For a hundred years, the tools of the trade fit in a scout's front pocket. A stopwatch. A radar gun. A spiral notebook full of scribble-scratch nobody else could read. Short-hand lingo only those in the business could comprehend. You meandered around the perimeter of the field catching different angles of players, you trusted your eyes, and you filed a report that lived and died on a single number between 20 and 80. That world obviously isn't gone. But these days, on top of swinging a bat in front of us, that player has also got a unique fingerprint. That fingerprint gets born out on a set of force plates, in a grip dynamometer, on a sprint gate. That fingerprint tells us things the eyes alone simply cannot see.
Athletic testing has quietly become one of the northern stars of amateur evaluation for many organizations. Some still believe it's a …