probably like the approach the Houston Astros take. Maybe the St. Louis Cardinals still do that.

But that just is not the way it's done in baseball. It's more of if it's used at all, it's what do the numbers say? Are there guys that we should rule out? That kind of thing it's it is uh the way i would do it is very different than the way most teams do it can i give you guys one more sure in his senior year javier baez singled more doubled more homered more and walked more than he was ever made out. So he had more of each of those than he had outs. Yeah.

It was also Jeff Decker, too, was another crazy high school hitter. I mean, you think you go to high school, there's always like one guy on the team who's better than the rest. So there's some guy in the county who's the best baseball player. Then there's these guys. These guys are not just on one level higher. They're just stratospheric. They're crazy.

That's the kind of talent it takes to become a major leader. Lastly, how many teams would you say consider themselves above average at drafting? how many teams would you say consider themselves above average at drafting? You know, because, I mean, people tend to think, tend to rate themselves more highly than maybe they should. And I'm curious because, you know, how many teams would trade? Like, you know, whatever the team with the best reputation as a drafting team is, whether it's the Cardinals or whoever, how many teams would actually, you know, if they could trade their draft board for that team's draft board,

how many teams would do that? Or, you know, are they all convinced that they have the best scouts and they trust their opinion more than any other teams or even the consensus? So that's, I would guess that they all think they're above average. I mean, they might say, well, we don't have quite as many scouts as this other team does, so maybe they have a bit of an advantage there. But I'm sure those scouting directors all go into the first day of the draft thinking, I'm better than most of

these other guys i you know that's human nature yeah there's there's you know it's just it's such an interesting process and there's still i think a lot of tradition in it um that is changing and you know that does make scouts uncomfortable, which is completely understandable. I guess it's hard to be proved wrong, really, that you're not above average because there's so much randomness that goes into it or player development that goes into it that it's hard to say. And then the personnel, the scouts change and the front office changes and you can always just say that it was a small sample it

usually was i guess but you know actually the worst thing that goes on is your best scout they he stops being a scout he gets promoted so you take like a great area scout who is tremendously valuable in that role and then he moves up to regional cross-checker, national cross-checker, scouting director, and then maybe he gets promoted out of scouting entirely. And it just doesn't make any sense. I mean, if you have

someone that can add that much value to the organization, keep them as a scout, but you just are going to have to pay them what they're worth. And that's not the career path in baseball. You get promoted. So it's unfortunate.

Jeff Decker's high school stats. 565 688 1202 was his slash line. He pitched too. Did he pitch? I wouldn't be surprised. That's on this page, too. Is that senior year or cumulative? It says

48 games played, but it says career totals, too. I think that 1202 is probably just a slugging. Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah. I didn't think his OPS was that low. Yeah. No. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong thing, but whoever this is pitched

145 innings or something with a 1.2 ERA. I mean, it could be him. I mean, you know, some of these guys were great pitchers and hitters. Like A.J. Reid, you know, last year in college. So it does happen. Hang on. Are you wondering whether you found the wrong Jack Becker? I'm wondering whether.

Jack is a pretty unique spelling. Yeah, that's probably not it. It's probably not the wrong Jeff Decker. Okay. Well, thank you for sharing your insight and stories. Chris is on Twitter at Octonian. He is one of the best public resources for sabermetrics, for all kinds of sports analytics and math questions and math help.

Ben, you found his junior and sophomore years combined. Ah. Not his senior. His senior year, he appears to have had a 1472 slug. Okay. Not bad. Right. Not quite Baez levels, but pretty good.

700 on base percentage. Well, maybe it's ballpark effects. You got to adjust. Yeah. So, yeah, right.

So, Chris often shares lots of free, interesting data that you can check out and he helps people out all the time if you have questions.

So, find him on twitter thank you chris oh thanks and uh good luck this week thank you uh so you can send us emails for the email show at podcast at baseball perspectives.com facebook group facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and our sponsor is the play index to baseballreference.com and use the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. We'll be back tomorrow. You say now one and one and one and one is three. I know my life's ever been, ever been, ever been to me.