Baseball's First Scouting Combine

Baseball's first Scouting Combine will be held Aug. 18-21, 2010 at Dr. pepper ballpark in Frisco, TX.be

The top 100 HS and college baseball players will be invited. Every MLB team has been invited to attend as well. The Andrews Institute and Athletes Performance will help with the performance and medical evaluations.

- The Andrews Institute will conduct a comprehensive Physical and Orthopaedic evaluation.

- Athletes Performance will conduct Functional Movement Screens (FMS), VO2 and Body Composition evaluations.

- Position players will go through 60 yard dash, vertical jump and 5-10-5 agility assessments as well as SmartKage batting evaluations.

- Psychological and Leadership evaluations will be conducted along with direct interviews with the athlete.

- Practice sessions and games will be conducted to give scouts a more traditional on-field analysis.

It will be interesting to see how many teams participate and how it affects the 2011 draft. This has been a long time in the making, and you can argue about some of the process here and there-- the utility of some of the tests-- as is done every year when the NFL holds its combine, but to do this in combination with traditional scouting is better than to not do it at all.

I fail to see how more information is not better for teams and having said that, the nature of competition is that some will be better at PROCESSING that information than others.

There will always be failures to point to and say, "see this process doesn't work". I'll just bet that G.M.'s and scouting directors will sleep better knowing they have more complete, comprehensive information than they have ever had before when investing significant amounts of money on 18-21 year old players.