from Amazon
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Shame on the scout?
By Tangotiger, 11:24 AM
Ugh:
Shame on the scout, who doesn’t use whatever stats he’s got available to help him formulate his total opinion of a player.
I do not want my scout looking at any stats. None at all. I’ve got the stats. Why do I need a scout to look at them too? It’ll simply bias his observations. (As Theo Epstein put it, scouts and stats are two lenses of glasses.) The scouts provide the observational aspect of what the player is doing, the inputs. The stats provide the outputs. The sabermetrician will merge the two, to get a cool pair of glasses. And the more outputs he has, he bigger that lens will get (and the less outputs, the smaller the lens).
Shame on the scout? No. Good for the scout.