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March 16, 2006

Future Shock

Taking a Step Back, Part Three

by Kevin Goldstein

Scouting pitchers is generally a more difficult proposition than evaluating position players. With young pitchers, scouts are required to place that much more of their projection on their anticipation of a player's future, leaving more room for error. Because of the built-in risk for failure, either through injury or lack of performance, more pitchers are drafted than needed, and therefore an inordinate amount of the scouting budget is spent on hurlers, in order to have just a few reach the big leagues. While the average team carries 11 or 12 pitchers on their active rosters, a full 55% of the first 100 picks in the last two drafts have been pitchers, so the failure rate is higher.

The Scouting Scale Returns:

The 20-80 scale is also used for pitchers, only this time, individual pitches are graded. Over the last two days I used Joe Ballplayer as our example, so today let's take a look at our top high school draft pick, Tommy Throwhard.

TOMMY THROWHARD, P   PRESENT   FUTURE
Fastball Velocity      60        70
Fastball Movement      40        50
Curve                  --        --
Slider                 45        60
Changeup               30        45
Other                  --        --
Control                35        50
Command                40        50

Young fresh raw arms, on sale this week at Target! Without even going into a full explanation of each category, we can see a few things here about Tommy. Tommy throws hard. Tommy already has a pretty good breaking ball with plenty of promise. Tommy has just two good pitches, and has problems throwing strikes with his power stuff.

Now let's look at how each pitch is graded: