Overview of the Astros' scouting approach -- will the O's operate this way under Elias?

[Frobby]

From Fangraphs today:
 

Quote

 

This will be Houston’s first full calendar year with a scouting staff comprised largely of in-office analysts who break down high-quality video and integrate their assessments with a slew of data from TrackMan and other cutting edge evaluation technologies. Houston let go of most of their scouts in two waves over two years, and now sends individuals with Edgertronic cameras to amateur games in lieu of traditional area scouts. While this style of scouting has yielded stylistic uniformity across Houston’s prospect population — they almost invariably acquire high-spin, four-seam/curveball pitchers with a 12:30 spin axis, most of whom are adding cutters early in pro ball, while targeting college bats who have performed on paper and have big exit velos — it has also yielded a bunch of talented players, and further use of the tech on the player development side has made those players better.

This is a good farm system even though there are some clear potential long-term pitfalls from having narrow criteria for the players the org targets. For one, the types of pitchers Houston seems to like are becoming more sought after by other teams as a better understanding of how pitching works permeates baseball. Fewer pitchers of this type will be available to Houston as a result, but of course, Houston is likely also identifying players who can be altered to become this type of pitcher, even if they aren’t one yet. One day, there might be repercussions for having a staff full of very similar pitchers, but there’s no way of knowing that.

The Astros are clearly ahead of other teams around the league in some other areas, too. In some ways, it’s becoming easier for those lagging behind to catch up because they can also look to Baltimore and Atlanta, both of which have former Houston employees in prominent roles, to spot trends. In other ways, it’s getting harder to learn about Houston from the outside, as paranoia and acrimony have begun to impact industry discourse about the Astros in a way that makes it difficult to know which rumors about them are true and which are BS. Some of the things that have been mentioned consistently, and which seem plausible and interesting, include experimentation with visual machine learning and work with topical substances to improve pitch spin/movement. Of course, all the Rapsodo and Motus sleeve stuff is already widely known or knowable with quick use of Google.

Expect the 40-man crunch to continue apace here as teams gobble up the overflow of Astros pitching that can’t quite crack their roster.

 

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/top-39-prospects-houston-astros/

I wonder how much of this approach is favored by Elias, who was responsible for scouting in Houston, and how much is being dictated from Jeff Luhnow.   Elias has mentioned numerous times that he likes to combine analytics with traditional scouting, and he has a scouting background himself.    Luhnow seems a little further out there on the analytics limb.    But we have Sig!   It will be interesting to see in what direction we go.

[interloper]

Luhnow seems a little more militant about it all than perhaps Elias is. But it's impossible to say at this point.

[ChosenOne21]

These cameras and analytics sound awesome, but I don't think you can just get rid of traditional scouts entirely without paying some kind of price

[jsbearr]

Elias was not opposed to this progression, but he did not advocate for it. I doubt he has changed his mind. That said, almost all professional scouting this past winter was done through analytics.