TangoTiger Fans' Scouting Report

The Fans’ Scouting Report is a crowd-sourced effort to get scouting grades on all the players in MLB. Anyone can fill out a ballot of players for their hometown team (and others if you like) to contribute to the effort.

Baseball’s fans are very perceptive. Take a large group of them, and they can pick out the final standings with the best of them. They can forecast the performance of players as well as those guys with rather sophisticated forecasting engines. Bill James, in one of his later Abstracts, had the fans vote in for the ranking of the best to worst players by position. And they did a darn good job.

There is an enormous amount of untapped knowledge here. There are 70 million fans at MLB parks every year, and a whole lot more watching the games on television. When I was a teenager, I had no problem picking out Tim Wallach as a great fielding 3B, a few years before MLB coaches did so. And, judging by the quantity of non-stop standing ovations Wallach received, I wasn’t the only one in Montreal whose eyes did not deceive him. Rondel White, Marquis Grissom, Larry Walker, Andre Dawson, Hubie Brooks, Ellis Valentine. We don’t need stats to tell us which of these does not belong.

It’s a lot of fun and it produces some pretty solid results that match up with the popular defensive metrics like Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR).

Go check it out today and participate – The Fans’ Scouting Report by TangoTiger.