There’s many different theories and ways to go about scouting for the draft. This is in part what makes a sim league great. I think to have success you need to do some sort of draft list. Personally, I copy the draft class into an Excel file and put the draftees through a rating system that factors in Overall/Peak, Age, and Health. Then starts the process of going through each of the 210 draftees to start omitting players and coming up with a target list.
Position Players
An interesting thing to ask if you could only have on stat, what would it be? For me and as far as positional players go, it’d be on-base percentage. So for the position side of things I’m most paying attention to the player’s Eye and to an extent the Contact rating. If they can’t get on base then being a Gold Glove defender or having great power potential means little. I’d have to say defense means the least to me for draftees. I do value Defense, but in the end if you can’t hit you can’t win games. I tend to value Power per the position (i.e. a 1B with poor power has little value to me).
Going back to the on-base idea, you have to figure out what type of Eye the player has. Is it a high BB/high K or low BB/low K. You can get a good idea of this by comparing the player’s BB and K numbers to others from his level. The Skills tab will also give you a clue as to how much the player strikes out. In order to be a good Hit and Run guy you have to put the ball in play (aka not strike out). So the better the Hit and Run skill is for the player, the lower his strikeout numbers should be.
Age is another big factor. Younger guys are just more appealing as they should have more time to develop and is where you could find a 65/80 type on draft day who is 16 or 17 and then reap the benefits of continued development and wind up with an 85 or 90 rated player when done developing.
Pitchers
Again with the, “if you could only have one stat” I’d choose HR/9. This is a stat I don’t see as heavily used in sim league and is usually the answer as to why a GM can’t figure out why his star pitcher has a 5.00 ERA or the bottom of the rotation rated player is having a stellar year. So what is a good HR/9 number? For MLB numbers I’ve always lived by wanting pitchers to stay under 1.00 HR/9. Anything under 0.75 is absolutely great and anything creeping up over 1.20 is starting to become a problem. So as you can see small differences can mean a pitcher has a high HR/9 or a low HR/9. For draftees I look at their final two years of amateur ball and use 0.50 HR/9 for high school pitchers and 0.60 HR/9 for college pitchers.
It’s not perfect, but I have noticed a correlation to HRs allowed as an amateur and as a pro. It’s a stat that has led me to label pitchers from the 2017 draft, Darin Choudhury and Greg Attaway, as high HR risks – removing them from my draft board. I think a mistake a lot of people make is valuing GB% too much. It doesn’t just tell you the pitcher’s groundball to flyball ratio. It factors in groundballs, flyballs, and strikeouts. So naturally a high strikeout pitcher won’t have a good GB%, but it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a HR risk. Take Donovan Pace for example. His career GB% is at 32.6% and he has a very good 0.79 HR/9. When you consider that his 1853 career strikeouts are 33.9% of his total outs, it makes his GB% look pretty good.
As with position players age means a lot, the younger the player means the more likelihood of years to develop. For me anyone ages 21+ and under the overall of 60 is probably too far behind where they should be to be draftable. I’m also constantly looking for RPs that could be candidates to convert into SPs. The main factor is control and the second most important factor is the pitcher’s repertoire. I feel in order to be a successful SP you need the following; one 80+ pitch, one 75+ pitch, and one 65+ pitch. For a RP, though, I feel you only need one 80+ pitch and one 65+ pitch.
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So maybe this has helped or maybe this has been incoherent rambling. In the end I don’t feel there’s one or even two things that you can zone in on to judge if the player is going to be good or not. You should look at how his stats reflect the ratings mogul has given him and how his peak and age suggest his develop will play out.
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