Tony Lucadello - Scouting Fundamentals

Scouting Fundamentals

Unlike nearly all other scouts, Lucadello almost never watched a game from behind home plate. Rather, he moved from place to place around the field: a short way up the baseline (to see the batter's face), behind first or third base (to judge the arm strength of both infielders and outfielders), and halfway up the line (to watch pitchers).

Lucadello claimed that the key to identifying a prospect was to focus on the player's body control and footwork, saying, "Eighty-seven percent of the game of baseball is played below the waist."

The four kinds of scouts, according to Lucadello, start with the letter 'P':

• Poor -- wastes time looking for games rather than having a planned itinerary
• Picker -- emphasizes a player's one weakness to the neglect of all strengths
• Performance -- bases his evaluation on what a player does in his presence
• Projector -- envisions what a player will be able to do in two or three years.

He estimated that five percent of scouts were poor, five percent pickers, 85 percent performance scouts and five percent projectors.

Lucadello's credentials as a "projector" were most clearly demonstrated in his vision for Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt. As a high school senior with two bad knees, Schmidt hit only .179 with one home run, but Lucadello had been watching him since Little League and still saw his potential. "I felt...that Mike was a late bloomer," he explained years later. He tried to keep his interest in Schmidt from other scouts by hiding behind dugouts or bushes or watching from a nearby rooftop. "I watched one game from the back of a station wagon in the parking lot," Lucadello said. According to Schmidt, "Without Tony Lucadello, I wouldn't have been a Philadelphia Phillie. He scouted me from the time I played Little League Baseball all the way up through high school and college. He had me followed when a lot of other scouts had kind of written me off."