Spanky__99

Set your line-ups in our league, meat. It's not hard.

Set your line-ups in our league, meat. It's not hard.

Trolling, bro... he had to ask how comp picks work. I wish people stopped quoting him.

Ughhh... Bills. E: There we go!

You're nuts.

Wasn't that about the Giants post-season track record... not a crapshoot? How much does that bet payout on the Indians?

Uhhmmm... your goaltending might save you this week? You're carrying 2 starters, better than what I'm working with(at the moment) as I have 2 starters and a back-up, but Smith is out with injury, give your head a shake, mate. There's other teams in a worse situation than you, lol. There's nothing holding you back from picking up a back-up, is there?

lol

Cubs, got this.

My team suxxxxxx this week, losing to a team that hasn't set line-ups, lol.

Dubnyk 3 straight shutouts. Wowzers!

Ballgame.

Backs against the wall now, Cubbies!

Not a bad game.

He's an idiot.

Bryant should've ate that ball.

Hah!

Did you bet it?

Crazy that this game ended at this score, I assumed 5 + dingers with the wind blowing out. Shows you how little I know, lol. I lost a whack of money, damn.

Sheeeit... just watched the full replay... Lowry and Peterson s*** the bed. Great game, though.

True, if EE walks, it's possible.

Yeah, it's only one mans word. A consensus tells much more. This would be through a bevy of writing teams as BA/BP/2080/MLB, etc...

From... 2080 http://2080baseball.com/2016/10/what-does-it-take-to-be-a-scout-in-todays-game/ Scouting amateur and professional baseball players can be defined in many ways. As the game at the major league level revolutionizes into an analytically driven evaluation process, the core of scouting remains mostly the same. There are six principles that can be identified when we describe what scouting is and what it takes to be a scout. They are as follows. Judgment, or evaluation, is easily the main adjective we all associate with scouting. It is the crux from which all decisions about players are made but the other elements of how we arrive at our final judgment are equally as important. The best scouts, or those who separate themselves, are the ones who make the most consistently correct judgments or evaluations. Most all seasoned scouts know what to look for but yet, two scouts can watch the same player at the same time and have decidedly different evaluations. Judgment is in your gut. You must have a feel for what a player is. Scouting is information. You must have all the necessary and proper information to have a chance at the right evaluation. How you arrive at and use the information at your disposable is usually the difference between getting it right or missing on a player. Scouting is a significantly complex, sometimes unquantifiable business. The industry has made every attempt to drive scouting decisions based on data and analytics, but in its purest form, scouting still comes down to what the eyes tell the brain. As a scout, it is your job to find players, evaluate them and ultimately make recommendations for procurement. You are the decision maker. You are your own boss in a sense and your job is to find future major leaguers. To be a scout, one has to understand what that means and represents. You are a role model and ambassador for the game. As a professional baseball scout, you are the most visible member of the professional baseball family for your organization. Amateur players and their families many times will only ever meet you during the draft and signing process. And, most likely you are the only connection they will have to your club. Your professionalism should take the form of: a) being a role model, setting a good example by following a proper dress code, and d) being a goodwill ambassador for professional baseball. Represent yourself and your organization to the highest of standards. Believe it or not, when a high school prospect is choosing between signing or going to college, the smallest of encounters can sway his decision one way or another. Remember, a Mom is sending her 17-to-18 year old son out to the real world for the first time. She usually has the greatest say in his decision. Make her feel like her son will be in great hands and that she can feel safe as he embarks on his professional career. When you’re at the yard watching and scouting a game, you are very visible. Those around you know who you are and what you represent. Be a goodwill ambassador for the game. Exude a respect for the game for others to see. Represent yourself and the game. This can be simply in how you dress and present yourself. Your attire says a lot about how people will perceive you. For most, you are the only representative of MLB that they will ever meet or be in close vicinity to. You must have discipline to be a good scout. Most of the time, you will spend a full day’s work of scouting only to see what you are looking for once or twice. For example, if you are sitting on a hitting prospect at a high school baseball game, you may only see that hitter take one or two swings. This is where your discipline and patience is extremely important. Not all scouts can stay focused 100% of the time when faced with multiple distractions surrounding themselves at a ballpark. You don’t get to hit the rewind button and you never know what you’re going to see or when you’re going to see it. This is why you must maintain discipline and always be watching. At a typical nine inning game, you are generally only going to see about 20 minutes of live action. In other words, how much time the ball is actually in play. A game will usually take two to three hours, which means almost 90% of your day is spent waiting. A good scout is always scouting though. He/she is constantly watching even when the ball is not in play. The good scouts will tell you that many times, they identify what they really want to see when others think there is nothing going on. The game of baseball is obviously very cerebral and takes on many cognitive forms throughout. When the ball is dead, if we train ourselves to be disciplined and hunt for clues we will find that our evaluations will begin to shape separators. Most players you will see are all the same. Their tool chest and skill set are all very similar. There are only a very small percentage of players who have all “five tools” and have the gifted abilities and upside to out perform others on tools alone. So, if most all players are the same, then that means we have to find separators in order to determine who projects as a future big league player. This is where the discipline of a scout becomes vastly important. He/she must be perpetually looking for signs that one player can outperform another. What is the player’s character and makeup? Is he motivated? Does he look like he is prepared? Does the player demonstrate superior aptitude? Does the player make in-game adjustments? These are all important factors that will usually help you separate one player from the next. Scouting is information. And, in this game information is currency. Scouting can be confused with sticking a radar gun on a pitcher or clocking a run time to first base. Those are the easy parts to scouting, if there is such a thing. A good scout is in constant recon mode and searching for and gathering as much information as possible on a player. It’s true that we want to try and quantify as much as possible to help us make a decision. Today’s game has pivoted more towards analytics and we are able to decipher a lot about a player before even going to the yard to see him or by just letting the technical data from a workout or game inform us of what he is. Yet, the game is still, and always will be human. We can never forget that. The constant ebb and flow of a player’s growth and maturation coupled with his environment and circumstances are all factors that can’t be quantified and probably never will be. Or, never should be. We must not lose sight of the circumstances or the elements for which are presented to us during an evaluation. What this means is that in the world of scouting, no two days are alike. We must recognize our setting and allow for that to influence our judgments. Don’t get robotic in your interpretations of what you see. A player’s execution or performance, or lack thereof, always carries a story with it. Don’t lose sight of the story that the player is telling you while you are watching him. His exit velocity, spin rate, pop time or launch angle are all chapters for which to study. Ask the why, hypothesize and conduct the experiment to find the right conclusions on a player. Ultimately, with a postseason matchup like Madison Bumgarner vs. Noah Syndergaard, if we remove their names and throw their data analytics and technical tools into a box and open it, we would find that Syndergaard should be the better performer. This is what scouting is. Being able to know, or reach as close as you are able to knowing as to why Bumgarner will be who he is. It’s not just experience in the postseason either. Bumgarner was once a 20-year old dominant postseason force, so his “experience” doesn’t explain why he won and Syndergaard lost. It goes much deeper than that and that is what your job is as a scout. Find the unexplainable. Find the unknowns. Communication and conviction can sometimes go hand in hand. Communication is also part of information and recon. How you gather your intel is sometimes a direct result of your ability to communicate. A scout who doesn’t ask questions or seek out help or information from others is doomed to fail. It has been said before that you can’t be wrong in your evaluation of a player. What you see is what you see. If you do everything right and do your proper diligence, you can only grade and judge a player based on what you know and saw. Thus, have conviction in your assessment. Don’t let someone talk you out of what you saw. A good scout will challenge you and test you to change your mind or back off of a player. A smart scouting director won’t draft a player if his scouts don’t have conviction in their players. Properly identify a baseball prospect through the process of articulating the proper words and descriptive information that best describes all aspects of a player’s strength and weaknesses. A good report is one that makes the reader feel like he was at the game and can compare him to someone currently in the big leagues. If you’ve done all of that, you’ve done your job. Now, the rest is up to the player.

Thing is Abom... we don't have to give anything up for EE, we'd love Votto but... the cost?

Yes... zero is appropriate.