THE PROMISED LANDE: Scout Day Vital for Harvard

Wednesday was a special day across the river.

It’s the only day of the year when there are more spectators standing on O’Donnell Field than sitting in the stands. They wear pleated khakis and golf shirts, with a smattering of ball caps embroidered with the logos of the teams they represent. Some look like they were just playing ball last year. Others look like it’s been a while. But they all look like they’ve played, like the ball field is the only place they’ve ever really known.

They cluster together like 12-year old boys at a middle school dance, making small talk because they know each other and because there’s not much else to do while staring at what they’re actually there to see—the boys in the red caps.

Wednesday was Scout Day for the Harvard baseball team.

Ever since the publication of Michael Lewis’ best-seller Moneyball, scouts have gotten a bad rap. For those of you that don’t know, Lewis pits the “old school” scouts that project how good a player will be based on tools against the “new school” sabermetricians whose projections are based on statistics, especially statistics derived from larger sample sizes like those available for college players.

Now Ivy League types—that’s you—love the sabermetric approach. And why wouldn’t they? It’s logical, quantitative and most importantly, it’s open to everyone. No playing experience—or specific baseball knowledge—necessary.

The irony, though, is that while Ivy League alums like Red Sox GM Theo Epstein (who didn’t play sports at Yale, but did write about them for the Yale Daily News) and Los Angeles GM Paul DePodesta ’95 (who only played JV baseball at Harvard) have embraced sabermetrics as a valuable tool, current Ivy League ball players are much more likely to get drafted by front offices that still rely heavily on tools-based scouting.

Sabermetricians, like all statisticians, must base any projection on large amounts of reliable data, which are difficult to accumulate for Ivy League players. Their seasons are shorter and the quality of competition compared to major college conferences is lower by some difficult-to-quantify amount.

There is less data, and it is less trustworthy. I’m only a month into Stat 100, but I can tell you that’s not good if you’re trying to reduce risk.

Consider, for example, junior infielder Zak Farkes. Farkes was taken in the 39th round by the Boston Red Sox as a draft eligible sophomore last June, after a season in which he batted .342 with a .425 OBP and a .691 slugging percentage in 152 at-bats.

Compare those numbers to those of Landon Powell, a catcher from South Carolina that was selected in the first round of the same draft by the most famous figure of stats-based scouting, Oakland GM Billy Beane. Powell batted .330-.427-.611 in 270 at-bats. If you make the overly simplifying assumption that OPS is an indicator of success, Farkes’ numbers are better. But they are also more difficult to trust.

Powell had twice as many at-bats, and most of them came against Southeastern Conference pitching. For sabermetricians, scouting Ivy Leaguers poses the same problem as scouting high schoolers, though it’s less pronounced—there just isn’t as much reliable data to work from.

So where does that leave us?

At O’Donnell Field on Wednesday. At Scout Day.

Here the lives of Ivy baseball players more or less depend on men that Ivy League types have been known to look down on since the arrival of Moneyball. It is the scouts—the men like these, casually jotting down notes while nestled between the back stop and the large protective net behind home plate—that are responsible for Ivy Leaguers going high in the draft.

It wasn’t a computer printout that propelled Princeton outfielder B.J. Szymanski’s name to the top of prospect lists last spring. It was one sweet swing at a 95 mile per hour offering from Old Dominion uber-prospect Justin Verlander.

After the ball cleared the fence, all Szymanski had to do was stand there—all six feet five inches of his two-sport frame—and watch the 100 scouts in attendance, hungry for college position players, jot in their notebooks that this kid had the tools. He was big. He was fast. He could play defense, probably, since he was an all-Ivy wide receiver. And besides, he could hit for power.

In 176 more at-bats, Szymanski only hit five more home runs. He finished the season with a .433 OBP and .610 slugging percentage. His stats were less impressive than Farkes’, were dwarfed by Trey Hendricks’ ’04 numbers and on top of everything else, it was only his second year of college ball.

Beane probably wouldn’t have drafted Szymanski in the first few rounds under penalty of death. Too much risk for that much money.

But the “old school” Reds selected him in the second round, paid him $725,000 and sent him to rookie ball. Even today—even for teams like DePodesta’s Dodgers and Epstein’s Red Sox—statistics are only a tool. What scouts see still matters a lot more than Moneyball fanatics realize. The scouts are still the gatekeepers.

And that’s why Scout Day is a special day.

That’s why the team chatters more than they would at a regular practice. That’s why everyone overthrows everything trying to show arm strength. That’s why everyone—even if you’re a little hurt—takes the mound.

Former president Dwight D. Eisenhower once told a story of a childhood fishing trip with a friend, and as boys do, they began to talk about what they wanted to be when they grew up.

“It told him I wanted to be a real major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner,” Eisenhower said. “My friend said he’d like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.”

Deep down, just like Eisenhower we all dream of being big leaguers. And that’s the allure of Scout Day. On Wednesday, no Harvard player got six figures with a single swing like Szymanski, but they may have earned a second look. A scout may have put their name in a database, and that same scout may come back this spring. The player might not get drafted, and even if he did, he probably will never reach the big leagues.

But there’s still a chance, and that, by itself, makes Scout Day worth the walk across the river.

—Staff writer Lande A. Spottswood can be reached at spottsw@fas.harvard.edu. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.