How large a role does scouting actually play in baseball?
Scouting plays a larger role in baseball than it does any other sport. Sure, the NBA, NFL and NHL use advance scouts for teams they will soon play and they also scout amateur players for the upcoming draft. Baseball does both as well but still relies more heavily on scouts than the other sports, especially the NFL and NBA. The other sports use game film for a great deal of the advance scouting. For amateur scouting, the NFL and NBA rely heavily on pre-draft combines to analyze prospective draftees. Baseball sends its scouts out in the field much more extensively. Baseballs amateur scouts are in the field enough to draft up to 50 rounds of talent (up to 1,500 players). The NFL uses seven rounds. The NBA uses two. Both the NFL and NBA also have a much more highly profiled feeder system in the college ranks. Baseball has to work harder to go out and find the talent consisting of collegians, high schoolers, junior college players as well as several foreign-born players in countries where E
