August 25, 2010

BP Unfiltered

Wanna be a scout?

by Colin Wyers

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As he has done the past several years, Tom Tango is running his annual Fan Scouting Report, a chance for you to provide your subjective observation of what you see a player doing. For those of us who don't work for an MLB team, it's a really unique sort of resource to use to look at MLB players.

If you have a few minutes, please, take some time and go ahead and give your input on the players you get a chance to watch regularly. It's a fun exercise, and the more people participating, the better the data is.

Now, I have seen some people question the usefulness of the FSR - it is, after all, a largely subjective exercise. And we're asking baseball fans to act as scouts. I think we can all acknowledge that fans are not as good of scouts as professional baseball scouts, after all. So why do it?

And my answer is this - because it provides us with a different perspective. It allows us a chance to look at what's going on in a different way than we may have before. And we can learn new things from that. And I think there's a lot more subjective data floating around in baseball analysis than we care to admit; the FSR is subjective, yes, but it happens to be honest about it.

And with that, I'll go ahead and shut up - best not to say too much, lest I accidentally influence how someone votes. But it's a fun dataset to play with, and a little later on in the season I hope to tool around with it a bit and share some of what it's capable of doing with y'all. Until then - a poll you can feel good about voting early and often in.

Colin Wyers is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @cwyers
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