Looking at RoboScout

Digging into a fascinating new tool at Baseball America

Every week I drop my Stats Review bomb on you all, and every week I find myself slightly dissatisfied with the effort, and thinking of Mark Twain who said (or might have said, or possibly quoted Benjamin Disraeli saying, or maybe never uttered or referred to the words at all): “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

I hit and run the numbers at you, but I don’t feel like I do a great job of digging into what any of them mean (at least on Tuesday — hopefully that’s what all the narrative the rest of the week is doing). So today, in an effort to rectify that lack of meaning, I’m going to turn to a new tool over at Baseball America that I’ve found myself quite enamored with: RoboScout!

The tool was created by Dylan White, who has trod that now well-worn path from internet writer to Prospects Live to Baseball America, and I’ll let Dylan explain its basic premise:

A few years ago, I developed a tool to help me in my dynasty leagues. Essentially, I took public minor league data, applied park factors (from Baseball America of course), added some regression and outputted a relative ranking. In other words, using only publicly available data, I projected the future dynasty value of prospects. Little did I know that at that moment, RoboScout was born. Over the years, similar versions have emerged in the space, yet RoboScout has remained (with yearly revisions and refinements) the most valuable tool I have to find breakout or pop-up names before the rest of the industry has caught on. In other words, it has kept me one step (or multiple steps) ahead of my league mates.