An in-depth look at the intersection of judgment and statistics in
baseball
Scouting and scoring are considered fundamentally different ways of
ascertaining value in baseball. Scouting seems to rely on experience and
intuition, scoring on performance metrics and statistics. In Scouting
and Scoring, Christopher Phillips rejects these simplistic divisions.
He shows how both scouts and scorers rely on numbers, bureaucracy,
trust, and human labor to make sound judgments about the value of
baseball players. Tracing baseball's story from the nineteenth century
to today, Phillips explains that the sport was one of the earliest
fields to introduce numerical analysis, and new methods of data
collection were supposed to enable teams to replace scouting with
scoring. But that's not how things turned out. From the invention of
official scorers and Statcast to the creation of the Major League
Scouting Bureau, Scouting and Scoring reveals the inextricable
connections between human expertise and data science, and offers an
entirely fresh understanding of baseball.