The Problem with Signing Scouts
How one of baseball's oldest and seemingly harmless traditions encourages the wrong behaviors.
If you’ve ever tuned in for the MLB Draft, you’ve probably seen cuts to draft rooms celebrating after their picks are announced. It’s an exciting moment for an organization. The hard work has paid off and there’s all the hope and promise of an early-round draft pick.
Amid the celebration, there’s typically one person who commands the majority of the handshakes and hugs. That’s not the scouting director; it’s the area scout for the player just selected. They’re the ones who most intimately know the player, and the ones who will forever be linked to the selection as the signing scout.1
When scouts walk into a ballpark or come up for promotions, one of the first things people talk about is who they’ve signed. The players become marks on their permanent record — the good and the bad.
The signing scout is a tradition that’s nearly as old as the sport itself. And it’s one that does far more harm than good.
Area scouting roles are highly sought after and impactful, and yet you’d be hard pressed to find a less glamourous job in professional sports. Scouts spend most of their time on the road, traveling to and attending games that even die-hard baseball fans wouldn’t sit through unless forced. They’re compensated as entry level employees — even if the jobs aren’t that — and they’re often several layers removed from the decision-making processes despite providing the majority of the information that influences selections.
In some ways, the signing scout designation is the only remnant left of a time when scouts were the decision-makers in the draft. That’s probably the biggest conceptual blocker to getting rid of the practice; teams have reduced scouting departments and muted the influence of the remaining roles. One of the few ways they recognize these seemingly thankless positions is by crediting the signing scouts.
But the designation — and what it means across the industry — creates perverse incentives for the scouts and furthers the divide between groups that need to work together.
An area scout’s job should largely focus on collecting information and communicating effectively so the organization spends the right amount of time on the players in that area. Their evaluations are important, but mostly in the sense that they will help inform how many resources the organization devotes to a player. If they like a player, or if that player is generating interest from other teams, their report and subsequent communication should convey that so the team knows they need to get additional looks.
The most valuable thing an area scout can communicate is their honest assessment of players and the circumstances around them. That’s how they can contribute to the collective effort to evaluate that year’s class and line up a board correctly come draft time.
Unfortunately, that’s not always what you get when the most well known measure of scouting ability is who you sign. A scout who focuses on getting players isn’t incentivized to share their opinion and let the process unfold from there. They’re going to want to control as much as they can. That could mean pumping up players they really want while downplaying the ones they don’t. It could also mean hedging their true evaluations. And if any scout on staff operates that way, it’s hard for others not to follow suit. After all, it feels like a competition to get players.
The signing scout designation makes it nearly impossible to break the mental connection between getting players and doing a good job. An area scout who helps their organization avoid mistakes is just as valuable as one who helps uncover hidden gems in the middle rounds. But it’s not going to feel that way when someone asks them who they got in this year’s draft.
The allure of signing players also invites unnecessary bias into the process. Sit in a draft meeting. You’ll hear players presented in extreme and hyperbolic ways. Even when area scouts aren’t in the room, their crosscheckers take it upon themselves to advocate on their behalf. That doesn’t make already difficult decisions any easier.
And those decisions are increasingly collaborative. Maybe there was a time when players were selected solely because of scouting information. That’s just not the case anymore. Scouting is one piece of a collective puzzle. Attributing a selection to an individual doesn’t make sense when so many people contribute in some fashion.2
The disconnect between scouts and analysts that’s portrayed in Hollywood is overblown, but that’s not to say it doesn’t exist. In critical decision-making spaces, every team is going to have some tension at the seams of their departments. The draft brings that out in spades because there are several groups with their own identities and beliefs trying to solve the same problem. The hope is to find an inclusive, unified approach to make the best decisions. Crediting the selection to one person within amateur scouting sends a message that these groups aren’t really working together. It suggests a hierarchy that doesn’t do anyone any good.
In addition to being misleading and divisive, designating someone a signing scout assumes they want to be known for a selection. Because decisions are collaborative, particularly at the top of the draft, there are plenty of examples where an area scout is among the lowest evaluations on a player. It doesn’t seem fair to saddle them with the success or failure of a pick based on what other people chose to do. But that’s what happens. One of my closest friends spent nearly ten years as an amateur scout. To this day, we still rag him about one of the first-round busts he signed, in part because we know he didn’t like the player and had little to do with the selection.
I don’t expect the practice of signing scouts to go away anytime soon. It’s steeped in tradition and while the consequences are real, they’re also subtle and largely invisible to anyone who isn’t paying close attention. It’s easy to look at the “problem” and find little reason to take action when there are so many higher leverage things to spend time on.
The corollary is there’s effectively no barrier to a change that has the potential to improve the organization in meaningful ways. Any team could stop listing signing scouts immediately. A few well thought out messages is all it would take. They could clarify expectations (without the conflicting messaging), improve decision-making, and better support the claim that everyone is working together. The dramatic origin stories and the well-deserved praise for scouts wouldn’t have to fade away. Everything would look mostly the same, with only small differences. Small, but important differences.
Signing scouts are often designated in team’s media guides and other publications. You can see an example if you scroll through the players in the 2026 Tampa Bay Rays media guide.
And in the case of many selections, the area scout isn’t present when the contract is signed.