Future Value: The Battle for Baseball's Soul and How Teams Will Find the Next Superstar

by Eric Longenhagen, Kiley McDaniel, Keith Law (Foreword by)

Overview

An unprecedented look inside the world of baseball scouting and evaluation from two of the industry's top prospect analysts 

For the modern Major League team, player evaluation is a complex, multi-pronged, high-tech pursuit. But far from becoming obsolete in this environment—as Michael Lewis' Moneyball once forecast—the role of the scout in today's game has evolved and even expanded. Rather than being the antithesis of a data-driven approach, scouting now represents an essential analytical component in a team's arsenal. 

Future Value is a thorough dive into baseball's changing world of talent acquisition and development, a world with its own language, methods, metrics, and madness. From rural high schools to elite amateur showcases, from the back fields of spring training to major league draft rooms, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel break down the key systems and techniques used to assess talent. It's a process that has moved beyond the quintessential stopwatches and radar guns to include statistical models, countless measurable indicators, and a broader international reach.

​Practical and probing, discussing wide-ranging topics from tool grades to front office politics, this is an illuminating exploration of how to watch baseball and see the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781629378800
Publisher:	Triumph Books
Publication date:	06/01/2021
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	355,752
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Eric Longenhagen is the lead prospects analyst for FanGraphs. Kiley McDaniel covers prospects for ESPN and previously wrote for FanGraphs. He has worked as a scout and in the front office for major league organizations. Keith Law is a Senior Baseball Writer for the Athletic. He’s covered baseball since 2006. Before that he was a Special Assistant to the General Manager for the Toronto Blue Jays. He is the author of Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, the New Ones That Are Running It, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball and The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves.

Table of Contents

Foreword Keith Law vii

Authors' Note xi

Introduction xiii

Chapter 1 You Can't Know What You Don't Know 1

Chapter 2 The Draft 19

Chapter 3 The Mad World of J2 65

Chapter 4 The Changing (But Still Mad) World of J2 99

Chapter 5 Prose About Pros Scouting Pros 123

Chapter 6 But I Wanna Be a Ballplayer 143

Chapter 7 How to Scout 163

Chapter 8 How to Scout Hitters 183

Chapter 9 How to Scout Pitchers 207

Chapter 10 The Tricky Job of Summarizing 233

Chapter 11 Everybody Wants a Job in Baseball (But Nobody Wants to Die) 269

Chapter 12 Is Data Swallowing Baseball? 295

Chapter 13 Running a Modern Team 323

Acknowledgments 359

Sources 361

Editorial Reviews

“Beautifully constructed... In the vacuum of sports-centered books, it’s hard to overstate the importance of Future Value; the book will have a wide-stretching impact both presently and in the near and distant future.” —Prospects 365 


“In Future Value, Eric and Kiley give you the grand tour of scouting without asking you to leave your couch. They’ll walk you through the draft... the Wild West of international free agency... and professional scouting…. You couldn’t ask for a better pair of tour guides.” —Keith Law, senior baseball writer, The Athletic (from his foreword)  


"Kiley and Eric are the top public resource for prospect evaluation." —New York Mets Assistant General Manager Adam Guttridge 


“A must-read for anybody who wants to get into scouting” —Beyond the Box Score 

"True insight into how modern baseball operates is rare, which is what makes Future Value such an invaluable resource. It pulls back the curtain and answers every question needed to understand the game today. This is nothing less than the definitive guide for baseball fans who want to be smarter about the game they love." —Jeff Passan, writer, ESPN  

“From scouting the basic tools to the integration of data to paint a more complete picture of a player, Eric and Kiley explore the wide array of strategies and methodologies used by Major League Baseball teams in their quest to identify the next impact player.” —Angels General Manager Billy Eppler 


“Eric and Kiley make a compelling case for player evaluation via a modern marriage of analytics and the sometimes-harder-to-quantify insights of scouts.” —Reds General Manager Nick Krall 


“I learned so much more about baseball than I ever knew before.” –Roxanne, Goodreads 

From the Publisher