Scouts Are Only Human, And They Need to Be Loved

As much as I am a sabermetrician, I acknowledge that scouting is still the key (and best) way to evaluate players. Stats can help illuminate things that sometimes scouting miss but I think too many sabermetricians have the hubris to think that they know everything and everyone else is either wrong or stupid. I am not one of those sabermetrician, I've always had the broad, inclusive view of things.

Still, scouts are only human.

On the pre-game show for Wednesday's game (11-3 trashing of the D-backs!), Dave Fleming passed along a story about his meeting a scout for an east coast team with responsibility for following west coast baseball. The scout talked about how he has followed Lincecum since college and how teams saw the potential for what he is doing today but just weren't sure whether he would ever tame his wildness in order to achieve his potential, they weren't sure that he would show the determination and tenacity to learn and get better in the way that he has thus far. Still, they knew that with his stuff and speed, he had at minimum the potential to be a great closer.

How Could They Miss That?

All I can say is that I've never seen or met Lincecum and my experience has only been through broad and assiduously reading of everything Giants, but even I saw that Lincecum had this potential, which is why I was excited when some pre-draft projections had Lincecum falling to (and past) us (many had us picking Daniel Bard) and wrote about the Giants picking him if he fell to us.

How could they miss it? They should have had the same access to the internet that I had. And given his achievements, I would think that they would dig deep to turn over every stone to understand who Lincecum is as a person. Some of the stories leading up to the draft talked about how he was horribly wild early in his college career (really, his whole college career, even his breakout year) and he talked about how he worked to improve his walk rate. Still, when he got drafted in 2005, they still got on him about his walks and wouldn't pay him the $1M that he wanted, so he went back to college, learned another pitch, and had his breakout year when he won the Golden Spike and got drafted by the Giants.

So he learned all through his college years (appropriately enough, since they are halls of learning), demonstrated it by changing the way he pitched and by adding a pitch to his repertoire and that was all there on the internet to read. So why was it so fricking astonishing that he would continue to learn once he became a professional player? And how could a scout assigned to scout the west coast not have seen that? And apparently, most of baseball - or at least those 9 teams who drafted ahead of us - did not see that either, they bought into it too.

Well, that plus the fact that he is very short for a professional baseball player and therefore might not hold up to the punishing gaunlet that is the major league baseball season. Still, it would not surprise me if this scout's view represented the group-think that sometimes hold back us humans and he did use the royal "we" to refer to his scouting brethren.

Ultimately, though, I don't really care that they missed him, because I can call Tim "The Kid" Lincecum a San Francisco Giant. I am looking forward to many more years following him.

SIGN LINCECUM NOW!