So you didn’t have time to learn everything about prospects in time for your first dynasty draft and just picked names off a list – maybe even a general baseball list rather than a dynasty-specific list. Now you have a bunch of Austins and Chases on your team, and you want to know who you actually drafted, so you start reading some write-ups. You can follow the general baseball stuff like, “Makes hard contact,” but there are some scouting-specific terms and jargon you’re less familiar with. Well, you’re in luck because that’s what this article is all about
How to Read a Scouting Report
Translating the 20-80 Scale
Scouting uses a frankly bizarre rating scale where 20 is the lowest grade and 80 is the highest, in increments of 10 (mostly). To make matters worse, sometimes they’ll shorten it to just saying, “He’s a 5 runner,” or “has a 6 change-up,” and that’s when they use numbers at all.
Fortunately, there are some standard terms they use when referencing a numerical grade
80 – Elite
70 – Double-Plus or Plus-Plus
60 – Plus
55 – Above Average (Oh yeah, they use half grades sometimes too)
50 – Average
45 – Below Average
40 – Minus
20-30 are less consistent but you’ll see things like “Nascent” or “Questionable” for 30s and words like “Poor” and “Non-existent” for 20s. Half grades other than 45/55 are used pretty rarely.
These grades are applied to specific tools, like the traditional five – Hit, Power, Run, Arm, and Glove, as well as the player as a whole. It’s also common to see power split into “Raw” and “Game” to reflect how strong they look in batting practice vs. how much they’re able to get balls over the fence against real pitching. Game power is partly about hit tool but also about approach and swing shape. Hit tool sometimes gets split into components like contact and plate discipline. These separate swing decisions from the effectiveness of those swings.
What do these mean to me?
Even with consistent terminology, these grades don’t mean much if you don’t know what they’re describing. The extremes are pretty easy to describe. Aaron Judge has 80-grade power. Luis Arraez has 80-grade hit but 30 power – he actually hits a lot of doubles and occasional homers. Billy Hamilton, if you’re old enough to remember him, had true 20 power to go with his 80 speed. A more current version of that profile is Rays prospect Chandler Simpson, but you probably haven’t seen him yet.
Average tools are a bit harder because the natural randomness of fast, round objects colliding leads to fluctuations in stat totals. For power, 15 homers is average these days, 20 is above average, and 25-30 is plus. Hit tool is a little easier as we know what league-average batting average is, though it has been trending steadily down over the past 20 years. Plus used to be a .300 hitter, but now that’s only the territory of 70s and 80s, barring a BABIP outlier.
Plus batting average is more like .275-280 now, while a 50 hit gets you around .250. Speed doesn’t directly translate to stolen bases as instincts and willingness to run (both individual and team) are big factors. A below-average runner can swipe a dozen bags if they really want to, while your team’s catcher can have faster sprint speeds than your center fielder but not feel the need to stress their knees any more than they have to.
The Statcast Era
This will get into a deeper dive in Statline Scouting, but it’s worth knowing that with precision pitch, batted ball, and player tracking, we have more objective metrics to reference for some of these skills. Exit Velocity is extremely useful for hitters, as MaxEV is a pretty good measure of Raw Power while Average EV is a good indicator of Game Power. It’s also how I was able to give you that fun fact above about Shea Langeliers’ sprint speed. So now when you see a writer mention hard contact, they’re not just relying on the sound of the ball off the bat.
On the pitching side, Statcast has enabled a revolution in pitch design. Where “Feel for spin” used to be a quality scouts identified, we can now measure RPM on pitches. We also have metrics for pitch shape. You’ve probably heard about “ride” or “vert” on fastballs, which is short for Induced Vertical Break. This is a measure of how much a pitch drops relative to the average pitch of its speed. Back in the day, these were called “Rising fastballs” which us nerds would bristle against because the ball can’t truly go up. Now we can quantify how much a pitch defies expectations and is perceived to rise by dropping less.
Pitch Grades
I focused on hitters in the scouting grades section, but pitchers get graded too. These are typically based on visual judgement and radar guns at levels that don’t have pitch tracking setups, but that technology is rapidly spreading to the lower minors and colleges, so expect some of these to be replaced with statcast phrasing.
Scouts will talk about the characteristics of pitches, like the ride mentioned above. Run is a horizontal break defined as arm-side or glove-side relative to the pitcher. You’ve probably heard of 12-6 curveballs using the numbers on an analog clock to describe the direction the ball breaks. Sweep was used to describe very horizontal sliders long before “the sweeper” became a distinct pitch.
One thing to be careful of when reading a report is when a pitcher “Flashes a plus” pitch. This is a scout saying they have seen good versions of a pitch, but it’s not yet a consistent, reliable offering. It’s useful for projecting upside, just don’t count it as part of a guy’s arsenal yet. You see this most often with a fastball/slider guy flashing a change-up. It’s common for amateurs to only need two good pitches to succeed, while big league starters typically need 3 or more to work through a full major league lineup multiple times.
The hardest thing to judge without being a scout is delivery. I won’t get into the intricacies of these descriptors but their use is typically to describe the efficiency and perceived risk of injury for a pitcher. “Repeatable” is used to express the likelihood of starting and commanding pitches, while “high effort” hints at a future in the bullpen or a 4-5 inning starter. You still see references to body type and guys who are “built like a workhorse” or “have a starter’s frame” vs. being lanky or wiry, but we have seen that those don’t have strong correlations to future roles. Trevor May looks like a lumberjack but ended up in the pen, while everyone thought Chris Sale’s arm would explode into a million pieces.
What does have some truth to it is that tall, lanky pitchers tend to have a harder time figuring out command, with current examples like Triston MacKenzie, AJ Puk, and Sean Hjelle being examples of pretty typical outcomes. Even Randy Johnson struggled with control for the first four years of his career before becoming the Hall of Famer we remember.
Next time: Comps and Profiles
