The mystery around this is the basis of the scouting system in BaseHit.
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.
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 - A league's scouting setting is not intended to be changed over and over - to make a change, submit a request on the Commmunity Requests forum to make this change.
Leagues that like a realistic system of imperfect information, with diamonds-in-the-rough and draft busts should choose 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 full ratings information throughout a players' career should choose Scouting OFF.