Hello, Everybody

Hello, my name is Brendan Gawlowski. I could do the Troy McClure thing and list all of my previous bylines, but I’d prefer to just say that it’s a pleasure returning to FanGraphs after nearly four years away. Back in early 2022, I took a job as a pro scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates and I’ve been scouting minor leaguers ever since. In a few cases, I had a role in bringing players to Pittsburgh. It was a blast and I am grateful for the experience.

But for as much fun as I had, the job wore on those around me. I spent more than 80 nights on the road last year, a grueling schedule that’s rough on families in any situation and was increasingly unreasonable in mine. When I joined the Pirates, I was 30, childless, and ready to stretch my legs after two years of lying low and masking up. In the intervening years, a series of significant events made it hard to balance my passion for scouting with my responsibilities at home. My wife and I had a baby. A year later, we found ourselves facing a cancer diagnosis and long-term treatment. Our parents started battling their own medical problems. Through it all, I tried to be around as much as I could, but the realities of my schedule led to stressful compromises. The logistics of doing the job while being more than a replacement-level family member were hard to manage. This past July, I pulled an all nighter and drove from Corpus Christi to Houston to catch a 6 AM flight back home to Seattle, stepped inside for a quick shower, and then bolted two hours north to Bellingham for a birthday party. During that last stretch, my wife made her annual gentle suggestion that another path was possible.

And what a path this is. FanGraphs’s reputation as a leader in baseball analysis is well earned, particularly in the prospect space. For as long as he’s been at it, Eric has done an incredible job of covering the landscape. From my perspective, the breadth, depth, and nuance of his analysis is worth the price of a Membership all by itself. I learned plenty from him before, during, and after our time working together in my first stint here. The listing for this position came at the perfect time and I applied with gusto: I loved working as a scout, but the opportunity to join Eric in a full-time capacity, to continue evaluating baseball players while also getting another couple of months at home, was too enticing to pass up.

The timing was right for another reason as well. Beyond the “follow your passion without becoming a stranger to your dog” angle, I’ve also felt the itch to write a little bit. About players, certainly: I’m looking forward to gushing about Kevin McGonigle’s talent and weighing the merits of throwing a Ben Zobrist comp on Roldy Brito in public. Perhaps even more though, I want to write about the game and the industry. I learned a lot in my time with the Pirates and grew immensely as an evaluator. I want to share what I can from those experiences.

I also want to write about scouting itself. It has always felt a little silly that some folks associate the job with the stock characters they saw in Moneyball, as if scouts are a group of geriatric luddites scheming ways to keep Jonah Hill out of the kitchen. In reality, they’re an endangered species as teams shrink headcount and increasingly prioritize objective measurements. The scouting community has lost dozens of jobs in recent years, and should next year’s CBA negotiations result in another lockout, it will almost certainly deal another blow to the industry. In this world, we’re all line items on someone’s balance sheet, and in baseball, scouts are among the first squeezed off the spreadsheet.

That would be understandable, if still sad, had the juice well and truly been squeezed from subjective evaluation, if we’d collectively reached the point where a player’s biomechanical information and performance on the field gave us all we need to make sound decisions. It’s taking nothing away from the quantitative methodologies we have to say that we’re not there yet. Not even close. Holistic player evaluation is the right cocktail, and while every franchise strives to do that to at least some degree, teams are increasingly leaning hard on one of those ingredients at the expense of the other.

We lose something essential when we diminish the importance of subjective looks. You can’t possibly sit and listen to Sean McNally and Doug Strange talk about hitting, or Jeremy Powell and Andrew Lorraine evaluate leg mechanics, and conclude that their perspective belongs outside the room. I would argue the opposite: In a world where teams are on an increasingly even analytical playing field — I’ll pause here to direct everyone’s attention to the bottom of the standings as a way of noting the immense consequences for those that have fallen behind in this particular arms race — good pro scouting can be a competitive advantage.

I am eager to write about why that is. I want to cover the ways in which data can be used to evaluate and project baseball players, and also where and how it falls short or can even mislead. Through that lens, I’m excited to discuss prospects and the minor leagues in ways that will inform and entertain readers. In particular, I want to write about modern player development, explore how teams use evaluative and acquisition models, and highlight the enduring importance of good scouting in an increasingly analytical industry.

Before getting started, a final note for Pirates fans: It was an honor to be a part of your team. I didn’t need to visit often to see that the city loves its sports and will back a winning baseball club to the hilt. The baseball operations department is a talented and competitive group desperate to build a winner in Pittsburgh. I’ll be rooting for their, and your, success from afar.