Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball by Christopher J. Phillips

Louis Menand's review of Scouting and Scoring in the April 8, 2019 New Yorker does not reflect accurately the content of Phillips's book.  Phillips does not compare stats with scouting reports, as Menand suggests, but treats scouting and scoring almost completely separately.  As Menand points out "more than a thousand baseball players are drafted every year, and less than ten per cent of them ever play in the majors," and, most of those are not there for very long. What scouts try to do is come up with a measurement of  "overall future potential," an awkward and redundant term based on the fact that a great high school or college player may or may not become a major leaguer, a very different situation from football or basketball.  What so-called sabermetricians (another awkward term) do is something very different, i.e., they figure out obscure and arcane numerical values of players who, in most cases, have already played in the major leagues.

Menand confusingly conflates "scoring" with numbers crunching, while Phillips is mostly talking about the history of keeping score from the very beginning of professional baseball to today, including a fascinating history of how errors have been decided over the years. Menand's review is less about Phillips's book and more about Michael Lewis's Moneyball, a book about how Billy Beane of the Oakland A's used new ways of evaluating performance to find relatively inexpensive players.  Of course now all teams use the statistics that Beane pioneered and scouting is no longer done by each team but is centralized in the Major League Scouting Bureau.

All of this leads to some major dilemmas for those of us who love the beauty of the game, as misused analytics have lead to extraordinary levels of home runs, strikeouts and walks and a considerably diminished number of bunts and stolen bases (considered too risky).  Baseball is televised more poorly than ever and some further absurd rule changes are under consideration to speed up a game that exists in its own sacred time.  Let's hope the pendulum swings the other way sooner rather than later.