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"Talent scout" redirects here. For talent scouting in the music industry see A&R

Professional sports scouts are trained talent evaluators who travel extensively for the purposes of watching athletes play their chosen sports and determining whether their set of skills and talents represent what is needed by the scout's organization. Some scouts are primarily interested in the selection of prospects, younger players who may require further development by the acquiring team but who are judged to be worthy of that effort and expense for the potential future payoff that it could bring, while others concentrate on players who are already polished professionals whose rights may be available soon, either through free agency or trading, and who are seen as filling a team's specific need at a certain position. Advance scouts watch the teams that their teams are going to play in order to help determine strategy.

Many scouts are former coaches or retired players, while others have made a career just of being scouts. Skilled scouts who help to determine which players will fit in well with an organization can be the major difference between success and failure for the team with regard to wins and losses, which often relates directly to the organization's financial success or lack thereof as well.

According to Tony Lucadello, considered by some to be the greatest scout ever^[1][2][3][4], the four kinds of scouts 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.

Lucadello estimated that five percent of scouts were poor, five percent pickers, 85 percent performance scouts and five percent projectors.^[5]

Modern day scouts are becoming more and more reliant on computer programs to aide and assist in the evaluation of talent being scouted. Every professional sports franchise is now using computers to organize their collected information and data. As of 2007, most franchises still depend on human management to decide which players their organization will draft or sign. In every major sport however, there are some new pioneering programmers that very well may change the landscape of how scouting is done at the professional level.

• Tony Lucadello

• Piet de Visser
• Gilles Grimandi
• Leonardo
• Cesare Maldini
• Michel Pavon

• Joyce, Gare. "Wall of Dreams."

• Jordan, David M. Occasional Glory: The History of the Philadelphia Phillies. McFarland & Company, 2003. ISBN 0786412607
• Robbins, Mike, Ninety Feet from Fame: Close Calls With Baseball Immortality. Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004. ISBN 0786713356
• Spivak, Jeffrey. Crowning the Kansas City Royals: Remembering the 1985 World Series Champs. Sports Publishing LLC, 2005. ISBN 1582618267
• Winegardner, Mark. Prophet of the Sandlots: Journeys with a Major League Scout. Prentice Hall Press, 1990. ISBN 0-13-726373-2