# 94 - THE DATA PROBLEM MEETS REALITY

A deep dive into what baseball recruiting gets wrong when rankings, measurables, profiles, and exposure start to look like certainty.

In this episode, I break down why a verified number is only as useful as the context behind it, why Fit Score should be separated from Confidence Score, and why the player a college recruits is not always the player it gets once failure, fatigue, competition, and pressure show up.

I also get into summer baseball, why it exposes players in ways showcases often cannot, and why the next evolution of recruiting has to move beyond profiles and rankings toward something more complete.

Better evidence. Better context. Better fit. Better decisions.

Transcript

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Baseball loves numbers. 91 mile an hour fastball. 97 exit velocity. 1.9 pop six point eight sixty three point eight GPA. Numbers feel clean, objective, certain. But a number is only as trustworthy as the source underneath it. Fastball, ninety-one. Did he sit there? Touch it once. Bullpen game, trackman, dad's gun. Last week, last year, same number, completely different information. Exit velocity is the same, 97. T, live pitching. Peak, average, one swing, 20, same number, different meaning. Once it lands on a polished profile, the context disappears. Now it just says 97. That's the problem. The number may be true, the certainty around it may not be. So recruiting information needs a source. Verified, observed, reported, inferred, or unknown. Trackman is not dad's gun. A scout's observation is not a parent's opinion. Sometimes the right answer is we don't know yet. A verified number without context is still incomplete. An opinion without a source is just noise. The point is not to remove judgment, it is to show what the judgment is built on. That's why I push back on mystery scores. If I ask a parent three questions about their son's work ethic and turn the answers into 66%, I haven't measured work ethic. I measured the parents' answers. So I want two numbers, fit score and confidence score. School A fit 92, confidence 47, great fit, weak evidence. School B fit 86, confidence 94%, slightly lower fit, stronger evidence. Which one would you trust? But even if the data is clean and the fit makes sense, the player they recruit is not always the player they get. I asked college coaches one question: What's the biggest gap between the player you recruit and the player you get mid-season? The answers weren't velocity or rankings, failure, mental approach, baseball IQ, competitive nature, maturity. And one answer nailed it. The unknown of how they respond with all the moving variables of baseball life in school. That's the gap. Recruiting sees the player when things are going well. He's probably the best player on his team. He starts. He gets attention. Everybody is telling him how good he is. Then he gets to college. Now he might be the 37th best player in the program. Everybody was the guy somewhere. Now what? What happens when he goes zero for 14? Doesn't start? Another player takes his job, midterms hit, his body hurts, confidence disappears. That's where the player shows up. Ask a high school player, are you mentally tough? Yes. Coachable? Yes. Handle failure. Yes. Competitive. Absolutely. That doesn't mean he's lying. If you've always been the best player, you may never have been forced to find out. And this is why summer baseball matters so much to me. I've coached it. I've been a GM. I've built rosters. One summer, over roughly two and a half months, I signed more than 90 players. 90. Because summer baseball is chaos. Players arrive late, leave early, get hurt, transfer, get drafted, don't like the role. Want to go home. Sometimes the player who arrives is nowhere near the player who was described. Anybody who has built a summer roster knows the call. I've got a dude for you. Okay, what does dude mean? Starter, future guy, great kid, needs at bats, or actually good enough for this league right now because placement and development are not the same thing. Sometimes a college coach finds the right environment, sometimes he just needs somewhere for the player to go. Summer baseball exposes that fast. Summer ball doesn't care about your ranking, your scholarship, your school logo. The pitcher still has to throw strikes, the hitter still has to hit. And when you're one for 18 riding a bus at midnight, your body hurts. And there are 30 games left. Now I'm learning something. You can say you're committed. What happens when quitting becomes available? You can say you're coachable. What happens when a coach you barely know tells you something you don't want to hear? You can say you love baseball. What happens when you're exhausted and there are 24 games left? That is evidence. Player goes home, college coach calls. How was he? Pretty good. That's insane. We just put the athlete through an eight-week stress test. New coaches, new city, travel, fatigue, failure, competition. Then we reduce it to batting average. Eventually, the game strips away the profile. The ranking doesn't help when you're zero for 14. The graphic doesn't help when somebody takes your job. Under load, habits matter. Attention matters. Preparation matters. Because the player under load is the player colleges eventually get. So recruiting cannot stop at one question can he play here? It also has to ask who does he become when playing here gets hard? That is the real data problem. The number tells you what he can do, pressure tells you who he is when it matters.