The case of the missing Scouting Report player ratings in today’s analytic Baseball world


If you’ve read the annual THE SCOUTING REPORT or THE SCOUTING NOTEBOOK that Harper & Row, STATS Inc., and The Sporting News published from 1983-2006 you know just how in-depth the scouting reports were that evaluated player “tools”.

THE SCOUTING NOTEBOOK

Unfortunately those publications are no longer published and while Baseball Prospectus is a great read, it doesn’t completely replace the detailed scouting reports that THE SCOUTING REPORT and THE SCOUTING NOTEBOOK provided.  Yes, we have stats and lots of them.  Baseball statistics have never been as accessbile as they are now.   It was a totally different Baseball world in 1982 when the first Bill James Baseball Abstract was published for national distribution and the Elias Sports Bureau tried to claim Baseball statistics as it’s own private domain.

There never has been a Baseball publication that provided player ratings like the incredible Rick Barry Pro Basketball Scouting Report, but perhaps DYNASTY League Baseball is the closest thing to it for Baseball in terms of providing Major League Baseball player rating grades.

A tremendous amount of effort goes into the creation of the DYNASTY League Baseball season player ratings to give you the best possible replication of a players strengths and weaknesses.   I’ve been rating and grading players for 27 years for not only each season player card set for Pursue the Pennant and DYNASTY League Baseball since the 1984 season, but also several past seasons including 1957, 1967, 1970-1974, 1982 and three Greatest Teams sets from 1906-1988.   That’s about 35, 000 different players and when you multiply that times about a dozen or so player ratings per player that comes to almost 500,000 individual player ratings.  OK, Dan Treuden has been helping rate the pitchers for quite a few years, but still that is a lot of players and player ratings to evaluate!

You can now find almost of these player ratings easily accesible at: DYNASTYLeagueBaseball.com

Most player ratings are based on a 1-10 scale or A-F including A+, B+ and C+ (Error ratings go from 5-100) to give you a broad spectrum of ratings and precise statistical accuracy using historical scales.  The player ratings are derived from thoroughly researched and tested formulas and computer calculations. 

In some cases though, you simply can’t devise a formula that will take all factors into account.  Defensive Range ratings are a good example.  If you only used a players zone rating (UZR), you would come up with many misleading ratings simply because this defensive metric doesn’t account for variables such as the vagaries of the scorer’s zone judgement, the adjacent fielder, how hard the ball is hit, size of the outfield and defensive shifts.  There isn’t any single defensive metric that is reliable enough to be used alone to assign defensive range ratings.  That’s why it is important to look at more than one defensive metric and use “old school” scouting reports as a cross check.  In the case of DYNASTY League Baseball, the primary defensive metrics used are Bill James Range factor, John Dewan’s Baseball Bible plus minus and Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR).

It’s this kind of effort combined with the foremost knowledge and insight into the game that makes DYNASTY League Baseball’s player ratings the most realistic of any baseball simulation.