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Scouting

Note: The original CSFBL scouting system has been overhauled as of the June 2022 update

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. Throughout baseball history, there have been young players who scouts thought were going to be superstars, but they never reached that potential; and there have been players who scouts thought were going to be, well, just OK, and turned 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 some internal values (hidden to users) 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 they get more experience, scouts get more accurate in telling you what a player's current ratings are (but not their potential ratings). So a scout is less accurate looking at a 17-year old than he is looking at a 30-year old who has played for five seasons. That doesn't mean the scout was inaccurate with the 17-year old

A player's scouted ratings for a given season, and their potential ratings, do not not change over time. Also, all team owners see players the same way

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 - Changing scouting settings for an existing league is a big process, and can only be done once. Submit a request on theCommmunity Requests forum to make this change.

Which to choose?

Leagues that want to work with a realistic system of imperfect information, with diamonds-in-the-rough and draft busts will have Scouting ON.

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