Each year, Virginia Commonwealth baseball assistant coach, Mark McQueen receives countless videos, scouting reports, and letters from high school ballplayers hoping to attract a Division I scholarship. Most of the applications never escape the file cabinet.

“Three-quarters of them I’ll never even have time to look at,” McQueen said. “With so many kids out there, you just can’t see everybody.”

Because college baseball recruiters often struggle with little time, few resources and weak financial backing, the baseball diamond produces plenty of diamond-studded talent that is never uncovered.

To compensate, baseball recruiting has changed drastically the past decade. Professional scouting services, once just a domain for the soon-to-be rich and famous, have risen into a mainstream recruiting tool often essential for a high school player hoping to attract Division I attention. Today at The Diamond, the Baseball Factory – one of the more popular national scouting services – will hold a tryout camp designed to help players reach their college dreams.

Each high school player who attends will be videotaped while performing a series of drills and then evaluated by a professional scout. After that, both the video and the evaluation will be sent to 50 colleges and universities of both the athlete’s and the Factor’s choosing.

“College coaches have a need for information that’s credible,” Baseball Factory founder and CEO Steve Sclafani said. “The players have a need for a way to get noticed, because a lot of the time college athletic departments just don’t have the money to use for baseball recruiting.”

Baseball lends itself particularly well to such scouting services, mainly because players can still be evaluated when seen performing simple drills.

The Baseball Factory, located in Columbia, Md., has grown since 1994 from a local operation into a business with 40 full time employees. Other successful scouting services include Team One Baseball and Perfect Game USA. All promise to provide their clients with the resources to draw college attention.

Question is, do professional or college scouts depend on the information provided by scouting services?

“There are a lot of services I’d be inclined not to believe. You have to develop that sense of trust,” McQueen said. “Once you have a couple of guys where your opinions are consistent, it becomes easier and easier to use that particular scouting service as a tool.”

Both McQueen and University of Richmond coach Ron Atkins rely on the Baseball Factory, in part because of their acquaintance with Steve Bernhardt, a former Spider player and current Factory employee. Vito Chiaravalloti, who helped Richmond reach the brink of the College World Series this year, is among the handful of current Spiders discovered through scouting services. Both local coaches admit, though, that scouting services also must be taken with a grain of infield dust.

Many coaches fear that edited videos create deception, believing that a recruiter would rather see a homemade videotape of 20 batting practice swings rather than professionally edited footage that cuts all but the best three or four hits.

Others wonder whether an evaluation being paid for by a high school player and his family can be unbiased.

“I haven’t seen an evaluation yet where it says, ?This kid sucks, he’s wasting his money,'” said Mark Gjormand, coach at baseball powerhouse Madison High in Vienna, Va. “Mostly, these kids are clients who are being represented.”

Yet Andy Ferguson, who doubles as a major-league scout and the Factory’s Director of Scouting, claims that most scouting services try their best to be accurate.

“It’s in the kid’s best interest that we are honest with them about their ability,” Ferguson said. “We would be doing the kid a disservice if we told him that he’s better than he really is. It’s a disservice to the college he ends up going to as well.”

At each of the video scouting sessions directed by the Factory, scouts assess each player in a variety of skills rating them on a scale of two (poor) to six (outstanding). After that, each participant is given a global assessment (this time, from one to 10, with one being the best) designed to reflect his potential as a college player.

Jon Reed, a rising senior at L.C. Bird High School, attended an evaluation session last year at William and Mary and plans on being at The Diamond this weekend. An outfielder and shortstop for the Skyhawks, scouts called Reed “a solid outfielder” who “tracks his balls well and comes up throwing in a solid manner… but needs to work on getting his throws down.”

He’s exactly the kid of player targeted by the Baseball Factory. Without exposure, Reed and others like him could easily slip through the cracks – or into a file cabinet. That’s why Reed and his parents elected to spend the money, about $400, for a day with the Factory.

“You know, it’s like an edge,” Reed said. “It’s not so much that I’m looking for a particular college. I’m just trying to get better. I want to play ball, and if any college comes around with a spot for me, I’ll take it.”

Said Atkins, the Richmond coach: “For those kids on the edge, I’d say some could definitely get overlooked. If that’s the case, you have to do something to promote yourself. It may cost you $500 or so, but if it helps you get scholarship money at college, obviously that’s worth it.”