Colin Pfeiffer

One of the easiest mistakes in scouting is believing the best player is the one who looks the part. Baseball has always rewarded appearances. The tall athlete, sculpted body, broad shoulders, easy batting practice power, and effortless velocity all matter, but they don’t always matter most. During my twenty years as a Major League scout, I learned the game has a way of humbling anyone who falls in love with the uniform before he studies the player inside it. Dustin Pedroia made evaluators uncomfortable because the physical look didn’t match the baseball player. He was listed around 5-foot-8 or 5-foot-9, often under 170 pounds, with very little physical projection. Traditional evaluators could knock the body, size, short violent swing, aggressive approach, and fit him into a “slap hitter” profile. On a 20-to-80 scale, some scouts could bury him with grades like 20 power and 30 speed, then walk away thinking they had him figured out. They didn’t, because what many missed was the real player. Pedroia had elite instincts, exceptional hand-eye coordination, barrel control, baseball IQ, and a competitive fire that was hard to quantify on a report. At Arizona State, his contact ability was historic, with only 11 strikeouts compared to 43 walks. Boston trusted the swing path, makeup, and how long his barrel stayed alive through the zone. They drafted him 65th overall in 2004, and three years later he was the American League Rookie of the Year. One year after that, he was the American League MVP. What some saw as an out-of-control hacksaw swing, Boston saw as rotational power. He created torque through his lower half and core, allowing a smaller frame to produce far more impact than the eye test suggested. He kept his bat head flat and active through the zone, giving him margin for error even when he cheated to a fastball. The body didn’t scream impact. The barrel did. I remember being in Asheville, North Carolina, after I had started my pro coverage in that league in 2002. I was talking with some older gentleman scouts from the area, and they asked me about “Petey.” I had an okay breakdown on him from seeing him that spring, but nothing close to what he was about to show me. His Augusta team walked into the ballpark while Asheville was taking batting practice. They were still in their civvies, and Pedroia was the leader out front. He didn’t look like a typical pro ballplayer. He was 21, undersized, with a receding hairline, and if you were scouting the parking lot, you could have missed him. Then the game started. He led off, and on the second pitch, he drove a ball deep to left-center field. I got a look from the scouts beside me. Later in the game, he went deep again. Now we were all looking at each other, and it became comical, so we just started laughing. I was a little light on Mr. Pedroia. That is the lesson. The scout’s job isn’t to find the best body. It is to find the best baseball player, and those are not always the same person. The radar gun measures velocity, the stopwatch measures speed, and the showcase leaderboard measures snapshots, but the game measures something deeper. Things that don’t always show up on a showcase leaderboard, but win baseball games: 
 • Baseball instincts
 • Internal clock
 • Anticipation
 • Competitive toughness
 • Adjustability
 • Awareness
 • Feel for the game
 • Consistency under pressure
 • Barrel control Sometimes the player who fails the eye test passes the scout test with flying colors, because the uniform never tells the whole story. THE SCOUTING CLASSROOM: Stories Behind the Report  THE PLAYER WHO FAILED THE EYE TEST… BUT PASSED THE SCOUT TEST Subtitle: The uniform never tells the whole story. #BehindTheRadarGun 🔎 – at Hurricane, UT