scouting Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Kaapo Kakko Is A Good Teen Who's Too Busy Partying To Go To The NHL Combine
The World Championships were a coming-out party for Kaapo Kakko, who spent the last year tearing up Finland’s top pro league, before proving on an international stage that he can do more than just hang with the world’s best. The 18-year-old winger lit up Worlds for six goals in 10 games as Finland t...
Welcome To The Jon Gruden Show
The NFL Draft is the world’s largest nonsense bazaar, and more tonnage is shoveled in the final two weeks than in the other 50 combined, so when Ian Rapoport tweeted out the other day that Jon Gruden and Mike Mayock sent all the Raiders’ scouts home and did not expect to recall them before the NFL D...
Check Out Branch Rickey's Early Scouting Reports For Hall Of Famers
Branch Rickey, who is best known for signing Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945, spent decades of his post-playing career evaluating baseball talent. He instituted the first minor league farm system (an innovation born of out of a desire to lock up top talent for cheap) and encouraged t...
It's Time To Once Again Help Prove That Average Fans Are The Best Scouts In Baseball
One of the best off-field developments in baseball this year was MLB bringing in pseudonymous saberist Tom Tango to work with their Statcast data, the product of player-tracking technology that promises to unlock such mysteries of the game as the relative values of positioning and reaction time, and...
Kicker Fast
The biggest news from this year’s NFL scouting combine is obviously Iowa kicker Marshall Koehn’s record-setting 40-yard dash time. ...
Arkansas QB Trying To Stretch His Lil' Baby Hands In Order To Boost Draft Stock
I can’t imagine how stressful it must be to be a prospect at the NFL combine, where every aspect of your physical being is broken down and scrutinized in absurd detail, and the slightest deficiency can sink your draft stock. So it’s no wonder that Arkansas quarterback Brandon Allen is stressed out a...
Former NFL Player Reveals Bonkers Questions He Was Asked At NFL Scouting Combine
If there’s one thing the NFL scouting combine is good for, it’s putting NFL prospects in contact with crazy people who think asking deeply benign or invasive questions is what scouting is all about. ...
Former Bucs GM: We Spied On Justin Blackmon's Favorite Bar For A Week
I rolled my eyes at the claim that an unnamed NFL team had shadowed Jameis Winston on a flight—surely lots of teams had scouts flying into and out of Indianapolis around the combine. But maybe it’s not so crazy. Former Tampa GM Mark Dominik admitted that in 2012, the Buccaneers dispatched a scout to...
A Way-Too-Serious Scouting Report On The NBA All-Star Celebrity Game
The Celebrity Game is without question the crown jewel of NBA All-Star Weekend, an event that provides the too-rare opportunity to see the TV and movie and music stars (and in some case, "stars") the world worships be extremely terrible at something, and for however brief a second, be able to say ...
Hey, You: Help Prove That Average Fans Are The Best Scouts In Baseball
Whether or not you know it, if you're a baseball fan, you probably appreciate or enjoy the game a little bit more because of Tom Tango. The pseudonymous saberist, currently a consultant for the Chicago Cubs, has had a hand—often the most important one—in developing many of the most interesting and u...
The Scouting Reports Said Greg Maddux Shouldn't Have Been So Awesome
A scouting report of Greg Maddux from 1985, the year before his first call-up, is making the rounds today. It's funny because the scout declared Maddux was "not strong enough to be a starter," and we all know how that turned out. ...
Leaked: 10 Months Of The Houston Astros' Internal Trade Talks
Two years ago, the Houston Astros constructed "Ground Control"—a built-from-scratch online database for the private use of the Astros front office. It is by all accounts a marvel, an easy-to-use interface giving executives instant access to player statistics, video, and communications with other fro...
Meet The Guy Who Wrote Those Bizarre Scouting Reports For NFL.com
Think of the most important thing you'd want to know about an NFL prospect. The piece of information that should be listed first on his NFL.com draft profile. It is, almost certainly, nothing like these:...
Rajon Rondo Gets The Troll-Scout Treatment
ESPN.com (Insider) has posted an article in which anonymous NBA scouts give their opinions on which NBA point guards are the most overrated. Here's the entry for Rajon Rondo:...
Very Cool: Cal Ripken Jr.'s High School Scouting Report As A Pitcher
A reader sent this to us last night, and we want to share it with you: a baseball scout's 1978 evaluation of Cal Ripken Jr., then a high school senior—and a starting pitcher....
How Branch Rickey Invented Modern Baseball
Excerpted from Dollar Sign on the Muscle, named by Sports Illustrated one of the top 100 sports books of all time; postscript by Sam Miller. You can read more about the new Baseball Prospectus edition of the book here, or buy it in paperback or as an e-book....
Old Scouting Report On Mark Grace: "The Brothers Love Him"
Diamond Mines is a fantastic site for baseball wonks, as it allows you to look up old scouting reports on major league players. It's also a gold mine for people who want to marvel at some of the truly odd things that scouts used to include in their reports....
1985 Bo Jackson Scouting Report: "The Best Pure Athlete In America"
Bo Jackson was already known as an extraordinary athlete in April 1985, when he was a junior at Auburn. But just how gifted did those who were paid to evaluate his talents think he was at the time? According to a baseball scouting report unearthed by a Reddit user, the answer ranged somewhere betwee...