Two hard-throwing, buzz-generating Astros prospects, Francis Martes and David Paulino, encapsulate how the Astros have taken a different approach to the game in a way that has nothing to do with the usual meme of analytics.
The Astros did not draft these pitchers, and numbers didn’t matter much, radar-gun readings aside. It’s about the design of a scouting system that got the right peeople to the right place, people who then made the right evaluations. In this case, one young scout named Alex Jacobs on the backfields of Florida were the Astros’ eyes, under the supervision of the director of pro scouting, Kevin Goldstein.