Major League Baseball teams spend millions of dollars on scouting departments. They send dozens of scouts across the country to gather as much information as possible on their opponents.
LSU doesn’t have that luxury.
LSU coach Paul Mainieri has three assistant coaches, a strength and conditioning coordinator, a director of baseball operations and a number of trainers and equipment managers. None of these people hold the title of “scout.”
That forces Mainieri to use non-traditional methods to construct scouting reports. It typically boils down to two things: television and Mainieri’s familiarity with opposing coaches.
Since Mainieri arrived at LSU in 2007, LSU has appeared on television 146 times, with 23 more games to be broadcasted during the 2012 season. That trend appears at almost every other Southeastern Conference school, allowing Mainieri and his coaches to stay in Baton Rouge to scout their opponents.
“So many games are televised in college baseball that we can watch the games and scout them ourselves,” Mainieri said. “We have the whole list of every game that our opponents will play on TV, and we just DVR those games and study them later.”
Mainieri said he doesn’t need to see a team to have a general idea of how it plays. With 30 years of collegiate coaching experience, he has observed or faced most coaches in the business.
The experience gained from playing the same schools on a year-to-year basis helps build a trend that follows a coach.
“One of the biggest parts of scouting is to understand the way the coach plays,” Mainieri said. “Whether he’s a coach that likes to bunt, likes to hit and run or likes to squeeze. That along with a stat sheet and you get just about all the information you need.”
Other schools don’t utilize the same scouting practices as Mainieri. He said when some coaches are looking for a scouting report on a certain opponent, they will call another coach in the conference and ask for help.
The practice is not one Mainieri supports.
“We don’t call random people and say, ‘How did you pitch that guy?’,” Mainieri said. “It’s an awkward thing to do. How do you trust the person you’re getting the scouting report from? The value of it is very limited.”
Though Mainieri doesn’t ask opposing coaches for scouting reports, he does call on his years of experience to have a friendly conversation with another coach about an upcoming opponent.
“If we have a very close friend from our years in the business, I might get some general thoughts from them about the style of play,” Mainieri said.
Though a detailed scouting report can provide a wealth of information, Mainieri said it’s not the knowledge of an opponent that matters most.
“So much of our philosophy is not so much worrying about our opponent as much as it doing what we do best,” Mainieri said. “We’re not going to force our pitcher to adapt to the hitter. We want the hitter to have to adapt to our pitcher.”
 
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Contact Hunter Paniagua at [email protected]