The best GMs are the ones that really integrate their stats with what their scouts are seeing, imo.

When I said “Stats don’t tell you the likelihood of a player becoming great at a major league level”, I meant that in a present day sense. I didn’t say stats WON’T tell us the the likelihood of a player’s success in the future. For all we know, in the future point-and-shoot cameras could be tracking the spins on baseballs, computer programs could be analyzing the glide path a bat takes when a player swings it, the reaction time from pitch to swing. There is a lot of potential for stats in the future, but currently stats don’t tell us much of anything, especially on a high school or college level where the emphasis on scouting is really high and the emphasis on any kind of statistical analysis is really low. I’m not saying any kind on emphasis on statistical analysis should be disregarded, but if you are scouting a really projectable player, you would expect to see good results from statistical analysis.

Scouts can be wrong. But that’s just that. Scouting isn’t perfect. I never said it is. All I said is that statistics cannot replace scouting at this point in time. But scouts do not always evaluate talent equally. This is where an emphasis on scouting is important. My main point is not putting an emphasis on more scouting than statistics, but putting more emphasis on hiring scouts who have the best track record at finding talent, have the best track record at finding needles in a haystack, and have the ability to analyze a player from top to bottom and evaluate potential weeknesses more effectively than any old average scout can do. And that was the main point of my 1st post. Not that I want less statistics, but that I want better scouts. And that could give us an advantage over all the other teams who are hiring savvy GM’s.