My Worst Report: Lessons Learned From the Field

Scout long enough, and you’ll write every kind of report. Good ones, bad ones, accurate projections for the wrong reasons, misfires despite a good process. Like baseball itself, evaluating players is hard. You’ll be right plenty, but everyone has whiffs. While some reports miss the mark more than others, the ones that sting most are the ones you don’t learn from. Even the worst reports can turn into a positive if they change your thinking or provide a valuable lesson along the way.

Sometimes, these lessons are simple. Bet on the athletes. Be leery of the guy with a 55% contact rate. Others come in waves, sometimes over an extended period of time. Such was the case with Richy Valdez, a Royals pitcher with a live arm who was both the subject of the report with the greatest misalignment between the grade I submitted and what wound up happening, and the bridge between two lessons that made me a better evaluator than if I’d never come across him. We’ll come back to him in a second.

Lesson One: You Have To Like Players

“You can’t just go org the complex.”

It was my first year and one of Pittsburgh’s more experienced scouts was on a Zoom with me, trying to teach me how to evaluate a rookie ball team. I had, in fact, recently doled out a bunch of org and non-prospect grades to a complex-level team. At the time, I hadn’t thought twice. The gap between the complex and Low-A is vast, a bigger jump in talent than any other in the minors. Good players in Arizona and Florida can be in short supply, and even good rosters probably only have a handful of future big leaguers. Get stuck with a bad team, and you can go a week without seeing an above-average big league tool, much less a real prospect. Why wouldn’t you org the complex?

The crosschecker sympathized with my arguments — that I hadn’t seen many prospects, that a lot of the guys were very old or very raw — but he held firm in his advice.

“It is a fact that most of the players at that level will not make the major leagues. But we need to find tools. We need to find players who can make it. People get better.”

It was a difficult message to fully internalize. Coming from the public side after my first stint at FanGraphs, I felt an urge to round down on players, to err on the side of saying a guy can’t play rather than giving him the benefit of the doubt. I can’t say for sure whether colleagues here and elsewhere felt or feel similarly, but the incentives seem to align that way. Readers, understandably, want to know who will be good in the future. On the writer’s end, to express skepticism widely is to play the odds.

It’s a different equation for teams. Clubs don’t have the luxury of waiting to see which rookie baller can handle Double-A pitching. The guys who can will either be unavailable or very, very expensive to acquire by that point, so if you want to find the next Junior Caminero, you better do it while he’s still swinging at spin in the other batter’s box. And that requires evaluators of all stripes to embrace a degree of uncertainty.

“If you go down there and write ‘org’ every time, you will be right more often than anyone in the department,” the crosschecker told me. “But we’ll need to find a new scout.”

Lesson Two: It Can Be Hard To Find Players on the Complex

It sounds a little silly, but the conditions at the ballpark can play tricks on evaluators, and both the Florida and Arizona complexes present challenges for scouts. Raw players, warm climes, a dead atmosphere, and a low level of play make for a product that bears little resemblance to the games fans are accustomed to seeing on television. Pitchers usually have underwhelming stuff, no idea where the ball is going, or both, while for their part, hitters have little power, no feel for contact, or both. Pop flies find grass as often as they land in gloves, and infielders sometimes lose high choppers in the sun. The scorekeeper might need your help deciding between a hit and an error, and they may or may not have accurately logged all of the night’s substitutions. On a good day, there’s a pitch clock. The mid-inning music is very loud. If you’re not careful, you can get sucked into a conversation with other scouts or team staffers in a way that diverts your attention further. It’s a difficult environment in which to lock in.

There’s talent there, but sometimes it’s well camouflaged. This is especially true in Arizona during the summer, when game-time temperatures routinely reach triple digits, and even more so if you’re tasked with a squad like the 2023 ACL Chicago White Sox. It’s giving nothing away to say that that team simply wasn’t very good. Of the 30 Sox I saw that week in early June, only five remain in the organization two and a half years later. Just one, Ryan Burrowes, cracked the Honorable Mention section of our White Sox prospect list this offseason. Draftees like Christian Oppor and George Wolkow eventually brought an infusion of talent to the roster later that summer, but the pickings were slim when I scouted them.

Preparing to scout a complex game is a bit like getting ready for a hike. You need to hydrate all day, bring plenty of water and ice to the game on top of that, time your meals just right, and dress smartly. Some orgs require scouts to wear pants on the complex and others don’t, but regardless of the code, even the slower learners only need to wear jeans once. Seats are at a premium, so many scouts bring portable chairs. Sunscreen is a must for day games. I learned the hard way that birds like to sit in the trees that adorn the Dodgers backfields at Camelback Ranch.

For the week, I was primarily responsible for scouting the White Sox, with clearance to write up pitchers on the opposing team who caught my eye as well. There wasn’t much to see. The second night’s starter, Josimar Cousin, was a little interesting as an older Cuban signee with far more pitchability than you normally get on the backfields, but nobody was lighting up the radar gun. Many of the pitchers left were non-prospects I’d seen the year before; I was starting to prepare for a slow week. And it was at this point, heading into the bottom of the second in a dehydrated and overheated stupor, a bit too comfortably ensconced in my camping chair and perhaps a tad restless to write up a player, that the Royals summoned Valdez from the bullpen.

I wish I had a better memory of that night. I recall that Valdez was about six feet tall at the time, of slight build, a little looser and more filled out than your typical 17-year-old arm just up from the DSL. I distinctly remember he touched 95 — nothing special on its own, but practically an oasis for dried-out scouts parched for something to write. His slider flashed average, and he even had a changeup, no sure thing for a teenager. My notes tell me that his slider was a bad fit for his arm slot and that he almost immediately lost his velocity. His game logs reveal that he struck out four and walked one in four innings of work.

This feels too recent for a “back in those days” moment, but the preponderance of video-sharing and data really has ticked up in recent years. At the time, on the day this very young right-hander made his seasonal debut, I had no other video or recent numbers to reference, no way of double checking that my sweat-soaked notes of “flashed a breaking ball” and “chance to clean up the delivery” or “projectable change” passed muster. I just knew that the kid had viable velocity, that I thought he had a path to a tick more and at least one secondary, and that something about him had made me sit up straight while everything else in the desert ambient pushed me to want to lay down and take a nap. With that night’s performance fresh in my mind and a goal to get more aggressive on the complex, I fired up my laptop and put a B2 on the guy — roughly equivalent to the 50 FV we have here, though thankfully with some amount of an implied caveat given the level.

Lesson Three: There’s a Lot To Learn From Your Mistakes

Suffice to say, Valdez does not appear on track to reaching that lofty projection. He’s still 20, so you never know, but in the spring of 2025, less than two years after I submitted my report, the Royals released him; he has not been picked up by another club. As mentioned earlier, scouts miss all the time, and if you’re never playing a 10-2 offsuit, you’re probably not helping your team find talent. Still, there’s a difference between selective aggression and recklessness. Plenty of guys with a B2 or a 50 don’t make it. Most manage to escape the complex, though. I had to figure out what happened.

For Valdez, the rest of the 2023 season went well enough. He posted a 6.92 ERA that summer with an encouraging strikeout rate, and while he was a little wild, he kept his walks under control. It’s not the kind of production that jumps off the page, but it’s totally fine for one of the youngest pitchers in the Fire League (as the ACL has long been disaffectionately known). As he returned to the bump for a second stint in Surprise in 2024, I was curious to follow along.

It didn’t go well:

• May 8: 1.1 innings, two runs, one strikeout, one walk, one homer
• May 23: 1.0 inning, two strikeouts, one walk, one hit batter
• May 30: 0.2 innings, three runs, one hit, one walk, one hit batter
• June 13: 0.1 innings, three runs, three walks

That outing in June wound up being his final affiliated appearance. A look at the tape proved revelatory. The arm strength was still intact (though not substantially better), but with a clearer head and more experience in the rearview mirror, I saw a few things I’d overlooked that first outing. Late separation. Poor timing. Jumpy delivery. Inability to repeat. Still a decent athlete with paths forward, but a project. In the intervening period, more exposure to the level led me to a more nuanced portrait of what I’d actually seen the year before: A lottery ticket, not a likely rotation piece.

Fortunately, the Pirates didn’t dangle Paul Skenes for the young righty out in Surprise. But regardless of what happened with Valdez’s career after I submitted my report, there was a lesson waiting to be found. I may have missed on the player, but the experience inspired reflection, led to valuable conversations with peers, and made me think differently about how to project on young talent in difficult environments.

It’s a moment that resonates again as we mark Prospect Week and the dawn of a new season. We’ll be covering a lot of players in the following weeks and months. We’ll miss on a few forecasts, but the breakdowns will always be thoughtful, measured, and better than what came before. People get better, after all. Prospect writers too.