Luke Harker's Resume

In baseball, scouting is everything.  That is obviously said within every sport, but baseball is the most drastic.  The reason for this is because players are being drafted right outside of high school.  Players are even being signed internationally younger than 16 years old.  So how do these scouts view these players and value their talent? They use the 20-80 scale.  This is a tool used to evaluate and project the current and potential skills of a player.  The scale is based on their major league talent, where a value of 50 would be average.  Knowing that, 20 would be the lowest ability value, while a 80 would be the highest ability value that a player will have.   Players are values based on specific categories, and those categories are brought together and the player is given one main value.  A player truly has two values for each aspect of their game: present value and future value.  When it comes draft time, it is good to allow all management to have a number to identify which players will have the potential to be successful at the major league level.

When evaluating a player’s game and skills, they are rated on values that include hitting, power,  running, fielding, and throwing.   An example of this is a player with good fielding ability and a very strong arm might be given a score of 65 or 70 for their fielding.  This would be considered well above average.  A player who happens to strike out more but with raw power projections might be given a score of 55 or 60 on their hitting.  A scout usually separates many categories to be able to determine the values of a player.  An instance of this would be splitting power into game power and raw power.  Where game power is the power a player is able to show off during a game and raw power is what they can show off in a home run derby.  A player like Austin Riley who everyone knew was a power hitter, but all the power he had was raw.  It wasn’t until the 2021 season where he was able to show it in his game by mashing 33 home runs, and another 38 in 2022.  Other categories split up would be fielding with glove ability, arm and oftentimes speed.  Hitting takes in the power, like stated previously, along with contact and eye ability.  These are just some examples of the many ways that scouts split categories to value a player.

The biggest way they value players is based off of body projections, ie. height and weight.  They also take into consideration current mechanics and if they are able to be manipulated to act like a major league player.  Future value of a player takes current value into consideration.  For example, if a player was to be the best player in all of high school, they may be projected much higher than a player who is simply more athletic.  The reason for this is because if you shrink the scale down to a high school level from a major league level, a player could have 70s or 80s across the board.  Another big variable taken into consideration is the passion for the game, and the intelligence to change how you play the game currently to a possible better way. 

One question that you may ask yourself is why use a scale rated 20 to 80 rather than one that goes from 0-100.   This is actually because a player’s range of ability is able to be valued better on the 20-80 scale.  This is because, like I said previously, an average value for a player on this scale is 50.  If we were to take 50 on the 0-100 scale, the value of the player would be considered below average.  This is because a 0-100 scale is a linear scale.  This means that it is a fixed increment not allowing for a scout to consider that player as average. When we think about the 0-100 scale, it is mostly used in schools, so a funny idea to think about is if you say that 100-90 is an A, 89-80 is a B, 79-70 is  a C, and so on and so forth, a 50 would be considered a failure and below average.  Obviously there isn’t direct correlation there, but the outside person would be more confused if the baseline of being average was 50.  The 20-80 scale increments of 5 show true ability. It can be considered more of a logarithmic scale, due to the slight increments being more drastic to the value of a player.

Just like any number scale, the 20-80 scale is not a perfect system.  Since it is also done by human scouts, it is subject to personal opinions and biases.  Some scouts may value certain numbers more than others and vice versa.  Though, it is a good tool to use when comparing the present and future values of players.

Overall, the 20-80 scale is a better tool for evaluating baseball players because it better reflects the range of ability found among major league players and provides a more nuanced view of a player’s ability. It allows scouts to accurately assess a player’s skills and project their future potential, which is essential for teams looking to draft and develop players.