Scouting

What is scouting?

Baseball teams hire scouts to visit high schools, colleges, and other professional teams to review players and try to assess their skills and potential. There are young players who scouts think will be superstars, that never reached that potential; and players who scouts think are going to be just OK, who turn out to be far better.

The mystery around this is the basis of the scouting system in CSFBL.

How does scouting work?

Each player has hidden values that influence how easy or hard they are to "scout". This hidden variance creates a bit of mystery, especially for younger players

As players get older, and get more experience, scouts get more accurate in judging a player's current ratings. So a scout is more likely to misscout a 17-year old than he is looking at a 30-year old who has played for five seasons.

A player's potential ratings are their draft-time expectations, and do not change over time. The ratings you see for a player are the same everyone else sees; scouting doesn't change this.

League options for scouting

Individual leagues can choose to have the scouting system on or off. Leagues with scouting off will always see nearly-perfect players' ratings throughout their careers.

Leagues with scouting on will not have exact information on the ratings of players, but will instead see "scouted" ratings, as previously described.

Note - ChangingA league's scouting settings for an existing leaguesetting is anot bigintended process,to be changed over and canover only- beto donemake once. Submita change, submit a request on the Commmunity Requests forum to make this change.

Which to choose?

Leagues that want to work withlike a realistic system of imperfect information, with diamonds-in-the-rough and draft busts willshould havechoose Scouting ON. Alternatively, leagues can choose a precision of 5 or 10 for ratings display, to give estimated ratings instead of exact numbers.

Leagues that prefer to work from full ratings information throughout a players' career willshould havechoose Scouting OFF.