THE SCOUTING LIFE
A grading system established years ago has become a staple of baseball scouts’ jobs.
The scouting system used today by the major leagues was created by Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey (left, sitting with Jackie Robinson in 1948 as Robinson signs a contract). Rickey, who also worked for the Pirates and the Cardinals during his career, pioneered a method based around a 20 to 80 (or 2 to 8) scale. As one scout describes it: 20 is a non-prospect; 30 is filler for a farm system; 40 is a marginal major leaguer; 50 is an average player; 60 is above average; 70 is high-impact and 80 is a gamechanger, the best of the best.
Take, for example, the scouting report for a young pitcher named John Andrew Smoltz from the summer of 1984 (left). Smoltz was graded in the high 60s and 70s as a 17-year-old and, of course, would go on to make the All-Star team eight times with the Atlanta Braves during a Hall of Fame career.
For contrast: below is the report of a player seen in the late 80s by a California Angels’ scout. This player — Todd Michael Devereaux — topped out at 60 in the hitting categories, but saw himself check in the 30s and 40s when it came to his running and fielding ability. The scout? He did all right for himself, leading the Chicago Cubs to their first World Series in more than a century last season. You may have heard of Joe Maddon.
One morning in February, by the back fields of the Kansas City Royals’ complex in Surprise, Ariz., Dayton Moore chatted casually with Rene Francisco. Moore is the Royals’ general manager and Francisco a top assistant, both with decades of scouting experience. Their conversation would be familiar to anyone in baseball. “I’ve never put an 80 on a player,” Moore said. “You, Rene?” Francisco shook his head. “I’m usually a 40 through 60 guy,” Moore said. “I mean, 60s plus, it’s an All-Star, so what the heck.” The banter continued like this. An outsider might have felt like a toddler trying to understand calculus. Were these people talking about numbers, players or what?
“I guess a guy can be a 20 runner and a 60-70 powerproduction guy,” Moore said. “Usually I think the only 20 you’d ever put on a guy is the run grade — right, Rene?”
Maybe, Francisco said, but what about a slow runner who still has good instincts on the bases? Moore laughed.
“If you’re a 20 base runner,” he said, “hell, you probably don’t even know where first base is.”
These numbers are not part of the analytics revolution that has swept baseball in the last 15 years. Quite the opposite, actually. As teams finalized evaluations for this year’s amateur draft, most still relied on a common and quirky scouting language that stretches back decades.
Ahead of his time
Baseball scouts measure tools on a scale of 20 to 80, or sometimes 2 to 8. To baseball people, a scale from 0 to 100, or 0 to 10, would look as out of place as a pitcher’s mound in the middle of the outfield.
“Eighty you’re a franchise player, 20 you’re nothing and 50 you’re average,” said Detroit Tigers general manager Al Avila, the son of a scout and the father of a major league catcher. “It’s always been that way.”
And if it has not, there may be no one alive who remembers otherwise. Art Stewart, a senior adviser to Moore with the Royals, is 90 years old, born on Babe Ruth’s birthday in 1927. Stewart took his first scouting job with the New York Yankees in the early 1950s, when a Pittsburgh
Oakland Athletics vice president of baseball operations Billy Beane, an analytics pioneer, prepares for the draft with front office personnel and scouts.
Michael Macor / San Francisco Chronicle Pirates scout showed him a numerical grading system at a spring training game in Bradenton, Fla.
“That’s a funny way of doing it,” Stewart said he had thought at the time. But then, he said, he learned who had created it: Branch Rickey, the pioneering executive, who was working for the Pirates near the end of his Hall of Fame career.
“Branch Rickey is the one that came up with the number system. What we have today is just a takeoff of what Rickey did,” Stewart said. “He was so far ahead of the game, it was scary.”
When Stewart joined the expansion Royals in 1969, the team used a 1 to 4 scale, like a movie critic’s rating system: 4 was excellent, 3 good, 2 fair, 1 poor. But in late 1974, when Major League Baseball created a centralized scouting bureau, the 2 to 8 scale took hold throughout the game.
Gordon Lakey, who started his scouting career in 1970 and now works for the Philadelphia Phillies, spent three years with the bureau in the mid-’70s. He said its first executive director, Jim Wilson, had encouraged the use of double-digit numbers — not just 2 through 8 — to further differentiate prospects. Not all teams took their reports from the bureau, Lakey said, but enough did that the 20 to 80 scale became the vernacular.
Deciphering the numbers
Scouts judge players on a variety of tools and typically assign two grades for each, evaluating the present and the future.
“Technically, you should have a lot of players in the 20s as hitters, but you can project them as 50s,” Lakey said. “You should not have many high school hitters as 50s, because you’re saying he’s an average major league hitter right now. That’s where your future grade becomes so important. It’s all about projection.”
Lakey translated the numbers this way: 20 is a non-prospect; 30 is filler for a
farm system; 40 is a marginal major leaguer; 50 is an average player; 60 is above average; 70 is high-impact and 80 is a game-changer, the best of the best. Usually, Lakey said, nobody whose overall grade is below 35 will ever play in the majors.
Like many scouts, Lakey rarely gives 80s — though he did in the late 1970s when assessing the power of Michigan State’s Kirk Gibson, whom he saw launch a homer over a building at the University of Michigan. Gibson would go on to hit indelible World Series home runs and win a Most Valuable Player Award.
Stewart, too, gave Gibson an 80 for power, and remembers also giving it to a teenage Alex Rodriguez. But the 80 grade, or an 8, is so rare that it appears on just one of the dozens of reports published in “Scouting Reports,” a 1995 book by Stan Hart; the scout Tom Ferrick gave an 8 to Delino DeShields for present and future speed.
When Jeff Luhnow, now the Astros’ general manager, came into baseball from the business world with St. Louis in 2003, the sanctity of the 80 grade bewildered him.
“I was trying to force it into deciles — like if the scale’s 20 to 80, then there should be a certain number of major league players between 70 and 80 by definition, if each bucket is even,” Luhnow said. “Then I went back and looked at our data, and I couldn’t find any hitters that were between 70 and 80 on the hit tool. I thought, ‘Well, how can that be?’ And they said, ‘Well, an 80 is Tony Gwynn and Wade Boggs. Those guys are once in a generation.’”
Initially, Luhnow said, he was struck by the arbitrary nature of using 20 as a low and 80 as a high. His bigger issue, though, was that few scouts seemed to go outside the 45 to 55 range, meaning too many prospects were clustered in the middle. Luhnow said he encouraged the Cardinals’ scouts to widen their range, but came to understand — somewhat grudgingly — the value of the scale.
“I realize you can’t fight City Hall, and people have been so indoctrinated in this method of thinking about players that you have to accept it and work with it,” said Luhnow, whose Astros front office is among the most analytically minded in baseball.
“And I think it actually, over the years, has grown on me,” he said. “Maybe that’s because I’ve gone native, but I do think that there’s a certain language that scouts and coaches and executives have regarding player evaluation that when you throw out a term like ‘fringy average’ or ‘plus-plus,’ as a scout you know exactly what that means, and you can sort of envision what that looks like in the player.”
A familiar structure
Billy Eppler, the Los Angeles Angels’ general manager, agreed that having a well-established scale helped when hiring scouts from other organizations, so comparisons can resonate throughout the industry. Every team adds wrinkles of its own, of course, but the basis generally stays rooted in those numbers.
“Some teams will do a high risk or a low risk for every grade, like a high-risk 6 or a low-risk 5,” said Derek Falvey, the Twins’ chief baseball officer. “A guy that maybe has slightly more performance when he’s healthy or otherwise, that’s your highrisk 6. But your low-risk 5 is maybe a little bit more stable, but you’re viewing as having slightly less upside long term.”
The factors that make up a final grade can be endless. A hitter with exceptional bat speed may have poor pitchrecognition skills. A pitcher who throws hard may lack the feel for spinning a breaking ball.
Narrowing the numerical options, Moore said, helps eliminate confusion over just what the scout really thinks. A scale of 0 to 100 would present too many choices, and baseball, he noted, is not wedded to rounded numbers, anyway. It is, after all, a game that usually lasts nine innings, not 10.
“Nothing’s 0 to 10 that I’ve ever dealt with,” said Mike Rizzo, the Washington Nationals’ general manager. “To me, it’s just a scale. You could call it red, white, blue, 20 to 80, it doesn’t matter as long as I know what a scout is saying when he says, ‘There’s an 80 runner.’”
Rizzo, who has scouted for more than 30 years, said he did not hesitate to give 80s. A division rival, the Miami Marlins’ Giancarlo Stanton, has 80 power, he said, and Nationals shortstop Trea Turner has 80 speed.
“What do I always say, K.K.?” Rizzo said, turning to Kris Kline, his vice president for scouting. “Hey, if he’s not an 80, why have 80s?”
As for the other end of the scale, Kline — who played four years in the minors without escaping Class A — has a keen understanding.
“You know what a 20 player is?” Kline asked, smiling. “A scout.”
“And I think it actually, over the years, has grown on me. Maybe that’s because I’ve gone native, but I do think that there’s a certain language that scouts and coaches and executives have regarding player evaluation that when you throw out a term like ‘fringy average’ or ‘plus-plus,’ as a scout you know exactly what that means, and you can sort of envision what that looks like in the player.” JEFF LUHNOW ASTROS GENERAL MANAGER, ON THE RICKEY GRADING SYSTEM