THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Sunday, February 10, 2008

The 2008 College Scouting Report, By the Fans, For the Fans

By Tangotiger, 05:02 PM

Let’s see what happens if we turn the focus on college players’ fielding.

I got nearly 2000 ballots for the 30 MLB teams in 2007. I suspect I’ll get half that, but for a far greater number of teams, on the college side. The reliability simply won’t be as great, of course. I understand all the issues. But, let’s see how far we can take this.

• Sabermetrics • Minors_College

#1 (see all posts) 2008/02/11 (Mon) @ 01:05

Tom,

You might want to use facebook’s network pages to spread this to colleges. If you have a facebook, you can see the network page of any college in the country. You can only post things on the “wall” if you’re in the network, but anyone in the world can see the network page. Rarely do people check the network pages, but if you get just a handful of scouting reports from a bunch of schools then you will have more than you started with.

I have this strange feeling that you don’t have a facebook, so if you have any questions about it, feel free to email me.

#2 Tangotiger (see all posts) 2008/02/11 (Mon) @ 09:27

Facebook? Yeah, you are right, I don’t have one. That’s where you have an account that links you to all your friends, and their friends, right? Complete with personal pics, bios, whatever? I’ll ask my friends, RomeoRooster, SierraSteve, and UmbrellaUla how come we’re not part of this thing.

Seriously, that’s a good idea. The scare of this project is that at the college level, you might just have the guy’s friends (or the guy himself) evaluating the player. The only way around that is to have a big sample size. In MLB, I never get worried that Ryan Zimmerman’s friends will do an eval.

#3 CollegePlayer (see all posts) 2008/02/11 (Mon) @ 15:24

Exactly - I’m really hesitating to rate myself.

#4 Tangotiger (see all posts) 2008/02/29 (Fri) @ 09:59

Along similar lines as the above project, the Cardinals are hoping to identify “under the radar” players:
http://stlcardinals.scout.com/2/732926.html

Fascinating stuff. The difference are two-fold:
1. I’m focusing only on fielding, while the “radar” fans are likely going to focus on hitting and pitching

2. The Scouting Report ends up self-filtering based on the agreements of a crowd, while the “radar” project will force the team to filter each submission, and get the scouts out there.

In any case, I like both projects…

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