1986 Amateur Draft Discussion

[Jake]

Jeff Juden was a beast. ahem.

[liquidcrash]

Brien Taylor had a chance before he got hurt in a fight and wrecked his career. I heard plenty about him growing up in NC.

[Jistic]

Brien Taylor had a chance before he got hurt in a fight and wrecked his career. I heard plenty about him growing up in NC.

The rookie card I had of him...still do....was supposed to be worth a fortune some day.

[Clay]

I had a Todd Van Poppel and Ben McDonald autographed baseball...

Ended up going "Sandlot" with the McDonald ball one day and just playing ball with it when we couldn't come up with another one.

[Delandis]

So its a case where we want all the scouts to be wrong....or all of them to be right about particular players? Like you said, Clay, maybe we should play with scouting off.

BTW, last year and now this year as soon as the draft list comes around, there are grumbles about a lack of workability for a system that has shown no results, good or bad. Dodson was high on more than a few lists last year, but because he wasn't high on "everyone's" list the scouting is broken? That's trash.

So there should be some "consensus" as to who should be chosen as a top 4 or 5 pick? That's not even close to realistic. Someone who has a scouting staff in Baltimore, MD will not have the same draft list as someone in Los Angeles, CA. They scout different areas, with different techniques and views about someone's potential 3-5 years down the line. And on top of that most of the time scouts are wrong? You can't get anymore grey than that.

[Clay]

Again, I'm missing where people are grumbling or saying it's broken...

[Delandis]

Again, I'm missing where people are grumbling or saying it's broken...

I know, Clay. Its just me.

[Delandis]

Anyway, I think my scouting staff overshoots on pitchers and undershoots on batters. In their eyes, there have been an abundance of top pitchers but no real depth of hitters.

[Delandis]

There's one pitcher who has a 5 in contact and eye potential. I'm looking forward to shortlisting him just to see if he gets a chance to play and hit in the IL.

[Jake]

I think what people are saying prez is that it's perfectly fine if scouts are wrong on a guy. But that on the cream of the crop, scouts should all at least agree that he is going to be serviceable. For example, with a guy like A-Rod, every team would have taken him at #1. With a guy like Todd Van Poppel - every team had him rated as a top prospect. I think we would all be fine if there was some variation - like some people had a pitcher 7-8-7 and other scouts had him at 5-5-5, but at least he's serviceable across the board. If every scout has a guy 8-8-8 and he turns out to be a complete bust, that's fine. That's realistic. But half the league thinking he is the second coming of Sidd Finch and the other half thinking he couldn't cut it in rookie league - that doesn't happen.

And you are right - there is going to be variety from a scout in Maryland and a scout in CA. But in real life, teams have more than one scout that they can base an opinion off of. So sure, some crack head scout is going to say Van Poppel was a 3-2-3 pitcher, but the other 50 that scouted him for that team all had him at 6-6-6... so the team would have rated him as a whole as a top prospect. And with OOTP 8, we had the possibility of doing that since we had 6 scouts per team. So it was ok if one scout said Curt Dodson was 3-4-3-3-2, because you could make an educated decision since you had 5 other opinions. Now that we only have one view - which is ok with me - it should be more centralized.... or averaged out... or something. Am I making sense?

Basically - everyone is right. You are right that not every scout is going to agree on a guy. And everyone else is right in that every team's consensus on a guy should be similar for at least the top 5-10 guys. Also, the baseball draft is 60+ rounds. Ours is 10. So in real life, when a scout has one guy as a 4th rounder, and another has a guy as a 8th rounder, that's not as glaring of a difference as a 2nd rounder vs. a 6th in our draft.

Or, in our case, the first pick overall vs. an undrafted free agent.

[Delandis]

Its cool man. I'm not really mad or anything, its just I don't know how to convey that through a message board. BTW, everyone should give the computer-aided draft list a chance. You'll get a list of guys that your scout and the OSA agree on....somewhat.

[Delandis]

I think part of the issue is that I'm new to the game so I wasn't indoctrinated to the "old ways" of micromanaging 50 millions scouts opinions.

[Delandis]

Can someone explain the or/and operators for setting up the draft list?

[Clay]

I don't think we're using the in-game draft list this year.

I thought we were using something that Pawtucket was writing or tweaking or something.

[mahoney2]

We're using the online one again, I'm just working with andrew to tweak the source code to enable "fuzzing" of the autodraft, so it doesn't use the real # all the time.