Scout Day

Yesterday, we had our annual Professional Scout Day. We have been lucky enough to have many players go on and have the chance to play professionally with MLB organizations. I thought I would share with you a little about what we do on Scout Day and a little about the whole process of getting drafted.

We had roughly 20 scouts at our Scout Day who represent various MLB organizations. Each scout is responsible for a specific geographic region of the country and is responsible for evaluating all the players that are draft eligible in that area discerning the ones that have a chance to play professional baseball from the ones that do not. The scouts are looking for players that have the necessary tools to play pro baseball. Some of the tools they are evaluating are running speed, arm strength, hitting ability, power and makeup.

For scouts just evaluating at games can sometimes be a frustrating experience due to the fact that sometimes when evaluating a particular player you may not be able to evaluate much about him due to uncontrollable factors. For example when evaluating an everyday player at a game only, the team might decide to not take batting practice or a pregame infield/outfield and during the game the hitter walks everytime and doesn't get a ball hit to them on defense. This is why the Scout Day is helpful. It is a combination tryout/intersquad.

We begin by having all of our position players run a 60-yard dash. Then we have the hitters take batting practice on the field. That is followed by the everyday players taking a pregame infield/outfield. After that we play an intersquad game to allow the scouts see our players in a game setting and allow all of our pitchers to throw one inning.

We had several of our players perform very well and hopefully they generated enough interest from the scouts to continue to be evaluated during the spring and ultimately hear their name called in June during the MLB Draft. We are continuing practices this week and have our first outside competition next Tuesday at 3 p.m. when we take on the defending NJCAA National Champion Howard College at Foster Field. This should give us a very good indication of where we are and also give us some areas we will need to improve in as the fall continues.