4/1/2007

About ScoutingBook

Why and How We Do All This

ScoutingBook.com is the backyard toolshed of a handful of swell fellas who live, work, or breathe baseball, online gaming, or both. We use it as our own touchstone to collect and share our opinions, rankings, and ideas about baseball prospecting in a connected world. We're also sharing these opinions and rankings here for those who may be interested.   

By filtering and combining many inputs, we each hope to weed out our own bias and get a more neutral sense of the prospect universe. Some of us use this for fantasy draft help, some to keep a handle on farm systems for our day jobs, and some just because we love watching baseball talent develop.

Our contributors and sources include professional scouts, baseball writers, online fantasy baseball consultants, and hobbyist sabermetricians. We don't discount scouting reports, and we don't discount statistics: we try to deliver values that come from both the head and the gut at the same time.

The site changes every day. We're constantly messing with our formulas and updating info on players. We work hard to neutralize individual bias and report only the information on which we achieve some kind of consensus.

Our rankings are produced by constant tinkering with our own formula that combines:

  • Our own research
  • other published ranking systems (which we show for your consideration)
  • adjustments we make for opportunity and depth
  • adjustments we make for fantasy baseball purposes
    • and
  • our own combined and consensus valuations.


We started adding our own thoughts and opinions on players because all of us receive "so what do you think about PlayerX?" questions quite often, and these often trigger long arguments. We wanted a way to collect our own thoughts and responses.

Our opinions are our opinions, though, so if our rankings or our thoughts don't "match" someone else's, that makes perfect sense. They're our opinions.

We're not ESPN. We're not even John Sickels (though at least one of us would like to have his baby.)

We're just some folks who needed a place to record our thoughts on prospects and try out some new collaboration ideas, and it's grown a little from there.

We don't claim to document all the prospects in the world, and we don't attempt to be perfectly comprehensive, so if your favorite player isn't shown, it's only because he has not yet gained enough of our attention to appear. We try to focus on the prospects most likely to have a near-term impact (and this often puts us at odds with other "ranking systems", so beware!)

If a player is a few years away, we will say so, but he'll only appear high on our lists if he's so special he's worth the wait. Inferior players with a bigger chance to contribute sooner will be favored.

Sometimes, like everyone else, we are spectacularly wrong. Baseball players are human, full of foible and surprise, and so are we.

Our ranking formula, which turns all the data into the convenient numbered prospect lists that everyone enjoys, is the engine behind ScoutingBook.com. The process is re-run every day, and we also do some hand-cleanups and adjustments for softer information more or less weekly.

New players are added whenever enough people have submitted opinions on them, and removed when they no longer qualify as MLB Rookies.

Other tools and features on the site will follow this same model: we're doing what we find useful, for our own amusement, and if anyone else enjoys it, great! The annoying ads (sorry) pay for our hosting and an occasional beer, and that's about all. We make no money from this.

This is all for entertainment only. Please, no wagering.

   


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