[Syd Thrift]

Actually, the unrealistic aspect of non-SO styles of play is that in OOTP the scouts provide their ratings based on what the player's actual hidden ratings are. There may be a modifier provided based on how good the scout is and how accurate the ratings are set to be in your league, but that's what they look at in the end. In real life, the scouts can't just look at a guy and decide he's a good player (although in the past you did actually have guys saying someone has "the baseball face"... no, seriously). They have to watch the guy they're scouting play, too, and make decisions based on that.

One way I think future iterations of OOTP resolve this is to literally make scouts "watch" players and make judgments based on a small - let's say 4 or 5 games - sample size. Maybe they'd be able to get more out of it than someone who sees a guy go 10 for 20, but it ought to be organic to the game. If a guy gets into several 10 pitch at-bats, that's a good sign he has a decent eye, regardless of walk totals. A guy who hits a lot of line drives should be rated better for contact and maybe power, regardless of whether or not those liners land for hits. Likewise, a pitcher's control and stuff ratings can be influenced by the secondary outcomes of an at-bat rather than just the primary ones. And maybe there can be a *little* bit of pure ratings thrown on top that the scouts glean from watching BP and the like, but I would tread carefully with that because the world is full of guys who look like beasts in BP but can't translate that into hitting major league pitching.

(I also think that scouts shouldn't be rating guys on gap power. Yes, I realize that that's a rating in the game, but so is BABIP and there is no direct scouting rating for that either. For that matter, I'd like to see scouts translate high-ish gap power ratings into good potential power ratings, as there is a pervasive idea (which actually may have some truth behind it) that young players who hit a lot of doubles can fill out and turn into in-their-prime players who hit a lot of homeruns).

In the end, yes, that still means you're basing current ratings in particular on performance. That's the way it should be. Real life scouts do not have the magical ability to assess a player's true abilities by looking at him. Potential ratings are a little tougher to justify but consider this:

- Fielding ability, particularly the non-experience aspect of it, comprises skills which are probably at or near a player's maximum ability when he enters the draft (talking about range and arm in particular).
- Gap power, as noted, is thought to translate into HR power.
- Relatively skinny guys are expected to fill out as they age; conversely, 5'8" 150 pound players who are not currently hitting for power are also generally not expected to hit for power in the future
- BABIP generally starts out as high as it's ever going to get or close to that point
- Scouts can grade how decent a player is *right now* at fouling off pitches, recognizing balls and strikes, and otherwise doing the things that get you deep into counts, but I'm not sure they have a way of saying "this guy draws 40 walks a year now but has the potential to draw 100".
- Likewise with strikeouts. I hear all the time about how Minor League C-Level Prospect X could be a great major leaguer if he didn't strike out so much, but you never hear "and I think in time he will learn to strike out less" from scouts either.