[Sports Info Solutions] Q&A Steve Williams, Pirates VP and President, Buck O’Neil Professional Scouts & Coaches Association
February 23, 2024
[Sports Info Solutions] Q&A Steve Williams, Pirates VP and President, Buck O’Neil Professional Scouts & Coaches Association
1 comment
Hi, Mark from Sports Info Solutions here (the Defensive Runs Saved folks)
Posting this here because I didn’t think you’d find it otherwise. It’s a Q&A we did on our podcast with Pirates VP Steve Williams about his career and about scouting.
I liked this part
*Bobby: You are a scout by trade. And I always tell people that the original form of data is what scouts see. Right? How have you evolved personally, combining what you know to be true in 37 years of being inside the game with what analysts say and what the data tells you about a player?*
*Steve Williams: This has always been a numbers game. What the evolution has been is that we’ve taken those numbers and we put them on steroids. And we just dive into them even more. When we take the scouting report and the objective information, how can we blend them together? When they don’t come together, the question that we have to continue to ask ourselves is why?*
*Why is this changing? Why is this different? What are we looking at? How can we dig into this a little bit more? What questions should our scouts be asking now at the ballpark? What questions should our analysts be asking our scouts? What should we be giving them to focus on?*
*For example, fastball playability. Normally, if I go to the ballpark and I’m sitting there and I’m watching a guy’s fastball play at the top of the zone, my eyes are telling me that this guy’s fastball plays different at the top of the zone.*
*Now, when I go back and open my computer, I want to see those same numbers. I want to see the same thing, the spin rate, vertical, all those things. What does it look like? Now, if it’s different from a scouting standpoint, if those numbers are different, there’s a history that his ball doesn’t play that way, the next day I need to ask why is it different?*
*Did he make an adjustment? Are they focusing on something different? What is the philosophy of the organization? So we take it as, this is another tool in our tool bag, the objective information, and try not to get, for our scouts to be over analytical, but we want them to understand the numbers so when they walk into the ballpark, they can be extremely focused and targeted about what we feel that we can influence. Every organization can influence different things. Some organizations are really good with hitters. Some organizations are really good with pitchers.*
*We want to take the information that we have and advance the evaluation skills that our scouts have as well.*
*It’s another tool. It’s not the end all, be all. All this technology, all this information is still very new, but we’re trying to blend all of it together.*
If this post violates any self-promotion rules, I won’t mind if you delete it.
1 comment
Hi, Mark from Sports Info Solutions here (the Defensive Runs Saved folks)
Posting this here because I didn’t think you’d find it otherwise. It’s a Q&A we did on our podcast with Pirates VP Steve Williams about his career and about scouting.
I liked this part
*Bobby: You are a scout by trade. And I always tell people that the original form of data is what scouts see. Right? How have you evolved personally, combining what you know to be true in 37 years of being inside the game with what analysts say and what the data tells you about a player?*
*Steve Williams: This has always been a numbers game. What the evolution has been is that we’ve taken those numbers and we put them on steroids. And we just dive into them even more. When we take the scouting report and the objective information, how can we blend them together? When they don’t come together, the question that we have to continue to ask ourselves is why?*
*Why is this changing? Why is this different? What are we looking at? How can we dig into this a little bit more? What questions should our scouts be asking now at the ballpark? What questions should our analysts be asking our scouts? What should we be giving them to focus on?*
*For example, fastball playability. Normally, if I go to the ballpark and I’m sitting there and I’m watching a guy’s fastball play at the top of the zone, my eyes are telling me that this guy’s fastball plays different at the top of the zone.*
*Now, when I go back and open my computer, I want to see those same numbers. I want to see the same thing, the spin rate, vertical, all those things. What does it look like? Now, if it’s different from a scouting standpoint, if those numbers are different, there’s a history that his ball doesn’t play that way, the next day I need to ask why is it different?*
*Did he make an adjustment? Are they focusing on something different? What is the philosophy of the organization? So we take it as, this is another tool in our tool bag, the objective information, and try not to get, for our scouts to be over analytical, but we want them to understand the numbers so when they walk into the ballpark, they can be extremely focused and targeted about what we feel that we can influence. Every organization can influence different things. Some organizations are really good with hitters. Some organizations are really good with pitchers.*
*We want to take the information that we have and advance the evaluation skills that our scouts have as well.*
*It’s another tool. It’s not the end all, be all. All this technology, all this information is still very new, but we’re trying to blend all of it together.*
If this post violates any self-promotion rules, I won’t mind if you delete it.