What Pitchers Might Become
[note]Emerson Hancock was a first-round pick by the Mariners in 2020 who, until about a month ago, hadn't looked like an impactful pitcher:
SEIDLER: Look, Emerson Hancock has broken out — it already happened. We can already pretty confidently call that based on his pitch data. I've been considering writing about Hancock this week because this is a really fascinating player development story. This is a guy who looked terrible for five years after getting drafted, then all of a sudden there's a mechanical change and everything's just fine. He's back to basically the prospect he was when he was drafted.
PATERNOSTRO: The Mariners are top ten — you could probably argue top five — pitching development team in baseball. They had this guy for five years and didn't figure it out until they did. — For All You Kids Out There, Episode 573
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PATERNOSTRO: Pitching especially is not difficult to evaluate per se. We have a lot of data on how to evaluate these things.
SEIDLER: You're not going to love the way I'm going to frame it.
PATERNOSTRO: Probably not.
SEIDLER: It is very easy to evaluate what pitchers are and very difficult to evaluate what pitchers might become. And a large amount of the discourse, including a large amount of prospect reports, way over-indexes what pitchers are instead of what they might become. We fall into that trap — Baseball Prospectus falls into that trap more than I wish we did.
PATERNOSTRO: And you no longer get as much runway to see it before it happens.
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SEIDLER: There's been this, what I would consider fairly toxic discourse within prospect media about how what some people do is not scouting anymore. It's projecting or predicting, as if there's any fucking difference.
PATERNOSTRO: Especially with pitchers — telling them what they are now is useful, but it's not the end of the story.
Prediction is legitimately hard, and we over-index on what pitchers are because we can measure it. But "hard" and "not worth trying" are different things. Superforecasting has been the most important text of my professional life. I picked it up as a high schooler, and the first thing I thought of was scouting and making better baseball predictions.
Inside the orgs themselves, the over-indexing has a different cause. In the years since, I've talked to people at baseball and football organizations about lacking discipline of a lot of scouting operations. The hard part hasn't been in knowing what's broken but managing the transition to better process. Multiple assistant general managers I've talked to knew exactly what needed to change and were unwilling to pay the political cost of doing it.
Look, it's not just a baseball problem. It's a management problem, and the fix in cases I've seen work is closer to Vaccinate CA and parallel units that absorb the old.
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Seidler on the baseball version of the useless-output problem:
SEIDLER: Any moron with Baseball Savant can go on there and read the bars. Anybody in the world now can go into Claude and tell Claude to build a Stuff model. It'll be the same quality stuff model that pretty much everybody else has. That's what a lot of this has turned into. I don't actually think that's very good, but that's just what it is now.
Max Bay, a few days earlier, on what to do about it:
BAY: The baseball discourse on here sucks now. Some great people, but the discourse sucks. It sucks because it's stale. Too much discourse is just authoritative declarations about supposedly solved metas. Healthy environments need real research: EDA, new models, hypothesis testing. My advice for people trying to do something new: stop designing player cards. If you have to design a player card, make it a vehicle for communicating SOMETHING NEW. — @choice_fielder
Later in the episode, on whether David Stearns has had a bad winter for the Mets:
SEIDLER: I think a half hour ago we were discussing whether David Stearns had actually done a good job. It's nine games — we don't know yet. But we do know based on the process. The big things this offseason aren't actually the most important stuff happening. The most important stuff happening was the sorting out of their hitting development and continual growth in pitching development and continued organizational changes.
Baseball, and the people inside and outside of the league, Jeffrey and Jarrett's outputs among them, have taught me a lot about effective process and what makes good and bad organizations. Baseball operations is a useful place to learn about things that matter well beyond baseball.