Major League Baseball is developing a plan to allow interested teams to share information about players participating in alternate training sites. Kiley McDaniel of ESPN.com reported the news (Twitter links), noting that it has not yet been initiated.
At this point, it appears that about twenty of MLB’s thirty teams will participate in the initiative. They’ll have the chance to share both data recordings and video. It’s intended to help teams assess players in the absence of games or any in-person scouting.
It stands to reason that this effort will help increase the potential for summer trades. Teams typically gather information right up until the mid-season trade deadline, but there’s a near-dearth of that activity at the moment except for players actually playing in the majors.
There’s no doubt that this plan is imperfect, but it seems at least to be a worthwhile workaround effort. The fact that every team won’t participate is notable. It’ll be interesting to see how that shapes the run-up to the trade deadline.
This could help trades
I’m sure that’s the motivating factor for doing this. Hopefully fans will have access to some of this information
Will St L Cardinals be consulted on how to gain, use and apply other site data?
Step 1: Find someone who leaves post-it notes with their passwords affixed to their computers.
Now now. Let’s just agree that the Cardinals and Astros are both reprehensible organizations.
Chaz: agreed. Add slimy in there as well. Add in Red Sox, Yankees, and for the heck of it, Cubs, based purely on the general lack of knowledge by their fan base.
Milwaukee: Losers With Honor
Hey, if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’
“Here’s the deal I’m the best there is. Plain and simple. I wake up in the morning and I piss excellence”
If you ain’t first, you’re last.
I wonder which teams have decided not to share?
Patriots
Red Sox won’t share data on any of their pitchers.
You just have to watch them pitch to know you don’t want to trade for their starters.
They did share their data on their pitchers… it’s just that the other teams thought they were watching batting practice footage!! (PS – I’m a diehard Red Sox fan… so I’m not ripping on the fanbase… just the actual team! Haha)
They tried to share their pitching info with the Milwalkee Milkmen, but the Milkmen GM hung up the phone.
Great move by the MLB. Get the trade deadline a little more active. I’ve heard little “leaks” from the Rangers alternate site like how Ronald Guzman has been crushing home runs, but that’s about the extent of it.
*Chris Correa has entered the chat*
WEEI in Boston had a discussion with Sam Kennedy and was quoted the RedSox have had discussions with other teams on possible trades. He said “No one is untouchable”
Uhh, data…on what?
All of those games they aren’t playing?
“Player X is batting .350 against the pitching machine on Level 7”?
Presumably they’re playing intrasquad games.
I don’t understand why scouts can attend these workouts. It would be so easy to protect the players and other scouts from coming in close contact with one another. Limit the number of scouts to one per team. Have a separate entrance for them, full mask requirements, space them 50 – 100 feet away from one another and don’t allow them to talk to players, coaches or even come close to them in proximity. This would make trades much easier and have a 0% increase of risk with COVID.
Honest question because I’m not sure I know the answer, do they just let other teams have scouts at their practices normally?
Obviously in a typical minor league season games are public, but if a player is assigned to the team complex or instructionals, (i.e somewhere they’re just practicing/scrimmaging) do other teams scouts get access to that? I guess if you want people to view your farm for trade purposes it would make sense to let them into practices, it just seems like you’d let them get scouted at games or exhibitions set up for that rather than practices.
We could do tons of things that we currently can’t do — IF people tended to follow rules. They don’t (as a glance at any dugout shows), so we can’t. All the rules in the world can’t make people safe when a large percentage will ignore the rules. Best we can do, then, is not put any more people than necessary into situations where it’s really easy to ignore those rules.
It’s a strange choice to balance wanting other teams to have access to your players for possible trades, but also weighing that with a potential competitive advantage that could be gained by a team having little data/content on a player.
If you have a prospect is developing a new pitch or significantly changing the ratio of what they are throwing, a team with little to no data on that could be pretty confused, so might be worth holding back this info if you don’t think you want to make any big deals.