How to Become a Pro Baseball Scout

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Dr. Lynn Lashbrook, president and founder of Sports Management Worldwide in Portland, Oregon. People often ask me how do you become a professional scout, how do you break into the business and I always say you've got to know somebody but you also got to bring value. You meet somebody and you knew nothing about scouting, you don't know anything about sabermetrics, you don't understand the velocity necessary to be a major league pitcher, you don't understand the bat speed or the speed at getting to first base, if you don't really have a knowledge and you get to meet that opportunity, you really are not going to succeed as much as you would if you bring value. We offer an online course where we bring in a major league scout every week for our students to work with. We have scouting video that they break down scouts and they do a peer review. We're trying to get people in a credential mode. Now when do they understand sabermetrics and what it all means to use the statistics to go with the actual video and with the actual on-site scouting, putting together a report and so we think when you want to be a pro scout and work, not only do you want to be a scout, your goal is to be general manager somebody where you're sitting there reading all these scouting reports and deciding based on the needs of your team, talking to the coaches, talking to the manager and of course talking to the owner, you've really scouted the ones. If you can't scout, it's really hard to become an executive in baseball. You've got to understand talent is really how you put that 25 man roster together and now internationally, just like in India and other places, they're taking the gun just to see who can throw hard, they may have never seen the game of baseball. But there's 8 billion plus people out there and baseball is new to the rest of the world and so what you're finding in scouting is there's going to be more and more opportunities around the world to look at talent. There may be a player that's never seen a baseball that can throw a 90 mile per hour fastball and when you see that from a scouting standout, identifying potential talent and that's why baseball and the opportunity to get into the career of scouting is probably more exciting than ever because even in it this global world, the world has become smaller when it comes to the talent availability with the Internet and satellite TV, more and more eyeballs are watching a game they've never played before and because of their somatic type and their opportunity to learn the business and smart young athletes, we're going to need more and more scouts in my opinion not only with the technology, but the knowledge of the game, what are you looking for if you're over in India? What are you looking for in Russia when there's a developmental league over there? And there's more and more opportunity around there because a scout can't be everywhere and that's why I think for young people wanting a career in baseball, I think if you can prove to yourself and learn the business of scouting, you bring value to that opportunity and that's how you're going to get a job in baseball. It's not just because you didn't play in major league that you should give up the idea of being a general manager. But you're going to have to be a scout in order to move up the ladder. And so you don't have to be just a coach, but if you could learn to be a scout, even maybe start out as a cross checker as we say or bird dog, whatever, you start out kind of the walk on approach, you got to believe in yourself and you learn from your peers and all of the sudden someday you look back as you tell your story, you got started in the entry level scouting position and that's how you get a job in baseball as a professional scout."