Do you think the use of sabermetrics to analyze major league players is harmful to the scouting profession?
Oh I think so. But I think it’s also cyclic. The Kansas City Royals are a great example. They had a staff of probably fifteen, eighteen, twenty scouts. Excellent staff. They had brought the Royals up to snuff. They were one of the better organizations in Major League Baseball. But somebody convinced Kauffman at some point that they could save money if they joined a scouting bureau and kept their five or six best scouts. And then just follow the scouting bureau across the country. They did that and immediately the farm system collapsed. I’d have to go back and look at notes, but I think I’m correct in this…they signed one player in five or six years that they followed the scouting bureau. They signed [basically] only one player in those years who was a major league regular. They looked around and said, “Man, the cupboard is bare.” So they put a staff back together and in the first year they signed Marc Gubizca and Bret Saberhagen, which wasn’t a bad pair to start off with. Of course, th
