Questions re the Ringer article on the Reds minor leagues 93-2008

[Cooper]

Really enjoyed the article from the The Ringer site.

A couple of things i took away:

1. Clubs believe there's no such thing as a ballplayer with MLB skills that's hidden in the USA.

2. Scouts are no longer talent evaluators, instead they are data gathers for the analytics staff.

3. Houston really put the above ideas in place - they cut a ton of scouts.

4. The scouts were poor at evaluating talent - the dart board was almost just as effective. There were many factors that caused this to occur (regression to the mean, poorly planned eval forms, teams not understanding the scouting process, scouts not understanding what makes a good ballplayer, etc...).

Where are the Reds wrt the relatively new ways of accumulating ballplayers? Has Houston made a mistake in letting a good number of scouts go?

[Sea Ray]

You can't rely on analytics alone to find international players and to a certain extent, high school players. How are you going to use analytics to decide to sign a 16 or 17 yr old out of the Dominican Republic?

[Cooper]

Sea Ray- your right, the article was referring to cutting scouts in the states. I kind of inferred, but didn't make it super clear that this is the case.