Notice: Trying to get property 'display_name' of non-object in /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/src/generators/schema/article.php on line 52
keyboard_arrow_uptop

As he has done the past several years, Tom Tango is running his annual Fan Scouting Report, a chance for you to provide your subjective observation of what you see a player doing. For those of us who don't work for an MLB team, it's a really unique sort of resource to use to look at MLB players.

If you have a few minutes, please, take some time and go ahead and give your input on the players you get a chance to watch regularly. It's a fun exercise, and the more people participating, the better the data is.

Now, I have seen some people question the usefulness of the FSR – it is, after all, a largely subjective exercise. And we're asking baseball fans to act as scouts. I think we can all acknowledge that fans are not as good of scouts as professional baseball scouts, after all. So why do it?

And my answer is this – because it provides us with a different perspective. It allows us a chance to look at what's going on in a different way than we may have before. And we can learn new things from that. And I think there's a lot more subjective data floating around in baseball analysis than we care to admit; the FSR is subjective, yes, but it happens to be honest about it.

And with that, I'll go ahead and shut up – best not to say too much, lest I accidentally influence how someone votes. But it's a fun dataset to play with, and a little later on in the season I hope to tool around with it a bit and share some of what it's capable of doing with y'all. Until then – a poll you can feel good about voting early and often in.

Thank you for reading

This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.

Subscribe now
You need to be logged in to comment. Login or Subscribe
edanddom
8/26
Colin, you may want to curb the enthusiasm around voting "often" (unless you mean once each for many different players) ... if I recall past years correctly, ballot stuffing makes Tango mad!
cwyers
8/26
Fair enough. Not trying to endorse ballot stuffing, but there are multiple players and teams ones can vote for.