Matthew Cerrone posts this quote from a Patrick Flood interview with Paul DePodesta:

Well, a huge part of my job right now is scouting, and it really has been for the last four or five years. I think they’re all pieces to the puzzle, and you try to put the puzzle together as best you can. I’ll say this again, as I’ve said before: One of the principle aspects of our job is dealing with uncertainty. Whatever we can do to get our arms around that uncertainty will help us make better decisions. Some of that will be through analysis, other times it’s just getting out and not only seeing a player, but even getting to know a player. We’re trying to predict the future performance of human beings, you know? We can’t forget that they’re human beings. So I think [scouting and numbers] really go hand in hand. Ultimately, when we’re out scouting, what we try to do is to try to explain the performance, rather than just observe the performance, if that makes any sense. The stats help us do that.

This is very similar to what Joe Bohringer of the Diamondbacks talked about at the MIT-Sloan Sports Analytics conference. The more numbers in your hand, the less scouting you need to do. If you have someone with just a couple of years of high school, however, you need to take a look to see if the athlete matches the numbers.