THE SCOUTING CLASSROOM Stories Behind the Report THE GENERATION OF SCOUTS WE’RE LOSING When I broke into professional scouting with the Angels in 1999, I quickly learned something they couldn’t teach you in a manual. Some of your greatest scouting education happened sitting next to another scout. Not because you were supposed to copy his opinion. Quite the opposite. You had to trust your own eyes, write your own report, put your own grades on the player and eventually have the conviction to defend what you saw. But if you were fortunate enough to sit beside one of the great old scouts, you listened. I had men like Tom Davis and Rick Schroeder around me. Those were Hall of Fame-caliber baseball men to a young scout learning the profession. Tom was our Western Supervisor when I came into the Angels organization. Rick was another veteran evaluator whose experience had been earned through thousands of innings behind a backstop. Both would eventually receive the prestigious Scout of the Year Award. Tom in 2010 and Rick in 2016. But their value couldn’t be measured by an award. It was what they knew and, more importantly, how they knew it. There was no TrackMan telling them what they had just seen. No database spitting out a comparable player. They watched the player, his body, actions, how the ball came off the bat, how the arm worked, how the feet moved, how he reacted to failure and what happened when the game sped up. Sometimes you learned more from one sentence from a veteran scout than an entire weekend of games. YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO AGREE Sitting together wasn’t supposed to become shared scouting. If Tom saw a 55 hitter and I saw a 45, my responsibility wasn’t to change my grade because he had been scouting longer. It was to ask: What is he seeing that I’m not? Then I went back to my own eyes. Maybe I changed my evaluation. Maybe I didn’t. But now I was thinking like an evaluator instead of simply watching baseball. THE BACKSTOP WAS A CLASSROOM Young scouts today have access to information we couldn’t have imagined when I started, and much of it has made scouting better. But technology cannot replace wisdom transferred from one evaluator to another. The veteran scout quietly saying, “Watch this.” The conversation walking to the parking lot. Why an unconventional swing works. Why the average runner has better range than the 60 runner. Why the 88–90 mph pitcher might someday throw harder. Why one player’s tools will play and another’s won’t. Those conversations built scouts. AND THAT GENERATION IS DISAPPEARING A generation of scouts who spent 30, 40 and sometimes 50 years evaluating players is disappearing from ballparks. When those men leave, we aren’t simply losing names from organizational directories. We’re losing institutional knowledge. Scouting has always been an apprenticeship whether baseball officially called it that or not. Someone taught us. Someone challenged our evaluations. Someone showed us what we weren’t seeing. Twenty years in professional scouting taught me plenty, but some of my most valuable lessons came before I became the veteran in the seat. They came when I was the younger scout sitting beside men like Tom Davis and Rick Schroeder, keeping my eyes on the field and my ears open. If you’re breaking into professional scouting today and find yourself beside someone who has spent 30 years evaluating players, don’t spend the entire game staring at your laptop. Watch the field. Ask a good question. Then listen. Because eventually that seat beside you will be empty. And you may realize the man sitting there was teaching you something no radar gun, spreadsheet, algorithm or database ever could. He was teaching you how to scout. — Jeff Scholzen Veteran MLB Scout | Author | Educator #BehindTheRadarGun 🔎