Milwaukee Brewers: Changes Made To The Scouting Department

The Milwaukee Brewers are making some changes to their scouting department, according to reports.

David Stearns has been the Milwaukee Brewers GM for almost four years now, and he’s been here long enough to have gotten a good grasp of his scouting department and has decided to make some changes.

According to Robert Murray of The Athletic, the Brewers are firing both pro and amateur scouts.

This is a fairly significant development, considering how important of a role pro scouts play in trade targets and amateur scouts play in the MLB Draft.

Why Make The Change?

While there was no reason given for the reshuffling of the scouting department, there could be a variety of motivations for this. Perhaps they’re simply letting go of scouts that simply weren’t good enough or had given bad reports. After all, just like every job there are people who are good at it and people who are not so good.

Perhaps they had gotten tired of draft picks underperforming and wanted to make some changes. Most of the Brewers drafts in the past 10-12 years have been nothing to write home about, if we’re being honest, especially with first rounders. It’s too early to tell for the past few, in the Stearns era, but it’s mostly been bad prior to that.

Another possibility is that they’re trying a new way of scouting, a new way of doing things and evaluating talent. The Brewers are on the cutting edge in MLB for analytics and creating new ideas and strategies. Perhaps they found a direction they wanted to go and that direction either didn’t match the skill set of the scouts they let go, or those scouts were unwilling to follow that new strategy.

What Kind Of Impact Will This Have?

On the field? Nothing. At least not this year. This could make a difference down the road with the new scouts they hire wanting to get different players, or the new strategy turning up different targets to go after. But there likely won’t be a difference that we’ll notice on the field from what the previous scouting department brought.

Ideally, the impact of this move is to overall improve the talent level in the organization. The changes they make will hopefully lead to more successful drafts that bring in higher quality players, and a higher quantity of big league talent.

Baseball America recently ranked the Milwaukee Brewers dead last in terms of organizational talent, as the farm system has been depleted of top level prospects. Poor drafting will do that to you.

While we don’t know how drastic the changes are or what the reason for the changes was, the Brewers are going to try to do something different moving forward.