Name-checked.

I’m working on that top ten cooking mistakes post I promised in chat – wrote six of them on the plane today – but in the meantime, here’s an interesting and slightly testy interview with St. Louis’ scouting director/director of player development Jeff Luhnow. Luhnow name-checked me in the following answer (the bolded section is the question, the unbolded section is his answer):

Pete Kozma wasn’t considered to be a “sexy” pick at the time he was drafted. A lot of different media outlets said that while he had solid tools across the board, other then power, he possessed no real standout tool. Yet so far Pete has been played extremely well. Are you surprised at how well Pete’s performed early?

If we wanted a “sexy” pick, we would read Baseball America, read Keith Law’s articles, and pick based on their opinions. But we don’t, and neither do any other clubs, because while the journalists are doing a good job of expressing their opinions based on the information they have, we have to live and die with our selections and the future of the organization is impacted by these picks. If the journalist is wrong, he just admits it (maybe) and keeps writing about the next guy or the next draft. They will still sell papers or get eyeballs. If we are wrong, we’ve missed a huge opportunity to make our organization better, and nobody wants to do that.

He’s dead on about two things there. One is that my process is nowhere near as thorough as a major league club’s process is on high draft selections. I might see a player twice – once over the summer, once in the spring – and the depth of my evaluation doesn’t match what a good scout will do by seeing a player five or six times just within a spring. I don’t have to worry as much about makeup and barely think about signability outside of the context of projecting the first round.

The other point Luhnow scores is on the consequences of a bad evaluation. If a scouting director doesn’t have productive drafts, he could lose his job. If my rankings turn out to be totally off base, the most I’ll lose is some credibility, and some pride as well, since I actually like to be right now and then.

Where he’s wrong … well, I think I’ve hit on it above. My looks are limited, and I make evaluations based on what I’ve got, but I take the task very seriously because I find it embarrassing when I make a poor evaluation, and I know that I do have to answer to the readers, including members of a lot of front offices and a lot of scouting departments. Their respect for me as an analyst is predicated on me getting stuff right, and making sure my opinions are backed up by strong arguments. And I feel an obligation to the wider readership to present objective opinions backed up by strong arguments, fact-based wherever possible.

I also think it’s silly to say that “the journalist” (first time I’ve been called that, I believe) won’t admit he’s wrong. If Pete Kozma turns into an above-average major-league player, of course I’ll admit I was wrong. And if I was foolish enough to try to finesse the bad evaluation, I doubt that futureredbirds or vivaelbirdos would let me get away with it anyway.

Luhnow, who is among the most intelligent people I’ve met in this industry, is using a lot of small verbal cues to put the “journalists” in their place, but really, isn’t our place on the outside anyway? I could shout from the rooftop that Pete Kozma was the worst first-round pick ever (he wasn’t), but it won’t have any influence on his career as a player. What I write and say doesn’t influence what happens on the field, so for any exec to worry about what I say is a waste of his time.

Comments

  1. Keith, I read the Prospect Handbook by Baseball America, and noticed the foreword was written by Theo Epstein. Do you have any idea how many GM’s read BA?

  2. I think you got this totally right. He shouldn’t be worrying about what you write and nothing you have written would ever suggest that you think he should. Another small point is that the idea that an MLB scouting director would ever rely on BA for scouting is ridiculous because that would just create an echo chamber since most of the BA stuff, at least according to what I understand, is a compilation of what different MLB scouts tell them about their perceptions of players. Thus listening to them would create a kind of feedback loop that would be very unhealthy.

  3. At least he didn’t say: “Who the hell is Keith Law, anyways?”

  4. I don’t see Luhnow’s response putting anyone “in their place”. Rather, I think he’s refering to anyone who implied the pick was unsexy. He merely states that he (and his cohorts) have more to lose in the draft than a journalist and, thusly, research the draft pool much deeper. As they should. I think his only comment mildly directed toward you (and your cohorts) is that he had much more data at his disposal when evaulating/making picks. The information you have on prospects, more often than note, could/should contain a “small sample size” disclaimer. While I’m a loyal reader and believe you to be one of the better baseball “journalist” out there, your response stinks of defensive. And are you really implying all “journalists” (read: talking heads) admit when they are wrong? To their reads? C’mon…

  5. Keith,

    Later in the interview with Luhnow, he discusses the “piggyback” or “tandem” approach the Cards are using in the lower minor league levels to get innings for starters. Are any other organizations using this approach? Is it too early in the execution to discuss success /failure of the approach? Your general thoughts…