It is extremely rare for a team to grant access to their draft war room. But Fox Sports Houston gained such access to the general manager and scouts during this year's Astros draft.
The process of a major league is what most fans assumed would happen.
The general manager met with the New Owner and club president to agree that the team needs to major rebuilding effort through the draft and international free agent signings. With all executives on board with the plan, the general manager then began the process of evaluating players.
The scouting process focused on setting forth what drives players to succeed at the major league level and finding out how "early" in a player's career can you find those characteristics. For example, Astros identified the major league characteristics as a) contact vs. striking out and b) locating a fastball. In reality, the key to the Astro evaluation process is player "skills" and not what other teams tout as "tools."
Some people may think that the terms "skills" and "tools" are the same thing. A tool is an objective measure of a player: size, speed, range. When some scouts declare a player is a "five tool" guy, they are talking about the abilities to hit for average, hit for power, base running skills/speed, throwing ability (arm strength) and fielding. Scouts look at the numbers to rank a player's tools.
But the Astros look deeper than the career stats to determine when a player found major league skill characteristics. It almost goes beyond pure statistics to see if the prospect actually has a "baseball IQ" character to meet the demands of a major league player. The most important thing about success in the major leagues is the ability to adapt. If a player has the personal skills to adapt well at an early age, he is more likely to adapt as his professional career advances.
Then, the scouting reports were compiled to determine what players the team wanted to draft. Then the general manager and his staff tried to figure out how much the players were "worth." In their lexicon, the goal of the draft was to get "the most major league value" out of it. The general manager must project how much each players will cost, and what sort of "return" on investment the team will receive in the future. The best return would be a projected major league starter.
The team goes into the draft with a player ranking and their potential selections. The team then runs simulations of a mock draft to determine what their reaction would be if a certain player is drafted ahead of their pick or not drafted as they thought another team would do. If one looks at all the mock drafts this year by columnists, pundits and scouting services, each one was different because of the truly fluid dynamic of how each team evaluates a player is slightly different; each team has different philosophies in finding talent; each team has different needs to fill at both the major and minor league levels; each team has a different talent budget; and each team has a risk evaluation program to determine whether or not a pick is signable for a reasonable cost.
Once the draft started, the situation changed and internal debates began as "good" players were falling down the board due to perceived signability issues. The new collective bargaining rules may have made some teams much more conservative than in past drafts. In the end, most baseball writers believed that the Astros had an excellent draft, securing three first round talents. The Astros rebuilding process was interesting because it showed a layered evaluation program after identifying areas of solutions: high school, college, international free agents, or major league free agents (which have little impact due to the rebuilding blueprint agreed to with ownership).
The team broke down the scouting reports into objective criteria that most scouts use to rank prospects. Similar information was taken by management to find whether the prospects tools meet with skill characteristics of successful major league players. Then a consensus of prospect rankings comes to the forefront. With that list, a cost-benefit analysis is made by the general manager to determine major league values of each player. Armed with all this information, the team then goes into the draft room to iron out each selection as the draft progressed; not making their picks until they were on the clock to find the best major league value at that slot.
