Countless hours traveling miles and miles on lonely back roads. They spend way too much time in hotels. Their front office expects them to constantly provide player reports and updates. They must dig through tons of coal to find a single diamond. So much of their time is spent away from family and friends, missing birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays. Their best friend is Rand McNally. Always asking the question, CAN HE PLAY? Such is the life of a professional scout.

The scouting profession evolved as the game of professional baseball grew and flourished. Pre-1900 major-league teams used a network of local people to recommend talent which the manager often scouted and signed personally. Minor-league teams frequently signed players from their local areas. On occasion the minor-league club would sell the contract of one of its players to a major-league team. Major-league clubs did not have minor-league affiliates as is generally the case today. The minor-league clubs were independent. Many relationships between major- and minor-league clubs were built on personal relationships rather than strictly business ones.

Teams in the early 1900s began to hire scouts who would follow up on tips on players provided by their manager’s network of bird dogs, a name given to those who followed players but did not work for a team and had no authority to sign a player. The official scouts, often called “ivory hunters” by the press, were hired by the major- league teams, following the minor leagues most of the time, looking for players whose contracts they would then purchase. Minor-league teams, being independent, often had their own scouts and many a local star from semiprofessional, high school, town teams, and the occasional collegian were first signed by minor-league clubs.

Many major-league scouts and/or their teams began to create informal agreements with a minor-league team or two to “farm” out players to gain experience. This is how they “grew” players. Sometimes a major-league scout recommended a player to his preferred minor-league team with the understanding the big-league scout would have an informal option on the player, the first chance to purchase the player’s contract.

Major-league teams soon began to add scouts to the payroll. In the early 1900s, teams might have one or two full-time scouts. Often they had one scout to cover west of the Mississippi River and another to cover east of the river. In some cases more than one club even shared the same scout. Ted Sullivan, one of the earliest full- time scouts, acted as an early version of the Major League Scouting Bureau, scouting for multiple teams at the same time. Teams were still using the bird-dog system, then sending out their full-time scouts to follow up on intriguing prospects.

The scouting profession became even more important when Branch Rickey of the St. Louis Cardinals began to develop the farm system. Teams began to own outright, or develop formal affiliations or working agreements with, many minor-league clubs. The major- league club began to supply more players directly, thus needing to increase the size of its scouting staff.

During this period, minor-league teams continued to hire their own scouts, as they were still able to sell contracts to a major-league club, but more and more players were now being signed directly by major-league teams and then being farmed out until deemed ready. The minor leagues evolved as well, soon creating levels from Class D to AA that players would pass through as they hoped to make their way to the majors.

Most teams began to create farm systems by the early 1930s, attempting to control or own at least one club at each level. Rickey’s Cardinals came to control multiple clubs at each level. Rickey was a pioneer in player development and his philosophy was “out of quantity comes quality.” The more players his scouts signed and his farm system developed, the more flexibility he would have in improving his major-league club. He could trade prospects for major leaguers and also sell contracts of players he would not need at the major-league level, often for a nice profit.

As more teams followed in Rickey’s footsteps, there was increasing competition for the better prospects. The teams with the better scouts fared well, but so did teams with the fatter bank accounts. Particularly after the end of the Second World War, competitive bidding for services drove up the prices paid in bonuses or incentives to greener and greener prospects. In large part as a measure to keep costs down, Major League Baseball instituted the amateur player draft in 1965. There was no longer a free-for-all bidding war for the best domestic prospects.

The player draft changed scouting tremendously. Scouts could no longer sign players immediately, or directly, and keep them away from other clubs. Clubs drafted players sequentially from a pool. Scouts now had to turn in a list of draft-worthy players to their team’s front office and then hope no other club selected their guy before their own organization had the opportunity.

Much of the scouting was still organized geographically. Area scouts cover a certain territory which varies from club to club. In prospect-heavy areas scouts will have a smaller territory, i.e. Southern California. In most parts of the country area scouts are responsible for three to four states. Current areas that are the strongest for players include California, especially the southern part, Texas, Florida, and – increasingly – Georgia.

While scouting for the current draft, area scouts will also compile a list of players to keep an eye on for future drafts. These will be high-school juniors and four-year-college freshmen and sophomores. They also may utilize the reports from the Major League Scouting Bureau to compile their follow list. Good scouts will network with coaches and coordinators of events such as showcases.

Showcases are a growing phenomenon in the scouting world. Some involve travel teams, often hand-picked teams with the better players from a large area who play in large tournaments throughout the year. These events allow scouts to see many players in one place in a short amount of time. Other showcases, often coordinated by scouts themselves, gather the top-rated prospects from a much larger area or in some cases nationwide. Among the more prominent of these are the East Coast showcase and the Area Code games.

Most organizations now have regional cross-checkers who follow up on the area scouts’ list. With larger and larger signing bonuses involved, front offices have virtually added another level of scouting called cross-checking. Most organizations also have a National Cross Checker, who then follows up on the regional cross checker’s information. (See Gib Bodet’s article in this volume.) In the case of possible high-round draftees, the general manager himself might see the player in person as well.

With the increasing cost of signing these high draft picks, many general managers are becoming much more involved in the process. Some GMs will personally scout potential first- and maybe second- round picks. The director of scouting will do the same. Teams want to get as many looks at the top players as possible. A short time before the draft, clubs will bring their scouting departments together to develop their “board.” (See Ben Jedlovec’s article.) They will discuss, argue, and finally decide on the ranking order of hundreds of possible draft choices. When a player is drafted he is said to “come off the board.”

The area scout is the true backbone of the scouting department. After the first few rounds an area scout will often be the only one in the organization with a report on the player. The area scout also takes the lead in the signing process, making the initial contact with the player and generally handling most if not all of the negotiation. On occasion an area scout will sign a nondrafted free agent; someone he sees can fill a role in the organization. Scouts sometimes hold tryout camps and sign the occasional player from these as well.

An area of some growth in scouting currently is the international arena, which remains outside the player draft. With the likes of Joe Cambria and Howie Haak opening the door, and Epy Guerrero and Bill Clark running through it, international scouting has grown geometrically in recent years. All teams now scout internationally and most maintain an academy in the top talent area, the Dominican Republic. Latin America is scouted heavily, with Venezuela in particular supplying many players. Islands in the Caribbean have provided players and an increasing number are coming from Pacific Rim nations. Australia has produced major leaguers. Europe is increasingly being scouted. Canada has been an excellent source of players. Baseball has truly become worldwide.

A final area where scouting has grown is on the professional scouting side. Teams will scout other organizations for potential trades, players to acquire through the Rule 5 draft, and as minor- league free agents. As in amateur scouting, clubs have different systems in pro scouting. Some scout by organization. The scout will be assigned a certain number of organizations to follow, usually from the major-league club down to High A ball. Others assign scouts to specific leagues while some scout regionally.

How many times have you heard the media report a big trade with words similar to these: “blank for blank and two minor leaguers?” Those minor-league players may be the key to the deal and were scouted and recommended by the club’s pro scouts. Many clubs have scouts with titles such as Special Assignment scout or Special Assistant to the GM who will be sent out to scout specific players, often when a potential trade is in the works.

Pro scouts of course ask the age-old question, CAN HE PLAY? Is he a major leaguer? If so, what role will he have: an everyday player, a utility guy, or just up for a cup of coffee? They will decide if starting pitchers project out as a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 rotation guy, relievers as a closer, middle relief, or a long man. They will decide how they are developing, to ask regarding each player: Is he close to being major-league ready?

In the offseason clubs look for players to fill holes in their organization. Sometimes situations occur that need to be addressed by acquiring minor-league players. Perhaps a team’s AA club is going to be short on pitching and the AAA team needs a couple of outfielders. Minor-league free agents, scouted by their pro scouts, may be signed in the offseason to fill those gaps or a trade may be made.

Another area of pro scouting is called advance scouting. The advance scout travels ahead of his club, scouting upcoming opponents. He will write reports on tendencies, who is hot or cold, possible injuries, anything that might give his club an edge. Increasingly some teams are turning to technology to supplement or even replace advance scouts. They feel they can acquire enough information from scouting video, rather than needing to send a scout in person. Other clubs disagree with this philosophy, believing you can’t see it all from video and nothing can replace an experienced scout’s judgment on the spot. This is one debate that may never be settled.

Assessing video is a skill in itself, and a legitimate form of scouting. Finding the diamond in the rough, the 15- or 16-year- old kid who may develop the body and attributes of a true athlete remains one of the more exciting challenges for some scouts, but pro scouting is in the here-and-now, dealing with opponents on the field today. Both are essential parts of the successful big-league team today, as is – indeed – the full range of talent assessment and evaluation, that is, of scouting. Whatever the tools that might help, the primary question regarding any prospect remains: Can he play?

JIM SANDOVAL (1958-2012) was a history teacher and freelance baseball writer who collected ballparks and baseball scout sightings. He contributed to SABR’s NL and AL Deadball Stars books and The Fenway Project. A former small college baseball player, he realized he was more of a prospect writing baseball than playing it. He was the longtime co-chair of SABR’s Scouts Committee.

Jim Sandoval at Joe Davis Stadium, Huntsville, Alabama, August 2011.

Tom Seaver scouting report, 1965. (Click to enlarge.)

Just as an iceberg reveals only a small part of its mass, the public face of baseball shows only a fraction of the work required to assemble clubs and stage games. The nonplayer personnel are, in many ways, the unsung heroes of the game.

For years, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum has gone beyond the essentials of bats, balls, and gloves to collect the tools used by those engaged in the other, unseen aspects of the game. Photographers, writers, grounds crew, and scouts are all a part of this hidden game, and their cameras, typewriters, and field equipment have been duly added to the Hall’s collections.

Among this group, the scouts’ contributions are unusual, as their work regularly takes place away from their own ballparks. Traveling throughout an assigned territory, scouts scour the sandlot, high school, or (increasingly) college fields to find a gem, preferably one undiscovered by their competitors. The title given them by The Sporting News, “ivory hunters,” suggests their travels through the wilds of the Americas to find their rare quarry—the elusive major-league prospect. Aside from interstates and air conditioning, the scout’s job has changed very little since the era of such legendary figures as Paul Krichell and Cy Slapnicka.

The scout’s tools are relatively simple: a stopwatch, notebook, and pen, a hat for the sun and, more recently, a radar gun. In addition to these items, the Hall of Fame has also collected examples of the most tangible things scouts create: their scouting reports.

Our desire to build a much larger collection of scouting reports comes from several perspectives. First, as a research institution, the Hall is interested in all aspects of baseball, from the game on the field, to its cultural ties, to the game off the field. While we hold over two million documents in our archives, the amount relating to this important area of the game is seriously underrepresented. Over the years, a handful of reports have trickled in, mostly for Hall of Famers like Sandy Koufax, Tom Seaver, and Roberto Clemente. These reports excited us, and the more we considered them, the more we thought these documents might be exciting to our visitors. We began to develop a plan to collect and share as many reports as we could in an interactive database.

As we began a search for more reports, we started calling and interviewing many scouts, active and retired, throughout the country. In pursuing these reports, we discovered they were elusive for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, perhaps, free-agent scouting reports embody the very essence of ephemera. While multiple teams may research and pursue a prospect, only one can sign him. Once signed, the player is a professional ballplayer, and moves into the smaller, somewhat more structured scouting universe surrounding the minor leagues. At that point, the free-agent scout’s professional interest in the player diminishes markedly, and his old reports, now largely irrelevant, are often disposed of.

Another difficulty in obtaining the reports involves ownership. Regardless of who has a copy, the reports themselves belong to the scout’s employer, the big-league team. Without the team’s approval, a scout cannot transfer the documents to someone else. Most teams, moreover, are focused on the future. They do not have the time or inclination to perform a cost/benefit analysis to decide whether to allow their scouts to release information. So, largely by inertia, the default answer to a scout seeking permission to donate reports is often, no.

When asked to consider donating their reports, scouts voiced another concern. This was tied to the brutal honesty a report entails–how good is a player, and how much should he cost? No one has to tell scouts that they miss more often than they hit, and these reports graphically illustrate the uncertainty that lies at the heart of the profession. The reports document all of a scout’s failures in the unvarnished language the profession demands. The result is almost a prescription for an unflattering portrayal of both the player in question and the scout’s assessment.

The final hitch in the acquisition of reports stems from the core of a scout’s job. By necessity, the scout’s business is one that combines secrecy and personal responsibility. The names, locations, abilities, and projections of a scout’s prospects are closely guarded during the chase. Giving those data to an institution that is devoted to sharing information with the world is a difficult leap to make. While scouts see themselves as one of the least understood professions within the game, sharing such a personal part of their work does not always come naturally.

Sandy Koufax scouting report, 1954. (Click to enlarge.)

Fortunately, with the help of many scouts and baseball executives, we have been successful in starting the construction of that database. Over the past decade, we have acquired over 2,000 scouting reports on more than 1,000 players, compiled by about 200 scouts. These are largely within our primary focus of free-agent or amateur scouting, the segment of the profession that beats the bushes to bring new talent to the game. In addition, we have received a few reports for professional players, sometimes from the minors, but also created in preparation for the postseason.

These documents run the gamut in terms of the information they contain. Some are wonderfully detailed, outlining the scout’s impression of the baseball player. Most often, the reports contain only a single word that notes the scout’s interest: “Follow.”

One distinguishing characteristic of the reports is the scouts’ continuing use of the term “boy” to characterize all their prospects. Upon first reading, it seems pejorative in some way, since we now know the majority of these “boys” as men. After reflection, the word serves as a reminder that the players a scout seeks are, in fact, boys, 15, or 16, or 17 years old, and young enough to be many scouts’ grandsons.

On older reports, the racial issues our nation has long wrestled with are reflected in the language used. If a white player was known simply as “boy,” his African-American counterpart was often jarringly referred to as a “Negro boy” or “colored boy.” At a time when job and loan applications outside of baseball demanded to know one’s race, teams felt they also needed to know a prospect’s race as much as they needed to know his speed to first.

Mostly, though, the thrill of these reports is seeing the dead-on assessment of a scout’s prospects. Scout Dewey Griggs summed up young Juan Marichal by noting the trait that drove opposing batters to exasperation, “Never seems to exert himself,” before concluding, “very good live fast ball…should go all the way.” After rating 18-year-old Roberto Clemente A or A+ in arm strength, fielding, hitting, accuracy, reactions, power, and base running, scout Al Campanis elaborated: “Has all the tools and likes to play…Will mature into big man.”

Finally, said scout Tommy Lasorda of Tom Seaver, a sophomore at the University of Southern California, “Boy has plenty of desire to pitch and wants to beat you.”

An exhibit on scouting is on the long-term agenda of the Hall, and when it opens, we look forward to bringing these and other reports to our visitors. In the meantime, they are available by advance reservation to researchers at the A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center, here at the Hall of Fame.

JOHN ODELL, curator of history and research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, rejoices daily that he can merge his lifelong passion for baseball with his museum vocation. He resides in Cooperstown, New York, with his wife, Peg, and their three children. A Virginia native, Odell is an Orioles fan but loves seeing any baseball game, at any level, so long as it is live and in person.

Photo credits

All images courtesy of National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, New York.

Juan Marichal scouting report, 1959. (Click to enlarge.)

Today a major-league front office has many avenues for acquiring players—free agency, the amateur draft, trades, the Rule 5 draft, Latin American free agents, etc.—the usefulness of each depends on the ability of a team’s scouts to recognize talent. During the heyday of the Yankees dynasty, which occurred before the introduction of the amateur draft, a scout not only had to identify who would become a major-league ballplayer, but be able to obtain them in a competitive environment. In the 1920s and 1930s New York assembled a legendary team of scouts who, in conjunction with baseball’s most professional front office administration, delivered a consistent stream of baseball’s top talent.

Prior to the end of World War I, franchises generally operated without a general manager. Player personnel decisions were typically overseen by the owner and manager. The distribution of authority between the two depended primarily on the level of control the team president or majority owner wished to retain for himself. Many owners, like Barney Dreyfuss in Pittsburgh and Charles Comiskey in Chicago, prided themselves on their baseball smarts and maintained control over player personnel moves and decisions. At the other end of the spectrum the New York Giants employed a willful genius in manager John McGraw. Outside of a veto on significant cash outlays, ownership allowed McGraw essentially free rein on all personnel matters.

Baseball ownership evolved after World War I as more sophisticated American industrialists bought into the sport. These new owners recognized the importance of more professional administration to move beyond the limitations of operating like a small business. After the 1920 season the Yankees owners, brewery magnate Jacob Ruppert and his partner Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, concluded that they needed to revamp their business. The two brought in Boston Red Sox manager Ed Barrow as a de facto general manager to professionalize the front office.

Barrow inherited a small scouting staff led by manager Miller Huggins’s best friend in baseball, Bob Connery, and ex-major-league outfielder Joe Kelley. Connery in particular was generally regarded as an astute judge of talent, having signed future Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby while working with Huggins for the St. Louis Cardinals. Barrow clearly appreciated the importance of a strong scouting staff and during his long tenure in the Yankees front office often credited the Yankees’ success to having the best scouts in the business. Immediately upon assuming his new position in New York, Barrow hired his Boston coach and scout, Paul Krichell, to bolster the scouting staff. Destined to become one of the most successful of all ivory hunters, Krichell was responsible for many of the Yankees’ stars.

In the early 1920s, scouting evolved as the economic landscape shifted in favor of the high minor leagues. The major-league/minor- league draft in which teams could draft players from lower leagues was significantly diluted, effectively protecting the high minor leagues from losing players involuntarily to the majors (much to the detriment of the players). Scouts not only needed to identify the best players but negotiate with minor-league owners to pry them away for the lowest acceptable price. (Even before the attenuation of the draft, players were sold to the majors, but the threat of the draft acted to keep the prices down.)

The 40-man roster was another key factor at work in the 1920s. Like today, a team had a 40-man roster of players under its control and a 25-man active roster during the majority of the season. Unlike today, however, when a team can control many more players through its farm system, in the ’20s all players under control of the major-league team counted against the 40-man roster; thus, franchises could effectively control only 15 minor leaguers. Of course some teams, particularly Branch Rickey’s St. Louis Cardinals, maneuvered within and around these rules, but in any case the rules encouraged scouts to devote the preponderance of their effort to scouting the high minors for near-ready major-league players.

Within this environment the Yankees proved extremely successful in the early to mid-1920s. Krichell and Connery signed Columbia University baseball star Lou Gehrig to one of their precious roster spots and optioned him to the minor leagues. A couple of years later Connery pushed for the Yankees to purchase another future Hall of Famer, outfielder Earle Combs, for $50,000— at the time the highest price ever paid for an American Association player.

By early 1925 Barrow was down to only three scouts, Ed Holly (another former Red Sox scout), Bob Gilks, and Krichell. Kelley had retired in 1924 and Connery, in conjunction with Huggins, had purchased a controlling interest in the St. Paul American Association franchise. To rebuild his scouting staff, Barrow brought in two new scouts and organized his staff geographically. Former Vernon (Pacific Coast League) manager Bill Essick was assigned the West, and Eddie Herr, another old friend of Huggins, was responsible for the Midwest. Of the holdovers, Gilks maintained his Southern focus, Holly took over New England and the East, and Krichell continued scouting the colleges and New York.

The Yankees used a team approach for the most expensive players. When Barrow wanted to evaluate Salt Lake City star Tony Lazzeri, he sent Krichell to evaluate him. (Krichell liked to joke that Barrow, who often dispatched his scouts to review prospects on short notice, began every telegram with “immediately” or “at once.”) Krichell liked what he saw and recommended Lazzeri despite his huge price tag of $50,000 and five players. Barrow dispatched Holly to confirm Krichell’s judgment and practically ordered Connery, now in St. Paul and no longer a Yankees employee, to also validate Lazzeri’s ability.

In St. Paul, Connery maintained his close ties with Huggins and the Yankees front office. Because of this relationship, St. Paul sold quite a few of its stars to the Yankees and accepted a number of prospects back on option. In retrospect this relationship benefited the Saints much more than the Yankees. New York spent roughly $300,000 in less than a decade purchasing St. Paul’s best players. Other than Mark Koenig, none developed into a quality major leaguer. As far as one can tell at this distance in time, the ownership interests were aboveboard, but Huggins and Connery were clearly in a conflicted position. Ruppert became so disenchanted with Connery over a couple of player transactions that he later overruled Barrow’s recommendation of Connery as the farm system director in favor of George Weiss.

The misses from St. Paul highlight another aspect of the Yankees scouting philosophy. The club recognized that scouting is an inexact science; a team needs to sign as many talented young players as possible because some will inevitably not live up to expectations. The Yankees were not only the most profitable team, but at least as importantly, the ownership did not pay out its profits in dividends; it reinvested them in the team. These recycled funds allowed the team to pursue and purchase the best players—and lots of them. For every Saint who didn’t pan out, the scouts landed a Lefty Gomez or a Bill Dickey.

As the team rebounded in 1926 with several of the players purchased from the high minors, Barrow continued to fine-tune his scouting staff. He brought in Gene McCann to help in the East and Johnny Nee to take over the South. Several years later the Yankees added the last of their legendary scouts, hiring Joe Devine to help out in the West. Like Barrow’s existing scouts, all three had spent time managing in the minor leagues. Minor-league managers were a good source of scouting talent for a couple of reasons. First, and most obviously, they had a chance to develop and hone their evaluation skills of young players. Second, and almost as important, they would have developed a network of amateur coaches and managers in the lowest minor leagues to whom they could turn for player recommendations. Many in these networks were considered “bird dog” scouts who would receive a small bonus when one of the players they recommended was signed.

With the onset of the Depression in the early 1930s, the minors looked for financial assistance from the majors. In response the majors changed the roster rules to make investing in minor- league franchises worthwhile. Under a wide range of circumstances players on a minor-league team controlled by a major-league team were now exempted from the 40-man roster limit. Ruppert quickly grasped the impact of this rule and ordered Barrow to establish a farm system. To stock what would quickly become the best minor- league system in the league, Barrow redirected his scouts to spend more time chasing top amateurs.

Landing the best amateurs required wits, money, salesmanship, and hustle. The Yankees scouts became renowned for selling the benefits of the Yankees organization to prospective signees. Given the depressed economic environment of the era, signing bonuses typically topped out at around $6,000 to $8,000. If the Yankees wanted a player, they would not lose him over money; Ruppert desperately wanted to win and would make funds available for players his scouts believed in. Of course the scouts did not completely forgo the high, independent minors. In 1934 the Yankees purchased Joe DiMaggio for $25,000 and five players, a discount price because of his reportedly bum knee.

On balance, the Yankees’ mystique and success on the field probably helped in the competition for prospects, but certainly some were afraid of getting stuck behind the Yankees stars. New York prep star Hank Greenberg chose Detroit in part because of his fear of getting stuck behind Lou Gehrig, although Barrow and Krichell were far from their best in the courting of the big first baseman.

The signings of Charlie Keller and Atley Donald were more the norm. Keller became a highly sought-after prospect while at the University of Maryland. McCann, who had been tracking Keller for some time, landed him for $7,500. Keller had always wanted to play for New York and likely signed for less than he could have received elsewhere. As a condition of his signing, the Yankees did agree to let Keller choose where he would start in the minors. Donald had also always wanted to play for the Yankees. His coach at Louisiana Tech sent a letter to the Yankees touting him, which Barrow ignored. (Barrow had received other letters from the coach plugging players and few had panned out.) To get a tryout, Donald rode the bus to St. Petersburg to meet the Yankees at spring training. He arrived early, ran out of money, and had to take a job in a grocery store. Eventually he cajoled Johnny Nee into giving him a tryout and the Yankees signed him.1

The Yankees scouts quickly proved their mettle in unearthing amateur talent. In 1937, for example, when the Yankees easily won the pennant and World Series, their top farm team in Newark won more than 70 percent of its games. This minor-league team, often considered one of the greatest ever, was led by many future major-league players and stars acquired by the Yankees scouts.

Over the years there have been many explanations of what the Yankees looked for in a prospect and why their scouts were so successful. In one of the more interesting, Paul Krichell once summarized the importance of a player’s makeup: “A scout has to look for real ability in a player: Has he got a good arm, does he have speed, does he take a good look at the ball? Temperament counts a lot but you can’t look inside a young player, can you? So, how well does he like to play ball? Does he really love the game?” He then went on to discuss some specific criteria: “Sometimes you can have a ballplayer who will do well in the majors with one fault. Earle Combs couldn’t throw. But he made up for that in many other ways. But if a kid has two faults, he doesn’t have a chance.”2

Notwithstanding Krichell’s quotation, none of the explanations are particularly compelling. After all, scouting methods and front- office organization are relatively transferable skills: Teams can hire scouts away from their rivals and organizational models can be readily duplicated. Furthermore, the very fact of all the explanations for the Yankees’ scouting success indicates there was no shortage of information regarding the Yankees system. In a competitive, reactive environment there is no simple recipe for success.

In the end the Yankees’ scouting success came down to two factors. First, organizationally and administratively the team created an effective organization: one that recognized the importance of scouting, provided sound strategic direction, gave its scouts the tools they needed to succeed, and demanded excellence from all personnel. Second, as a result of this organization, the team hired some of the greatest of all baseball scouts and kept them actively engaged finding and signing the nation’s best baseball prospects.

DAN LEVITT recently completed The Battle That Forged Modern Baseball: The Federal League Challenge and Its Legacy, to be published by Rowman & Littlefield under its Ivan R Dee imprint in the spring of 2012. He is also the author of Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankees’ First Dynasty (Nebraska, 2008), a Seymour Award finalist, and co-author of Paths to Glory: How Great Baseball Teams Got that Way (Brassey’s, 2003), winner of The Sporting News/SABR Baseball Research Award. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two boys.

Sources

Online historical resources were extremely useful: in particular, The Sporting News and the New York Times. The SABR Scouts Committee “Who Signed Who” database is also a valuable resource for researching scouts. The author’s biography of Ed Barrow, Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankees’ First Dynasty (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008) offers a detailed history of the Yankees’ approach to team   building, useful background on the Yankees’ scouting system, and an extensive bibliography of Yankees-related books and articles. The task of tracking down the many references to Yankees scouts in published sources was eased tremendously by The Baseball Index.

Notes

1. The Sporting News, January 4, 1940; The Sporting News, July 27, 1939.

2. Roy Terrell, “Yankee Secrets,” Sports Illustrated (July 22, 1957)

One of the loneliest jobs in baseball has to be that of the advance scout. Dana Levangie and Scott Bradley are the two advance scouts for the Red Sox, with former Boston bullpen catcher Levangie (1997-2004) getting the bulk of the work. Levangie, a six-year minor-league catcher before joining the big-league club for bullpen duty, typically travels four to eight days ahead of the team, scouting a team the Sox will face a couple of series later. Thus, when the Red Sox host the White Sox the first week of September, Levangie will have been in Chicago for the final days of August watching how the reigning World Champions play the visiting Rays. The White Sox are in Kansas City for the three days before they come to Boston, but the pitchers the Red Sox will face at Fenway are the ones that will be on the mound against Tampa Bay.

And Levangie never sees his own team play. Every game is a road game, and he never gets to enjoy the companionship of his colleagues. The other scouts he meets on the road are not the same from city to city, as each follows his own schedule. It truly is one of the loneliest jobs – but one of the most crucial jobs as well. Levangie is part of the “team behind the team” that gathers information to help the Red Sox succeed.

During postgame remarks on more than one occasion during the first half of the 2006 season, Curt Schilling credited the work of the advance scouts in helping formulate the game plan that enabled him to succeed. Of course, Jason Varitek has to call the game and Schilling has to execute, but the game plan is one developed through the combined efforts of a number of people and Schilling was quick with praise on the days when things went well.

Advance video

Over the last few years, the Red Sox have accumulated video of opposing players – pitchers and hitters – that they might have occasion to face. Their system allows each batter to study video of the starting pitcher and likely relievers from the opposition, and to do so in considerable situational detail. Billy Broadbent has been Boston’s major-league video coordinator since 1997. He travels with the team and is available home and away to players and coaches, effectively the liaison between advance-scouting coordinator Kyle Evans and the Red Sox coaching staff. He travels with a server and four laptops, no longer the now-primitive VCR and single monitor of even just a half-dozen years ago.

Since the newer system was first implemented in 2002, any coach or player can draw on an extensive database showing real-time game footage. For instance, suppose you were a left-handed batter expecting to face Mike Mussina in Yankee Stadium in mid-September. You could call up video of every at-bat you had previously had facing Mussina to see how he’d worked you in the past. You could call up recent video from his last five starts to see how he attacked other left-handed batters. Did he often start off throwing strikes? Was there a pattern he might follow as he got deeper into the count? If you even wanted to know the pitch he had most often thrown in 2-0 counts, you could isolate those at-bats. It’s a very sophisticated system allowing any number of ways to “slice and dice” the available video data.

Advance-scouting coordinator Kyle Evans

Kyle Evans was in his first year as advance-scouting coordinator for the Red Sox. A former pitcher with six years of experience in the Indians system behind him, Evans got as far as Triple A with Cleveland but became a key component of the Red Sox major-league effort. “This is my first job on this side of the game,” he said, and he was pleased to be part of such a successful organization. “I know there are things that we’re doing here that are definitely ahead of the game. We’re obviously very guarded about our trade secrets, but it’s definitely an organization that prides itself as being a step ahead in terms of the information we have access to and can provide to the players and staff.”

Evans is in constant contact with Levangie and Scott Bradley, the advance scouts, but there is by no means a constrained channel of communication. “Dana spends a lot of time on the road watching games and trying to take in as much information as he possibly can, to get something of value to the coaching staff and to the players. He spends a lot of time talking to me, but he talks on a regular directly with Jason Varitek and with [bench coach] Brad Mills, trying to relay what he›s seen. He also talks to Al Nipper quite a bit, on the pitching side.”

Levangie will talk to quite a few people. “I talk to Brad Mills, to Nipper. I talk to Papa Jack [Ron Jackson, hitting coach], when I feel things are needed. He has a lot of history as far as the guys he’s seen. If there’s a new guy on board, I’ll mention it.” With Varitek, though, there’s a special catcher-to-catcher connection. “We’ll talk about every hitter. We’ll go over every hitter. He’ll have his own image of how he’s going to approach them, but I’ll try to sell him on what I’ve seen at that point.” Levangie’s conversations often continue after the game, too. “I talk to Billy on a daily basis, so he can tell me what happened, what stood out, how we did as a team, who’s doing what. I talk to Tito [manager Terry Francona] occasionally. Tito has a lot to do before each series. He respects his coaches a lot and he asks a lot from them, so I try to go through Brad [Mills].”

Jason Varitek

Having worked together for years while Levangie was the bullpen catcher for Boston, Varitek has a strong rapport with the scout. “Having been with Dana and having developed a great deal of trust in him and his knowledge of the game … he observes the game so much there’s probably nobody in the advance-scouting world that I would trust as much as him.” Varitek explains that his game preparation takes 2½ to 3 hours prior to each series, beginning with his own player-by-player outline of the upcoming opposition. “I’ll make my notes, then I’ll hear from Dana. I like to have mine done first so we have a comparison of what they’ve seen and what I think. We add in Billy [Broadbent] with the video and the pitching coach’s work and the bullpen coach’s work, and you have a big compiled pool of information.”

Then he sits down and formulates the game plan with the starting pitcher. Sometimes there isn’t a great deal of time to prepare. The Red Sox were in Atlanta for a Sunday night game, then flew home afterward with the Washington Nationals due in the next evening. “I had to do it the night before. I knew we were going to have a short day. I had to do it all on the plane.” Once a series gets under way, preparation for subsequent games in the series can be a 10-or 15-minute review. Of course, game plans are one thing and execution another. The scouting might be dead-on, but it all comes down to pitchers’ strengths: “Who’s on the mound? You can’t always pitch guys certain ways if the guy on the mound doesn’t have that capability. You have to take that information and interpolate and extrapolate it, and come up with a plan.” On a given day, a pitcher might have difficulty, say, locating. “Then you have to mix and match even more, and try and think out of the box a little bit.” One thing Varitek knows: “Everybody’s always put in their work.” That said, though, “They can do their work, and it still comes down to our execution, using that information properly and making on-field and game-time adjustments.”

Information flow

It is by no means just Varitek who receives the information. Kyle Evans, the advance-scouting coordinator, further explains the information flow: “The way it sets up is that Dana sends in reports that come to me. I try to filter the information along with what I can pick up watching a lot of video and having access to some different numbers and things that we have here in the office, to try and compile an accurate picture of the opposing team and specifically the players on the opposing team. We’re very fortunate to have a guy like Jason Varitek, who takes so much pride in the way he calls the game and how well he knows the opposing hitters. And so we definitely make sure there’s a lot of information there in terms of having an accurate picture of the other hitters strengths and weaknesses.”

The reports typically are prepared by the advance scouts in text form, using templates developed by the Red Sox over time, Evans says, using forms “that the players and coaches are comfortable with. Everything goes into those formats. Dana and Scott both feed information into those templates and then I follow through and update it and try to make things a little more complete. I put in a little more statistical information for them as well. At any point in time, we can print out very up-to-date spray charts and the like. Anybody would have access to certain things, but we definitely … it’s one of the places that the Red Sox try to get an edge, having access to things that the average person couldn’t come across.”

Evans tailors the reports to each recipient, developing different information specific to, for instance, the tasks of the individual coaches. “Each of the coaches gets a scouting report in one form or another. [So do] certain players who definitely take a more active role in terms of scouting the other teams. In Jason Varitek and Curt Schilling, I would say we have two of the most prepared players in the major leagues. In my opinion, Curt Schilling is one of the best pitchers in the major leagues at actually executing a scouting report. It makes my job a lot of fun to be able to game-plan for a guy like Curt.”

There are players, of course, who rely more on instinct than on preparation. Billy Broadbent recalled that Nomar Garciaparra “very rarely looked” at video, yet as a two-time batting champion was clearly successful despite drawing on the available information much more sparingly. Evans agrees that there are players that “you wouldn’t recommend trying to go outside of their strengths. That’s one of the biggest things that you have to take into consideration, someone’s ability to execute a scouting plan. That’s why I say it’s a real pleasure to get a chance to do this for someone like Curt. But we take into account everybody we have on the staff. That’s one of the places where there’s so much value in having Tek take an interest in it, because he does have a really good rapport with the pitching staff. Those guys trust him to call a game, and I think it’s a big deal to make sure that he’s prepared in a way that he continues to earn their trust. There aren’t a ton of players running around with a ‘C’ on their jersey. He’s a special player.”

Alex Gonzalez and Mark Loretta

Advance-scouting work benefits fielders and hitters as well as pitchers. Shortstop Alex Gonzalez explains that they will watch video of the pitchers they’ll be facing. “We have a video room and watch the video in our hitting group. Who’s pitching today, say Randy Johnson or anybody, you look at how they pitch, the last time he pitched to you – how he worked to you, watch this guy, how to see the curve. But they pitch different here [at Fenway]. You’ve got to make adjustments.” He listens to the defensive coaches, too. For the Red Sox, it’s third-base coach DeMarlo Hale who positions the infielders while first-base coach Bill Hasselman positions the outfield. So, Gonzalez says, Hale might tell him, “This guy, everything he throws through here, he’ll just try to … he’ll like to hit up the middle. We just move a little here [to the left]. Some guys you leave straight, a slight pull.”

If there’s a shift on, for a Teixeira or Giambi, Gonzalez has to be prepared to play second base instead of shortstop. “They tell me before the game, this guy likes to pull-hit it early in the count. With two strikes, he’ll have to hit a ball in the middle. You have to know the hitter, how they like to hit. What I do is watch his hands.”

Like Varitek, most of Gonzalez’s video work is done prior to a series, not on a daily basis.

Infielder Mark Loretta has been in major-league ball for eleven years and seen the use of computer data evolve. “It’s come a long way,” he says. “Especially the video stuff. It’s beome a pretty big part of the game.º I tend to lean more toward video scouting than I do the opinion of someone else. I like the radar-gun reading, et cetera, but in terms of what a guy likes to do in a certain situation, I’d rather look at the video and kind of determine that for myself.” Loretta is referring to the opposing pitchers. For defense, he tends to rely more on the preview meeting with Hale, going over the opposing batters. All in all, Loretta says, “The Red Sox are as advanced as any team I’ve seen.” He believes that the Red Sox pitchers “probably rely on it even more than the hitters do.”

Billy Broadbent knows that information is something you don’t toss out. “You don’t ever throw anything out. A perfect example is Chris Hammond. He retired for a couple of years after the ’98 season. You’d think you could throw away his video, but no, he ended up coming back.” Hammond played for the Yankees in 2003 and for Oakland in 2004.

Mike Timlin

Veteran relief ace Mike Timlin talks about how the bullpen uses the advance scouting reports. “We go over them as a group, the relievers. The catchers are in there, too. We sit down and put a game plan together, hash out some stuff. You bring your strengths, bring your weaknesses into the meeting. Nip (Nipper) starts rolling over the hitters, and we all chime in, because we’ve all faced different hitters at different times. There are things that we need [in the reports]: hot and cold zones. Where you had previous experience, most of it’s knowledge that you already have in your head. I used to write the stuff down, what I did facing each hitter, but it got to the point it was kind of tedious. Now it’s more of a memory thing. Most of the time I can remember the hitters that I faced, and how I got them out. Billy [Broadbent] sees it from a different perspective-he is like an advance scout that sits with us, or a pitching coach that sits here and watches all our films, as they As it takes place. I went up to him as I got finished yesterday and asked him what it looked like. He gave me what he saw.”

Levangie’s reports mean a great deal to Timlin. “Dana has a great eye for baseball. Catching in the bullpen, he could tell you something you were doing wrong while you were doing it. He had that kind of eye. He’s a very learned baseball man. Awesome.”

Bill Monbouquette

Of course, pitchers from earlier times never had the option to slip in a DVD and watch video. They still took advantage of the tools available to them. Bill Monbouquette pitched for the Red Sox from 1958 through 1965. “Each pitcher who was pitching in the series got the chance to go over the scouting report – what kind of success did you have? How do you pitch him? Where would you want to play him, in certain towns?” After time spent with a few other clubs, he ended up doing some scouting for the Yankees. Scouting reports in those days were handwritten reports. “You’d have to get that report in the next night.”

Monbouquette felt at times there can be a danger in providing too much information. “I really believe there is way too much over-analyzing and thinking about the game today. You listen to guys talk and you go, ‘What the hell is he talking about?’They make the game harder than it is.” Nevertheless, the better players would always try to get an edge any way they could. “Ted Williams, he would watch a guy. The first inning would be over and he’d come flying in. He’d get right up over there [the home plate side of the dugout]; he’d want to get a look at this guy. He’d ask, ‘Can you pick the ball up?’ That’s all that mattered to him.”

These days, players will sometimes take advantage of modern technology during the course of the game. Broadbent explains: “If those hitters see somebody warming up in the bullpen, they’ll go down and take a look on the computer to see what they can see versus right-handed or versus left-handed. There’s a room downstairs where they can take a look. Most of them know how to do everything, but I can control it remotely if they get stuck.”

Curt Schilling

Viewers watching the game on television will often see Curt Schilling poring over his notes during the course of a game. Schilling represents the most diligent player in terms of preparation. “The day I pitch, from the minute I wake up and get out of bed in the morning and have breakfast to when I throw the first pitch, every minute between those two moments, I’m in the on-deck circle. Every moment that I can, I’m thinking about a hitter or a situation, or a count, or a pitch. It’s not that I’m trying to get on a game face and be a tough guy. It’s just that I have a horrible fear of coming out of a game with a loss because I wasn’t prepared for something. I’ve done it before when I was young and I vowed I would never do it again. If I’m going to take the ‘L’ and we’re going to lose a game I pitched, it’s going to be because I made mistakes. That happens, and you have to live with that, but I can’t go to sleep at night if I thought I lost the game because I wasn’t prepared.

“My goal is to never be caught off-guard on the mound. To always be prepared for any situation, any count, any hitter – as far as keeping notes on umpires, knowing what guys call on what corners. So in the eighth inning of a game with a runner on third, if I’ve got an umpire with a wider outer half to the strike zone, I’m going to try and throw the ball off the plate.”

What about going over his notes while his team is up at bat? “The stuff that I’m doing between innings is more with the game charts. When I’m on the bench, I’ll have all of my previous starts against that team, the game charts there, just to see sequences. Because there are hitters who I know that study. And who guess. And I’ve had situations where I know that he’s guessing one way and I’ll throw a fastball down the middle and the guy will … In New York, I threw a fastball right down the middle to A-Rod in the first inning for strike three and he took it. I knew he was guessing something else. And that’s an out. Any time you can buy an out that way, the game’s too hard not to take it.”

Schilling takes an active role in defensive placement as well, creating his own spray charts and not relying on those from Major League Baseball. All his notes are handwritten, and he’s been keeping them for years, carrying forward the previous year’s notes during spring training. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that teams have an approach, much more so than individual hitters. In my preview meeting, I go over with the defensive coach where my outfielders are going to be with each guy, where my infielders are going to be, if this situation shows up, I want to do this and this and this. You rely on your advance scouts for a lot of that.

“I’m going to throw a pitch. I know where the ball’s going to be when things are right; I know what his reaction’s going to be. I don’t want to give up a hit on a ball that I know was going to get hit before I throw the pitch. That doesn’t make any sense. So I’ll position the infielders, I’ll move my defenders – and if a guy hits a ball to a spot where I’ve moved a defender away from – that’s happened – that’s my fault. That doesn’t bother me. I get mad, but I get nobody to blame. You can’t defend a bad pitch, so I defend the pitch I know I’m going to make, and if I don’t make it, that’s my fault.”

Varitek has the same feeling about proper preparation. He agrees that sometimes a good battery could probably pull it off without rigorous planning. “You probably can, but I think there’s situations where you might not have your best stuff, you might not be locating as well that day, somebody’s breaking ball isn’t working as well as it normally does. … It becomes my safety net. I think it’s a big part of our continued success.”

The information supplied by the Red Sox scouting department is crucial to Curt’s approach. “I’ve had some great advance scouts in the past. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that they knew I was relying on them. It’s a thankless job. I know I couldn’t be as good as I am – or want to be – without them. These guys – this group – are probably the best, the most detailed, the most thorough I’ve ever been around.”

It’s no accident that the Red Sox have made the postseason three years running, and part of the reason has been the advance scouting. Dave Jauss earned plaudits for his work in prior years, and earned him a world championship ring, and the team continues to invest heavily in data collection, analysis, and distribution. There are the professional scouts evaluating draft prospects and players on other teams being considered for possible trade acquisitions. As the postseason approaches, some of the professional scouts will be assigned advance-scouting duties, supplementing the work done by Bradley and Levangie to size up the opposition and better prepare the Red Sox players for the challenges ahead.

This piece on advance scouting was adapted from an article written for Red Sox Magazine in August 2006.

Cross-checkers, called regional scouting supervisors by some clubs, work a level between that of the area scout and scouting director. Most

have a layer between the regional cross-checkers and the scouting director. This role is usually called the National Cross Checker. One such national cross checker is longtime SABR member Gib Bodet. Gib graciously recorded his thoughts on cross-checking for use in this book on September 5, 2009.

I have been scouting about 40 years, cross-checking about 16, and these are observations based on my experiences in terms of cross-checking, to offer some concept of what cross-checkers do.

Cross-checking is essentially a flawed system but is still the best system I know of to try to rate the players. In essence cross-checkers are scouts who see the players who, in theory, are considered the best prospects of any given year, the high-school, college, and junior-college players.

Without cross checking, a team would essentially be stuck with a system that looks at reports to see who has the highest grade — but scouts don’t grade players the same way. Even looking at established major-league players, different evaluators will rate players differently. It’s a fact of life, as old as the game itself.

National cross checking reared its ugly head close to 20 years ago. The way the system worked, it was kind of a very … it wasn’t a set in stone situation. Occasionally, a front-office individual would come out — usually the scouting director — and look at your top prospects. They didn’t spend a great deal of time; they couldn’t look at very many guys, maybe only four or five.

Clubs began to add a number of national cross checkers; some have two cross checkers, some have three and on occasion some have just one. The variation depends on how active the scouting director is and how involved he gets in scouting the so-called premium players in the country.

It’s a flawed system. No matter what level you’re scouting, the more looks you get at a player, the better your chances for making a good determination on where this youngster should be drafted and where he should be selected.

Good cross-checking goes hand in hand with good area scouting. If you don’t have good area scouts, the cross-checker is not going to mean a hoot in hell because he is being asked to see the best players. If the area scout does not identify who the best player is in his area or who the best prospect is, you’re going to have some problems. A cross-checker can’t manufacture the players. A cross-checker can only report on the area scout’s recommendations.

Let’s look at the 1988 Dodgers draft. That year’s draft produced two rookies of the year. One was Eric Karros, who was probably the sixth kid we picked, and the last player, which I believe was number 62, was Mike Piazza. He became Rookie of the Year. I believe there were four other players in that draft that became major leaguers. (Editor’s note: Actually, seven others made the majors from that Dodgers draft.)

We picked four players ahead of Karros; we thought they were better prospects at that point in time. To a degree that tells you that the system has bumps in the road. You’re dealing with the unknown, of course. And that’s the difficult part of scouting. No two players develop at exactly the same rate. Very, very few players develop to the maximum, based on their potential. That’s just a matter of record. You can’t look at it any other way. Very, very few reach their potential. George Brett was selected in the second round. Fred Lynn was selected in the second round. George Brett is a Hall of Famer. And Fred Lynn was a very fine player, the first to win both Rookie of the Year and the Most Valuable Player in the same season.

If you do any kind of study in all of sports you’re going to find exceptions. John Unitas … I can recall an experience I had years ago. I went into the service at the same time as a good pal of mine I had played ball with as a kid. I was in a little bit longer than he was. I remember he had just got out of the service and I was home on leave.

This was during the 1950s. He was very excited about the fact he had gotten a TV set. He was very interested in pro football and he liked to bet a dollar or two. He invited me over to his home. We were going to watch a pro football game, the Baltimore Colts.

I asked him, I said “Norm, are you going to bet on the game?” “No, I don’t think we have much of a chance in this game. I don’t know how close you follow it, Gib. Baltimore has a great young quarterback by the name of George Shaw. He’s one of the top young quarterbacks in the NFL and he’s hurt. And they got to play some backup guy. They don’t have much of a chance.”

I’ll never forget this. We watched the game and Baltimore won. The backup quarterback was a guy by the name of John Unitas. George Shaw became sort of a footnote after John Unitas showed up.

Unitas had had a great college career. I think he was selected by the Steelers initially and he was cut and he was playing on a semipro football team getting paid, I don’t know, 8 or 10 dollars a game. The Rooney brothers, who were sons of the great old owner of the Steelers, had seen him play and they went to their dad and said we drafted this guy and he’s playing semipro football and he could help us. I guess the senior Rooney said, “Well, you know, our guys didn’t think that much of him.” Somewhere along the line, I don’t know if they had a taxi squad or whatever the case was but I guess he was re-signed and somehow or another was dealt over to the Baltimore Colts.

There is a flaw in every system for sure. National cross-checking doesn’t eliminate any of those questions but it creates a program which has as many experienced guys who have been in scouting over a period of time make judgments as to who the best players are. My experience is that the same clubs repeatedly make overall good selections.

I came to the Dodgers over 30 years ago. Beforehand, I’d worked for the Tigers and the Expos and the Angels among others … Kansas City and so on, and I was fortunate that all of those clubs had a very keen eye for young talent. They were selecting good players. They were feeding their system with good young players.

Are all the clubs equal in terms of their ability to judge young players? Obviously not, any more than they’re the same on the field. You have to look at prior experience and prior results. Atlanta is a very impressive outfit in terms of their ability to scout young talent; I believe at one point they had 14 division championships. Atlanta retools constantly and feeds young players into their major-league club. That’s always impressed me.

Between the late 1970s and 1996 the Dodgers produced nine rookies of the year. I’m quite proud of the fact I had something to do with three of them. Todd Hollandsworth, Karros, and Mike Piazza. That doesn’t diminish what others have done. When you look around major-league baseball, you see the Jeters and the Wainwrights and the Carpenters. Albert Pujols. Incredibly, Albert was picked in the 13th round. But the point is: He was still picked by the Cardinals. Others could have picked him, but they didn’t. It seems to me the same clubs have essentially have had very good results.

When I joined the Dodgers, they had that long-term running infield there of Cey, Garvey, Russell, and Lopes. All drafted. Let’s see. Cey was a college guy from Washington State. Garvey was from Michigan State. Russell was a high-school player and [Davey] Lopes was drafted out of junior college.

The 1968 draft historically has to go down as one of the great drafts – probably the greatest draft ever. It produced a whole slew of big-league players. Bobby Valentine was one. Bill Buckner was another. Garvey was in that draft. Cey was in that draft. Tom Paciorek was in that draft. I’m leaving out others for sure. [Editor’s note: Davey Lopes and Geoff Zahn were drafted by the Dodgers in that year’s January secondary phase draft. Doyle Alexander, a major-league player for other clubs, and Joe Ferguson were also in that draft.] Good organizations repeat and good organizations are sprinkled with a lot of very fine scouts; some area guys, some supervisory personnel – which is just a fancy name for cross-checkers that work their part of the country – West Coast, Midwest, or East Coast.

There have been a lot of very fine players produced through the system. The toughest part is to say when you look at the player, how quick is this guy going to develop? Is he going to develop to the maximum extent? There are a whole lot of bumps in the road for a young player. Professional baseball offers a lot of instruction. Some of it manifests itself to the nth degree when the player becomes a front-line guy. Some of it works out that the player becomes a major leaguer but he’s not a special player and so on.

Some of the sharpest baseball minds that I know in the game are very good in one phase of the game but mediocre in the other. I’ve seen guys who were excellent scouts in terms of evaluating front-line talent but they’re not very good in evaluating raw talent. Of course some are very good in every possible phase of the game. And those in my judgment represent the very best that scouting has to produce.

At this point it would be worthwhile to explain what some of the general routine is when you are a national cross-checker. You start usually in the month of January and it runs through about the tail end of May. You crisscross the country in every possible direction and you try to see the players that are rated the highest by your area scouts.

We have 20 or 22 guys in the field that cover different parts of the country. There’s a lot of driving. If you are the national guy, you fly a lot, maybe 100,000 miles in the course of a year. I figured it out at one point the miles I’ve driven and the miles I’ve flown over the years I’ve scouted. It’s unbelievable when you get down to it. You probably drive each year as much or more than some guys who drive a truck for a living.

I remember one period – I think it was two years ago – I was out on a cross-checking junket and I was out for 24 days around the country. And then during that period of time I had been in something like 22 different airports. One of the problems you have is scheduling young pitching. You don’t find probable pitchers announced the way you do in the major leagues. High-school and college kids pitch … usually in college your top pitcher on a given college team works on a Friday. But your scout may not be that high on him, he might like the kid that usually works on Sunday. And then what happens when you have three guys, one in Dallas, one in New York, and one in Los Angeles pitching on the same day?

You can’t obviously see the three of them. That’s one of the problems you have in trying to fit the high-school and college schedule into your schedule where you have different time zones and the rest. It is very, very difficult. Then when you add to that weather problems in the spring and very early parts of the winter it becomes a real zoo trying to dodge bad weather and to see top players.

There are a few individuals who don’t have a great deal of experience. But for the most part national guys are experienced scouts. Of course they should be. You’d better be a good evaluator and you’d better be resilient in your ability to run around the country because it is a considerable grind.

One of the most difficult issues to determine when you so-call “flash scout” a player is: Did you see him on a good day? That issue comes up occasionally. A scout will be high on a player in the field. An area guy will say, boy, I really like this guy. He’s a position guy and you go in there and see him bat four times and strike out three and pop up once and kick a groundball or whatever. The area scout might say, well, you didn’t see him good. He’s better than that. Everybody has a bad day and you saw him on a bad day.

That’s the advantage of having more than one guy who’s a national cross-checker. If you have two or three chances to see him, the chance of him repeating a bad day is slim. The key is having good people in the field and having good area guys who really know the player. To really know the competitive nature of the player is very important, to understand how the kid competes. Physical ability and tools are really not that tough for scouts to determine. It’s how the player competes against better competition that separates one player from another.

Most high-school players – the better ones – are not going to compete that often against front-line competition. They’re not playing against guys who are going to end up playing professional baseball. For the most part they dominate the competition.

You can’t determine a kid’s skills from how he handles weak competition. He is going to be playing against better players when he becomes a professional. How is he going to react? How is a good high-school player going to react his first year out, when he may be competing against some kid that was an All-American at a major baseball school? That’s going to tell you a lot about how he handles competition as his career unfolds. About 35 or so years ago, I had a scout-league team that Jack Clark played for. He was a high-school kid, from Gladstone High School in Covina, California. I happened to live in Covina. I had asked him to play for the scout-league team. I think I was working for Montreal at the time.

Jack was an interesting kid and of course there was interest in him. He was a pitcher/outfielder for Gladstone and of course he was a good-looking hitting prospect. Defensively he had a plus arm and Jack could run at one time. He wasn’t a plus runner but was certainly an average runner. Physically he was about 6-feet-3 and weighed 180 pounds. Of course, when he filled out he was a much bigger guy as a big leaguer. Jack was an interesting kid in this respect. He was a highly aggressive kid with a bat in his hand. Jack thought he could hit anybody. At the level we were playing at, he hit them all.

But defensively he was very indifferent. And he was immature in a lot of respects. I can remember once … incidentally, the Giants selected Jack as a pitcher and because the signers, the signees that year were kind of slow he got an opportunity to play the outfield and that was the end of his years on the mound.

One of the guys I know quite well told me that when he was playing in the California League, Jack was hitting about .330 and had a boatload of extra-base hits and home runs, etc. He was one of the leading hitters in the league and they saw Jack in a ballgame. His first four at-bats he hit four rockets, two off the wall and two out of the ballpark. His fifth at-bat, he lined to shortstop and he was so discouraged as a result, it took him about five minutes to walk out to his position out in right field. He was immature and pouting because he did not have a 5-for-5.

One of the keys there … the interesting part is Jack played hard in the phase of the game he felt very comfortable in. He was a tiger with a bat in his hand. Defensively, it was kind of like, oh, anybody can play defense. He did not work hard on his defensive skills. He got to the big leagues quickly. I think Jack was in the major leagues at 19. At times he would be very indifferent if he had poor at-bats. He would be indifferent.

I saw a game, a Dodgers game, where Ed Halicki was pitching for the Giants. Jack was playing right field. He had a bad at-bat. I believe at that point in time Halicki had a no-hitter going. And Jack had probably taken that lousy at-bat out to his position. Somebody hit kind of a lazy fly ball to right field. It wasn’t hit deep and he was very nonchalant how he came in and played the ball on a hop. Of course, the guy had a base hit. Well, when he got into the dugout, I could see right into the dugout from where I was standing watching the game at Dodger Stadium, boy, I thought Halicki was going to punch his lights out. He was so upset. Well, that was Jack Clark as a young major leaguer.

By the time Jack matured a little bit and played for the Giants and then played for Whitey Herzog at St. Louis, he became a real team guy. Playing for Herzog was a great experience for him because Whitey wouldn’t put up with any of that indifference. You play hard all the time or you don’t play. I think Jack was sort of a pet of Whitey’s. But Whitey would not look out the window if he didn’t play hard. Jack knew it, so he played hard all the time and became a very fine major-league player.

You better be sure about the degree the guy wants to play. I knew Clark and I knew the way he played and I knew the kid’s personality. When a scout would say, well, he doesn’t play hard, you would say, “You gotta know the kid.” Is he ever going to grow out of it? And he sure as hell did. He had a very, very fine career in the big leagues. He had great, great self-confidence.

That is something that a scout must be able to determine when you’re the area guy. You can’t just say because a kid didn’t run a ball out well, he doesn’t play hard. There are a lot of kids that play very hard who have marginal ability. Sometimes they play above their tools, for sure. But there are a lot of kids that play hard who don’t have the necessary ability to be major-league players.

I can recall getting into a conversation years ago with one of our scouts. We were talking about projecting players and of course projection is the name of the game. How do you project a 17-year- old or 20-year-old college guy in terms of what kind of a player he will be in the major leagues. This scout said, “I can tell you who I think has enough ability in terms of athleticism, etc., tools and so on, to get to the big leagues but I’m not gonna tell you what kind of a player he will be.” I differed with him there.

It’s my judgment that as a scout, as a national cross-checker, you have to look at the player and say this is what type of major-league player you think he will become. And how likely it will be that he will realize his ability. In other words, will he develop to the point of getting to the major leagues and then determining is he going to be the 25th guy on the roster or is he going to be a key player. His whole concept was, I’ll tell you if I think he can get to the big leagues but I’m not going to go past that.

There’s a big, big difference between the first player and the 25th player. Is he going to be a so-called 1 on a pitching staff which is a guy like Carpenter or Clemens or Maddux? The Braves had three pitchers, three starting pitchers that were what we would classify as a 1. An ace on the pitching staff – Glavine, Maddux, and Smoltz. And then Avery, whose career kind of tailed off. But when he was on that staff, he was probably a good solid number 2, but for whatever reasons, his ability to function at the big-league level and be a front-line pitcher didn’t last that long.

When we won in ’88, Hershiser was a 1. Now we did have Belcher and we did have Leary, who were probably good solid 2’s and 3’s. I’m probably leaving somebody out there. I believe Fernando was on that ’88 club. Fernando in his day in ’81 was a very solid 1.

You have to be able to determine what type of player the guy will be. Now that determination with the younger player is very tough. There’s no getting away from it. Projections on high-school kids can be really, really difficult.

I think the best pitching prospect I ever signed with the Dodgers was a right-handed pitcher by the name of Danny Opperman.

Danny pitched at Valley High School in Las Vegas, over 22 or 23 years ago. He was a few years behind Maddux and had better stuff than Maddux had. He threw harder and he had an outstanding arm. Danny never won a game in the big leagues.

He had a Tommy John operation very early in his career. He warmed up to start in a rookie-league game his very first year and he broke down. Actually he ended up having two Tommy Johns and of course as a result his career flattened out and he never got to the big leagues. He enjoyed some success at the Double-A, Triple-A levels but it never happened for Danny. Pitching is a very, very difficult prognostication to have to make. As the old expression says, a lot of them are just always one pitch away from a bad arm.

Bob Welch had a wonderful career. He’s a Cy Young Award winner, a front-line pitcher with us and then Oakland. I think he won his Cy Young with Oakland. During his entire major-league career the doctors wanted to operate on his arm to move his ulnar nerve. He always said no! But it’s interesting because pitching is very, very chancy – not establishing their stuff, but in establishing whether they are going to hold up. It is a very tough, tough row to hoe. Years ago I can recall our people being told – somewhere along the line and probably not by the medical people – once they have a Tommy John they’re as good as new.

To some extent the medical prognostication has been changed. If you have a youngster that has had a Tommy John surgery as a teenager, chances are he is going to have the problem again with full maturity. If he’s had a Tommy John in his maybe early 20s he becomes much less a gamble. They hedge to a degree but of course when we drafted Danny Opperman, we had visions of Danny being a front-line major-league pitcher and it just didn’t happen for him. Mainly because of his surgeries.

Here’s a kid who never lost a high-school game. Four years he pitched. He pitched on a very good high-school team that produced three or four major-league players. Maddux, of course. Tyler Houston, the catcher, was selected a couple of years after Maddux, became a front-line player. The backup catcher whose name I can’t recall off the top of my head who ended up playing third base the year Houston was selected, his name starts with an M [Doug Mirabelli], at any rate he got to the big leagues and caught for quite a while.

It’s a chancy call when you take pitchers – and yet you never have enough pitching. That’s an axiom used in baseball which I think does holds up: Good pitching defeats good hitting. You see it in the playoffs each year. You see it in the World Series. Occasionally you’ll have a game that gets out of hand; there are a lot of runs scored. But more often than not in the playoffs if you’re facing somebody’s number one guy and somebody’s number two guy and number three more than likely he is pitching in the middle of the game.

Relief pitching, that’s an interesting aspect. Why do relievers last a minimum amount of time? It’s all the ups and downs and all the throwing in the bullpen. It’s that simple. We had Niedenfuer, who burned out fairly quickly; he was a front-line reliever. We had Gagne, who was a front-line reliever. Relief pitching has been reduced to getting three outs, if you are a closer in the big leagues now. Relief pitching is different than when guys like Gossage, Perranoski, some of the outstanding relief pitchers were pitching.

They may come in and throw three innings for you. Sutter, those kind of guys. Now what they want is, the concept in major-league baseball is, try to be ahead by six innings and then you bring the specialists in. You bring in a middle-innings guy, a setup man and a closer to get you three outs apiece.

You shorten the game. That is the purpose of developing relief pitching to that point. Interesting view is look at Lidge. A couple of years ago he was unhittable. The next year, he couldn’t get anybody out. It’s a whole different issue. Lot of pressure on the player, on the pitcher and so on. Playoff baseball is entirely different to a point than the 162-game season.

Getting back to cross-checking, there is an expression that I can remember hearing years ago that area guys would use. Instead of calling them cross-checkers – guys that had my title, so to speak, they would call them double-crossers. Cross-checkers talk a lot. There isn’t any question that the so-called premium players in the country are seen by most all the clubs and are seen by everybody’s cross-checker.

Some area guys feel cross-checkers talk too much and share too much information because a lot of them go to the same places, you get familiar with people and so on. To be honest with you, and it’s not an attempt to cover anything, I’ve never experienced that. I really haven’t. I know cross-checkers who work for all the clubs. There are a few who talk probably more than they should. The lion’s share of the guys go to the games, they have the same routine you do, same travel schedule to a point. They got to chase all over the United States and see guys from Maine to California, from Wisconsin to Texas; they see them all.

Of course, you go one step past that and the step past that, and, the first kid you select in the draft is the guy that you most desire in that point in time – but that does not mean that five years from now or three years from now he’s going to be considered the best prospect from that particular draft. Little Pedroia is a good example. Second baseman for the Red Sox. You can look at him and break his game down any way you want. Pedroia was a fine player as a college player. But with scouts looking for size and strength and speed, he didn’t possess any of those things. He’s a little guy. Probably listed at, 5 feet, oh, probably 9 inches, he’s probably closer to 5-feet-6.

He was not a big-time base stealer or any of those things. And yet he became a very fine player who was the Most Valuable Player in the American League.

That’s the nature of scouting. That’s the nature of what they call player development. Al Campanis used to use the term quite often, he’d say normal development of a player. The normal development of a player. Not that there was an attempt to push this guy faster than he should. We used to call Campanis “The Chief.” The chief’s concept was let him develop at a normal rate. Because along with his game, he is going to develop a confidence level which says that when he does reach the big leagues, he will realizes that he belongs. He can play with the people that are there.

There are all types of views that people have about developing young players. What comes first, confidence or success? Well, it can be a trick question. To have success you have to have confidence, but it’s hard to build a great deal of confidence when you don’t have success. When Mike Schmidt hit .200 as a rookie it’s very difficult to look at his development and say he was a highly confident hitter as a first-year guy in the big leagues. He couldn’t have been, not hitting .200. And players don’t all have the same type of confidence. And quite often they are unable to retain it as they get older as big-league players when their skills slip a little bit.

That’s why baseball is a novel sport. You can overuse the theory but it is true: baseball’s based on who fails the least. If you’re a hitter, a position player, let’s face it. I’ve never done a numerical breakdown on this but I would say off the top of my head that when you look at the great hitters, the Henry Aarons, the Mayses, Mantles, DiMaggio, Ted Williams, George Brett, Rod Carew, any of the great hitters, Stan Musial, they’re hitting the ball in terms of lifetime batting average, certainly they’re getting three base hits out of every ten at-bats.

Does anybody believe that they’re hitting the ball hard three times? My guess is and it’s just a guess, but it’s off the top of my head, I would have to say that probably .300 hitters are hitting the ball five to six times hard against the best pitching in the world. For hitting a ball five or six times out of every 10, how do you come up with hitting .300? Well, remember this: In the big leagues they catch the ball.

The infielders are better, the outfielders are better, pitchers pitch tougher, etc., etc. Sure they get cheap hits occasionally but for the most part they square up the baseball. Great hitters hit. That’s not my terminology. I picked it up from somebody else. What do all great hitters or very good hitters have in common? The one common denominator is: THEY HIT!

You don’t look at someone and say, well, he hits .320 against right-handers but against left-handers he hits .180. That’s not a great player. That’s a guy that has a certain phase of his game, he’s dangerous. Probably a good example would be a guy like Ethier. Ethier’s going to hit about .275 or .280 for us, he’s got 31 home runs. He’s a dangerous hitter against right—handed pitching. He’s not a dangerous hitter against left-handers. Left-handers do a pretty good job of getting him out.

Again we get into terminology. But it’s interesting because as a scout you have to be able to break this down. Remember ultimately the game is played in the big leagues by the players you draft, whoever they may be. A small percentage of them get to the big leagues. Think about it this way. Maybe 8 to 9 percent of the players ever selected get to the major leagues. Of that 8 or 9 percent that get to the major leagues probably 6 percent, maybe 5 to 6 percent of them have appreciable careers in terms of time. The balance don’t. Of course pitching is a whole different animal. But let’s say 9 to 10 percent get to the big leagues. Pitching in the big leagues is one thing; being a front-line pitcher is something else.

I saw George Brett play. I scouted George Brett. On the face of his results, of course he’s a Hall of Fame player. Yet he was passed over by every major-league club, in the draft, in the first round. Even the club that drafted him. Yet George Brett turned out to be an amazing clutch hitter and justifiably so – a very, very good hitter. With some power. He didn’t have a lot of power as a kid. I want to say George Brett probably hit .275 or .280 in the California League. Again, it’s called development of the player. And there is not a common denominator as to who is going to develop or who doesn’t.

There are a whole slew of issues that can come up that impede a player’s development and some of it has absolutely nothing to do with the instruction. A lot of it has to do with the player. And that doesn’t mean the kid is essentially dumb or anything else. Anybody that’s ever been involved in athletics, involved with young players, when a coach or manager has a kid at a lower level, and has a lot of confidence in him, almost the very first thing you tell him is, hey, you’re not going to get three hits in the next at-bat. Just be yourself. Be yourself. What you are is plenty good enough to be a contributor here.

Just remind him: Get a good pitch to hit. This guy’s a tough pitcher, so you don’t want to help him. Don’t go out of the strike zone to hit. Are there exceptions to that? Of course. All you gotta do is watch [Vladimir] Guerrero, who is primarily a DH now. He might hit a pitch around the peak of his cap or off his shoe tops. That being said, he’s the exception to the rule.

You can go way back and say, well Joe Medwick … Ducky Medwick was considered a great bad-ball hitter in his era and so was Yogi Berra. But you probably run out of names when you get to the five fingers on your one hand, players that were great bad-ball hitters.

The other point I try to make is this: Great hitters rarely, rarely look bad. I’m talking about great hitters, rarely look bad on a given pitch. I saw a quite a bit of Williams as a teenager and I saw quite a bit of Williams as a young adult when I was playing ball in the service and even after. I am sure he took some bad hacks. Common sense would tell you that. But I never saw one.

I don’t remember seeing DiMaggio – I saw a lot of him, too – lunge at pitches and swing at pitches a foot outside the strike zone, breaking balls that bounce on the plate. I think some of these terms that are used in baseball now are thrown around far too freely. I’ve heard people say things like the greatest hitter that ever lived and that type of thing with Barry Bonds. It’s a given, Bonds was an exceptional power hitter. In his era, absolutely the best. But the greatest that ever lived, no.

And I’m not going back to the era of Honus Wagner or some guy that played between 1904 and 1920. I’m not going to that zone. I’m talking about great hitters. One of the exceptional hitters that I’ve seen during his big-league career was Carew. Not a great power hitter but a great hitter for average.

With the advent of Astroturf, speed is a big factor in terms of certain types of players. As a National League cross-checker, not only must you be a good evaluator, you must have a very, very good idea what good mechanics are to hit, pitch, and field. If you don’t have an idea there, I don’t see how you can make solid judgments. Because those are paramount.

The reason I say that, I’ve been asked periodically by different people: Have you ever seen a guy that’s a major leaguer that didn’t have great mechanics to hit that was a good hitter? And I would say, yes I have. But almost without fail they are players who are runners and can utilize their speed. Willie McGee was one, Bake McBride was one, Coleman was a good hitter without much power but they were runners.

Probably their mechanics allowed them to hit, on the face of just their mechanics, maybe .270 or so. But their speed enabled that average to get pumped up and I believe Willie McGee won two batting titles. When you look at that you’re saying his speed enabled him, he could run another 30 or 40 points. I signed a guy years ago, less a hitter than the guys I just mentioned, who was probably about a .230 hitter but whose ability to run and bunt and so on allowed him to hit more for average. Al Wiggins.

Even Garvey, Steve Garvey, who was a legitimate .300 hitter, 200 hits per year, maybe 30 home runs, knock in 100 runs. Garvey was a very good bunter. Garvey would beat out maybe 12 to 15 bunts a year, which got him over that .300 level. And Garvey wasn’t a great runner, when he first came to the big leagues he was probably an average runner. But he was a very, very good bunter. The other guys on that club didn’t bunt. Lopes, who was the leadoff guy, rarely bunted. But that was all part of Garvey’s game.

There are all kinds of nuances to the development of the player and/or pitcher. Regardless of what level you are doing, scouting is scouting. It’s an evaluation process. Once a player has been in the big leagues three or four years, if he’s not a star within three or four years, chances are hugely great that’s he’s not going to be one.

You can look at a few examples and say, well, Koufax became a star. Koufax had a terrible … what an unusual situation Koufax was. Koufax had terrible problems with the command of his stuff. His control was poor. Even though he had great stuff, it was a very tough haul for the club to pitch him. Because it was ball two on everybody. Ball one, ball two. Of course when you fight your control, then the hitter knows what’s coming. Koufax not only went from a guy who struggled with his control to a guy with great stuff that had excellent control. That’s highly unusual.

I guess I’ve rambled in terms of my concept of scouting here probably too long. At any rate what I wanted to do was to establish some of my theories in cross-checking over the years that I’ve been involved in the game. I hope this has been of some help somewhere along the line.

GIB BODET was named West Coast scout of the year in 2008 by the Scout of the Year Foundation. He is credited with being involved in the signings of Brad Wellman, Dave Hansen, Mike Munoz, Eric Karros, and Mike Piazza.

As a baseball executive,

The Providence, Rhode Island, native was once a minor leaguer himself, albeit briefly, after signing with the Philadelphia Phillies out of high school. At the age of 19 Gorman played New England League baseball (Class B) with the 1948 Providence Grays. He appeared in 16 games, accumulating 28 at-bats. He had one hit, a single, batting .036. He was released.

Lou went on to get a couple of college degrees and served most of a decade in the United States Navy. It was in 1961 that he began working in baseball. As this book was in its infancy, Bill Nowlin interviewed Gorman, asking about his thoughts on scouts and scouting from the perspective of someone who has served as a top executive at so many teams, both with established franchises and with two expansion teams, Seattle and Kansas City.

As Gorman said, late in the interview, with justifiable pride: “No one’s ever built two expansion clubs before. In the history of the game, no one’s ever done that. When I went to Seattle, the only person there was the ownership and me. That’s it. No one else. Didn’t have a name for the team. Didn’t have a player. Didn’t have a scout. Had nothing. When I went to Kansas City, I had Cedric Tallis, myself, and we hired Charlie Metro. We had no offices. The Chamber of Commerce gave us two offices to work out of, downtown in a hotel. We had one secretary between us. Didn’t have a name for the team, didn’t have colors, didn’t have a design. We had a contest to design a logo for the club. If you look at the Hallmark cards, it’s almost the same thing – the crown. (Hallmark is based in Kansas City.) A Hallmark artist designed that. It was a contest. Fifteen people sent in designs.”

BN: Tell us a bit about your first jobs in baseball.

LG: I worked one year for the [San Francisco] Giants in Lakeland, Florida. My first job in baseball. I left the Navy. I went down to the baseball convention in 1961. Tampa, Florida. I sat in the lobby of the hotel with a résumé. Winter meetings in December. I spent the week with interviews but nothing firm came out of it. The last day I thought, “Well, I better think about what I want to do with my life.”

BN: A chance meeting in a bar led to your getting hired.

LG: This guy’s in the Hall of Fame. I go to lunch with him and his assistant. I sell myself to them. So I end up working for the Lakeland Giants my first year. I had no idea what I was doing. You run the whole thing by yourself. There’s no one there but you. No secretary. You have to sell fence signs, advertising …

BN: You were the general manager and the ticket taker?

LG: You’re it. 15 or 18 hours a day. I slept in the clubhouse half the time. This guy came over from the minor leagues and helped me a bit. We had a fairly decent year. The club didn’t do too good, but we had a fairly decent year. Tito Fuentes was on that club. Bob Bishop, who would have been a great pitcher, now scouts for the Dodgers. Hurt his arm. Opened the Double-A Eastern League and pitched a no-hitter. Pitched a three-hitter the next game and struck out 14. In the third game, he tore his shoulder. He pitched briefly later, but never again like that.

The next year, I got hired by the Pirates to run the farm team in Kinston, North Carolina. On that club was Gene Michael, Jose Martinez. Gary Waslewski. Jim Price was the catcher. Mike Derrick. Pete Petersen was the field manager, later became the general manager for the Pirates and the Yankees. His son Rick Petersen is the pitching coach for the Mets.

The next year I got hired by the Orioles. Harry Dalton was my boss, and Lee MacPhail was the big boss. I worked for them. MacPhail left when the club was sold, and Frank Cashen came into the picture. Dalton became the director of baseball operations and I became the farm and scouting director. I was there three years and we won a world championship.

After not quite six years there, the Kansas City Royals started up and a guy named Cedric Tallis was hired as the executive vice president. He called the Orioles and got permission to talk to me, and he offered me the job as director of baseball operations, to work under him and run the baseball operation. At a huge salary compared to what I was making at the time. So I took that and moved to Kansas City and spent the next 10 years there. I had hired John Schuerholz as my assistant in Baltimore. He was a schoolteacher when I hired him. I took him with me. He worked with me for ten years. And Herk Robinson was the other kind that I hired, who later became general manager and executive vice president of the Royals, too.

Before I forget, in the years at Baltimore, my minor-league managers were Earl Weaver, Darrell Johnson, Joe Altobelli, Jim Frey, Harry Malmberg, Billy DeMars.

I spent the ten years in Kansas City and ended up as vice president and director of baseball operations with them. I signed George Brett and signed…it’s in the book. I built the baseball academy. I bought the property and built the complex. We took 35 students every year, housed them, fed then, bused them to junior college, gave them an education, taught them baseball. Did that for almost seven or eight years. Syd Thrift, who later became general manager of the Pirates, I hired and put him in charge of the academy. Next, Seattle. Danny Kaye hired me. He was the managing general partner and he hired me and I began the Seattle Mariners as general manager. I worked for him for 5½ years. At that point, the club was sold. My contract had two or three more years to run. Cashen had now become president of the Mets. He called me and said, “How are you doing with the new ownership? How’d you like to come and work with me? We’re going to rebuild the Mets. I’ll take care of your contract. We’ll move you. I want you to come with me and build the Mets.”

So I leave and go to the Mets, director of baseball operations. We signed Strawberry and Gooden, Dykstra, Mitchell, Randy Myers, and the whole crew who played in the World Series. I made the trade for Sid Fernandez and Ron Darling. We ended up drafting Roger Clemens in the 12th round of the draft, but didn’t sign him. Ended up taking Schiraldi in the first round. Spent the next four or five years there, and ended up coming here [to Boston].

BN: It’s almost 50 years now. Just the list of people who worked with you who became general managers is amazing.

LG: General managers? Schuerholz.Herk Robinson.Jim Frey. Dick Balderson at one point was general manager of the Seattle Mariners. Pat Gillick. Major-league managers – Jack McKeon, I hired. Don Baylor, I drafted when I was in Baltimore. Bruce Bochy. Jerry Narron. Sam Perlozzo. Frey. Bamberger. Dave Johnson. Lou Piniella. Lee Mazzilli. Clint Hurdle, I drafted and signed. Eric Wedge. Joe Torre. Darrell Johnson.

BN: Please talk some about scouts and the general manager.

LG: Scouts are so important. You get into this sabermetric thing, and obviously the statistics. Certainly, the technology today is far more advanced beyond what we had. Obviously, we use it, but I think it’s a question of where you place the emphasis. I don’t think you could ever get away from having good scouts. You don’t win without good scouts. You as a general manager can’t see every player. Nobody can. It’s impossible. You have to rely upon their judgment on players.

I’ll give you two good stories about my GM experience that really stayed in my mind. One year, I’m with Kansas City. I’m director of baseball operations. I go to the West Coast to look at the top players before the draft. We have a scout out there named Ross Gilhousen, who’s a veteran scout, signed a lot of guys that have gone to the big leagues. He passed away about six years ago. He takes me to see a pitcher at Chapman College, a small college but a good baseball school in LA. This guy’s a left-hander and throws a good breaking ball, but I swear, he wouldn’t break a pane of glass at 10 feet. I think I could get a hit off of him. I know they’re playing San Jose State, a little better-qualified school, out of their class, and he gets hit hard. Three or four innings. We leave the ballpark, and Gilhousen says, “You didn’t like him.”

“I didn’t like him at all. I know he’s playing a better school, but I don’t think he can break a pane of glass at 10 feet.” He says, “He’s better than that.” “OK, I’ll come back in three weeks. I’ll come back and see him again.” He’s pitching, I think, against Pepperdine. I see him, and he pitches better but still not that impressive to me. So we leave the ballpark, and I say, “Listen, Rosy, I’ll take him as a fourth or fifth round draft.” “No, no, you won’t get him.” “Rosy, he can’t get college kids out. How’s he going to pitch in the big leagues?” “He’s better than that.”

So the draft is held. He’s there, all the scouts are in. Schuerholz and I are there. The first pick in the country is the Padres and they draft this guy number 1 in the nation. I nearly fall off my chair. I say, “What a hell of a scout I am! I’m a bad scout.” It was Randy Jones. And Randy Jones goes to the big leagues and wins the Cy Young about four years later. Gilhousen never let me forget it. I learned one thing: He’d seen him for two years. I’d seen him for two games. I maybe saw the two worst games he ever pitched. But he saw him over a two-year period. He saw him at his very best, mediocre, and his worst–but he saw him at his best. He knew what he could become. I learned one thing. If I go out and look at a player for two games and I’ve got a scout that’s seen him for 10 or 15 games and he likes him, I’d better stick with his judgment. [Jones was a fifth-round pick. – ed.]

BN: Isn’t that the hardest thing for a scout, to look at a kid and project what he could become?

LG: Yes. There’s two things about scouting for me. The two things you never over-project are running speed and velocity. Running speed is generally what you see is what you get. You might teach him a better break out of the box, or a better lead off first base, but you’re not going to increase his running speed. Velocity, maybe once in a while a kid might get a little stronger, a little bigger, and maybe his delivery will give you a little more, but generally speaking, when you see the guy throw 91, or 88, whatever it is, that’s where it’s going to be. He might get a little stronger and he might get a little bigger, but…

At a college age, you’re generally going to pretty well see what you’re going to get. High school, you can project a little bit on him. When a kid’s 17 or 18, he’s going to get a little bigger and a little stronger.

BN: He might get 2 or 3 or 4 more miles per hour?

LG: I’m not sure you’ll get that much, but you’ll get something on him. I remember seeing a kid one year when I was…I forget where. The pitcher was very small, very tiny. His parents were there and dad was small. I thought, I don’t think he’s going to get too much bigger.

You sometimes can look at the kid and say this kid’s going to get a little bigger. I drafted Paul Splittorff in the 22nd round of Class A. That’s like 500 players. He’s in the big leagues three years later. He’s in the Royals Hall of Fame. The only reason we got him was he had an injury his junior year and didn’t pitch well. But our scout had seen him a lot the year before and kept telling me, “Don’t worry about his injury. It’s not serious. He’s a better pitcher than that.” Based on his gut – because I believed in that scout – I drafted him. Now if you doubted the scout, you wouldn’t have drafted him. It was Don Gutteridge. He was working for me. He had seen him. As a sophomore, he was a big case but they all got off him because he didn’t pitch well the next year.

The second thing happened to me with that same scout in California. I’m out there about four years later and we go to see a kid at LaVerne College, the same conference with Chapman. This kid throws three-quarters – up about here [demonstrates] – and the ball does nothing. He had a good slider. Good command, but the fastball does nothing. We left the ballpark, and I said to Rosy, “I don’t like him, but you tell me where you want to draft him.” He said, “Take him fourth or fifth. Don’t let him go lower than four or five.” So I took him as a fifth-round selection. We get him in spring training and in camp you have all your scouts and you evaluate every player, generally week by week. You bring in the new kids and we sit and watch them each week and we evaluate them, judge them. We get in about the third week with this kid and the evaluation is – across the board: “No prospect, release. No prospect, release. No prospect.”

One of our scouts used to say “SOE”. I asked, “What do you mean SOE?” He said, “Seek other employment.” Better than saying “no prospect.”

So I called the scout and said, “Rosy, they want to release this kid.” He said, “Don’t release him. Put him on Waterloo, Iowa” John Sullivan was the manager at Waterloo. He said, “Do me a favor. Let Sullivan have him at Waterloo.” So I put him on the Waterloo club. Sullivan calls me in April and says, “Lou, this kid can’t get anybody out. He can’t pitch. It’s embarrassing to put him out in a ballgame.” I said, “OK, hold him. I’ll try to find you some more pitching. We’ll release him as soon as I can find you some more pitching.” I said, “Just use him in mopup situations to protect yourself.” They’re playing Wisconsin or someplace in a snowstorm in April and he throws him out there to protect his pitching and the kid gets hammered. When he comes out, he’s got severe tendinitis, so they disable him. About late May, he starts to bring him back and warm him up. And he says [regarding his throwing angle], he says, “I can’t get up there. It’s too sore.” So Sullivan asks, “Well, can you throw the ball from here?” [sidearm] He says, “Let me try it.” And he begins to release the ball from there. It’s Dan Quisenberry.

And I’m going to release him. Sullivan calls me up in late May and says, “Lou, you’ve got to come see him.” I said, “Why? We’re going to release him.” He said, “I don’t know how to tell you this. I think he’s a prospect.” “Wait a minute. You told me in April to release him. Now he’s a prospect. Did lightning hit him? How did he get to be a prospect?”

Quisenberry ends up going to the big leagues in four years and is the most dominant reliever in the American League for ten years. If he doesn’t get a sore arm, we’re going to release him.

I drafted Billy Beane, by the way, with the Mets. He should have been a much better player than he was. We took him in the first round – we had three first-round drafts that year, and we took him as a fill-in draft. Billy Beane out of high school was an all-state everything – baseball/football/basketball – going to go to Stanford on a full ride. Never really became as good a player as he should. I thought when Beane made a statement in the book Moneyball, he said at one point he thought of firing all his scouting staff and drafting players only by the computer. Well, you can’t measure what’s here [points to head] and what’s here [points to heart] on a computer. There’s no way in the world you can do that.

BN: When you move from one organization to another, sometimes you must come to a place that’s had a different philosophy about scouting.

LG: Scouting techniques – like when I came to the Red Sox here, you don’t know any of the scouts here. They all judge differently. They all have a different way. And your job is to interpolate that judgment. The worst thing you can ever do as a farm director or general manager is overestimate or underestimate your talent. Some guys are very conservative and some guys are very liberal. What’s a 5 to one person may be a 4 to someone else. It takes you a while, as you’re dealing with them, to learn that. You can get burned sometimes if you don’t know the scout too well. That’s why a lot of guys try to bring their own scouts – because they know their judgments.

It’s funny. Go back on the Bagwell trade. We had Bagwell for 65 games in A and 140 games in Double-A. He hits two home runs and four home runs. Nobody projected his power as above average. Everybody called him a prospect. Everybody said he’s going to be a line-drive contact hitter who could hit with some average in the big leagues. Has to move position. Can’t play third base. Got to play first base. First question I asked: Isn’t he too small to play first base? They said no, he could handle it. He can handle first base. I had two scouts see him and two managers see him, plus we saw him in spring training, and no one plussed his power. Now obviously we made a mistake projecting his power. So sometimes you get burned even with good scouts, every once in a while. But generally speaking, if you go on the percentages…George Digby, scout in Florida, he signed Boggs, he signed Greenwell. We drafted Tino Martinez on his judgment. Didn’t sign him. Anybody that Digby recommended to you, you’d listen to. You’d take his judgment.

When I was with Baltimore, we had a scout named Walter Youse, and every player that Youse would recommend, you’d take.

We had a local team that we sponsored in Baltimore. We had a local automobile dealer named Johnny’s Automobile, but we ran the club. We bought the uniforms. Our scout ran the club. Every single kid in that area that went to Missouri, Kansas State, KU, University of Iowa, all the high-school kids played on this team. This team had sent 55 kids to pro ball over the years. Curt Blefary. Larry Haney. Dave Boswell. Jim Spencer. Player after player. He ran this club, and every year, there’d be eight or nine kids drafted off this club. I remember one year a kid called me on the phone. It was about May, I guess. He said he’d just moved to the area and he said I understand you sponsor a baseball team in the area. I play some baseball and I’d like to try out for it. I said, “Here’s the number of the scout. You call him and I’m sure he’ll give you a workout.” I don’t think any more of it. We drafted some local kids and I’m in with the scout – three kids and we’re trying to get them signed to a contract. I said, “How’s your Johnny’s team?” “We’re 23-1 or something. By the way, that kid you sent us is the best player we ever had.” I said, “What kid?” He said, “The kid that called you back in May.” I said, “Oh, yeah. Let’s bring him in and work him out if he’s that good a player. Let’s take a look at him.”

Hank Bauer was the manager. I said, “Hank, can I bring a kid in this next homestand any time and have Brecheen throw b.p.” He said, “Yeah, bring him in next Wednesday.”

I’m in the office the next Wednesday. It’s about 2:15. In comes this kid from Arizona State. 18 years old. He’s on the football team as a freshman, on a football scholarship. He says, “Hi, my name is Reggie Jackson.” I said, “Mr. Young tells me you can play baseball.” He says, “Yeah, I can play baseball.” So I bring him into the clubhouse. Paul Blair calls him over and says, “Come on, kid. We’ll get you dressed for the workout.” Reggie at that time had power. He had speed. He can throw. He can do it all. I’m awed by him. The regular guys come in about 4:30. Charlie Lau. Gene Woodling. They’re by the batting cage watching. He’s hitting them into the bullpen. Line drive in the upper deck at the stadium. So Lau says to me, “Where’s this kid play in the system?” I said, “Charlie, he’s a freshman in college. He isn’t signed.” He said, “Lock the gates. Don’t let him out. You’d better sign him.” I’ll never forget that.

BN: Now you have to be drafted?

LG: You’ve got to be drafted. In those years, though, you were drafted at the end of your sophomore year, not your junior year. So I asked him could he come back. I didn’t want the White Sox to see him. I got him off the field, got him showered, took him up to the press box and fed him hot dogs and crabcakes. [Gorman asked Jackson if he could come back another day, and got some other people in to see him. He got ten tickets for Reggie. He came back the next homestand.] We had about five scouts in. John Schuerholz was there. Jim Russo was there – one of the great scouts in Baltimore’s history. Youse was there. MacPhail says, “You’re right. He’s a hell of a prospect. We’ll never get him. We’re going to draft 24. He’s going to go too high.” I said, “Well, could you get him to drop out of school?” “No, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to influence him.” He finished playing for Johnny’s the rest of the year, and every year they have a tournament in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, called the All-America Amateur Baseball Tournament. And teams from all over the East Coast, 30 or 40 scouts come in. A huge tournament. They draw 9,000 for the games. And Reggie’s the MVP in the tournament. Every scout in the country sees him and [he] goes number 2 in the country. That’s it. Oakland takes him.

When we were in Baltimore three years, we’re going to play the Dodgers for the world championship. Koufax, Drysdale, that great Dodger ballclub. They had Russo and two other scouts do the advance on the Dodgers, and they stayed with the Dodgers for two weeks. I sat in the day they came in to talk with Bauer and the coaches and analyze the Dodgers, and the in-depth of their report just stunned me. And the in-depth of every player, how they picked them apart. How to pitch this guy, pitch that guy. What this guy does well and that guy doesn’t do well. How they play the game, how they defense. It was awesome to sit there and realize how these guys had sat there for two weeks and picked up all that information. It’s amazing to think of what advance scouting does. Clubs do that all the time, and if you’ve got guys that do that well, what a difference that is when you get that report. That to me is invaluable.

Going back to the technology thing, one of the things that impresses me, they have TV cameras in the clubhouse and every single hitter and every single pitch is recorded by these three guys on a disc. A hitter can come in if he struck out in an inning and take a look at what happened, what pitches he threw, in slow motion. Same with the pitching. What pitches he’s throwing. What guys hit off him, what he shouldn’t throw against this guy. They can take the disc back with them to the hotel room. To me, that technology is marvelous. Right in the ballgame right now, you know exactly what this guy is throwing you your last two at-bats. That is an amazing technology. I think statistics have their value. They place so much emphasis on on-base percentage, and that’s important. But somebody’s got to drive those guys in. It’s fine to get them on base but someone’s got to get them in. Slugging percentage is important. There’s 8 million statistics they give you. To me, what’s more important is how you use your 27 outs. Weaver’s theory was the most important thing I have on offense is my 27 outs. And I don’t give them up unless I can score a run. The only time I give an out up is if I can score a run. It’s still how you handle those 27 outs to earn our runs. I think sometimes we get to the point with statistical analysis that we let that dictate everything we do. You could have statistics on defensive purposes, about this guy – but you can’t judge range. Marty Barrett could get to a million balls and not make many errors but what’s his range compared to, say, Ozzie Smith?

I’ll never forget this. When I first got to Baltimore, I’m watching them work out and one day in August I’m sitting on the bench next to Bauer. I wanted to learn from these guys. And Brooks Robinson is taking groundballs. I haven’t seen much of him, because I’ve spent most of my time in the minor-league system. I look at this guy and he doesn’t throw too good. I said, “Hank, he doesn’t have a strong arm.” And he says no. I watch him a bit more and it looks like he doesn’t run too good. And Bauer says, “I know it.” So I’m curious about this guy. I go into the clubhouse the next day and I went through the files and pulled out the report. He was signed out of high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Central High School. And the reports had him below-average hitter, below-average thrower, fringe prospect. So I thought to myself, “What makes this guy so good?”

When you began to watch him, It wasn’t his arm strength, or his running speed. It was his first-step quickness. He’d get to the ball before anyone else would ever get there. His reaction to a groundball was unbelievable. Every throw he made to first base was close. Every play at first base was bang-bang. He got to the ball so quick and got rid of the ball so quick. His release on the ball was unbelievable. How do you measure that on a computer? I don’t think you can do that.

I remember when I was in Seattle, I had Bill Mazeroski for a coach. We had a second baseman named Julio Cruz, later played for the White Sox. Cruz had a habit on the double play of jumping and making the throw instead of kicking off or pushing off as he crossed the bag. He’d get up and jump, so Darrell [Johnson] said, “Geez, get him out of that damn habit. Maz, go help him.” I happened to be watching the workout one day at the Kingdome. Maz is working with him and they’d hit a ball to shortstop, and I said, “I don’t think the ball is hitting his glove. I don’t think the ball is hitting Mazeroski’s glove. It’s just gone.” I walked out and stood there and said, “Maz, is that ball hitting your glove?” and he said, “I don’t know.” “You don’t know if the ball is hitting your glove?” and he said, “No.” “Can we try it again?” “Sure.” That ball never touched his glove; that ball was just gone. I don’t know how you teach that. All of a sudden, the ball was gone. Sometimes the quickness of things like that doesn’t show up in a statistic. There are things about a player… now, I think the statistics can tell you things. When a player has played in the minor leagues, you have at least a norm of judgment to grade him. Those statistics can be important. It’s something you use, but it doesn’t dominate our judgment. There’s just so many…I can go back on a thousand stories.…I remember one year when I was in Kansas City. Bob Lemon’s the manager. He asked me, “Have you got anybody in Triple-A? Left-hand pitching, that can help me?” I said, “No.” I’ve got a kid named Steve Mingori, a kid named Bobby McClure. I don’t think they can pitch in the big leagues. He said, well, let’s bring them into spring training. Both of them made the club. Mingori spent ten years in the big leagues. McClure spent 19 years in the big leagues. He’s a Triple-A pitching coach right now. What I saw of him, I didn’t think he could throw hard enough to get left-hand hitters out. But he had that good curveball; he had a good change. They both picked up that split-finger thing. All of a sudden, they could pitch in the big leagues. [Mingori and McClure were signed at different times. – ed.]

When I’m with the Mets, my Triple-A shortstop’s Ron Gardenhire. One of my scouts is Terry Ryan. The Triple-A club, Tidewater, has Jeff Reardon, Mike Scott, Greg Harris…there’s four guys on that club that pitched in the big leagues [not all in the same season]. So Scott comes up and doesn’t pitch well. Nobody likes him. They think he’s a fringy guy. I come here to the Red Sox and they trade him to Houston. Al Rosen’s their general manager. He gets them. He was pitching awful. Rosen’s about ready to release him. He calls Roger Craig, who’s a friend of his. Rosen says, “Do me a favor. If I send a kid down to you, could you teach him that split-finger fastball?” So he sent him down to Craig, on a high-school field, and Scott picks it up like that. He goes back the next year and wins 18 games. The fourth year, they face the Mets for the National League pennant and he wins the Cy Young. You think back on that guy, and if you looked at him at that time and projected him, based on the statistics you had, you’d say he’s not going to pitch in the big leagues. You can get fooled so many times on judgments.

BN: What about guys who got really good reports, who looked really good on paper, everything just looked good, but they just didn’t have what it took?

LG: The best example of that in my mind was Dave Kingman. If you worked Dave Kingman out in the ballpark, you’d give him anything he wanted. He’d give you plus power. If you rate from 1 to 8, with 5 as average, he’d be 7-8 power. You try to grade to the Major League Scouting Bureau system. You’re going to use their reports. You might as well use the same reports.

You watch this guy, he could hit balls 500 feet. He could throw. He could run for a big guy. He was a big strong guy. You’d look at this guy and think, “God damn, this guy’s going to hit 50 home runs everywhere he plays.” He’s going to be a very good defensive outfielder. You’ve got to sign this guy. Give him everything he wants. He never became…it’s almost a conundrum to look at this guy. Why wasn’t he a better player? It wasn’t through lack of effort. I remember one year, the second or third year in Kansas City, the scouting director asked, “Where’s that guy Kingman?” He said, “Can you get him?” I said, “Yeah, they’d probably trade him, for some backup catching or an extra relief pitcher.” He said, “Get him. I can work with Kingman. I can teach him to hit.” I said, “Joe, we’ve had eight million guys work with him. No one’s done it.” So I get him and we put him on the Triple-A club. Goes to Omaha. This is a guy who’d been in the big leagues four or five or six years. He busts his ass down there. Plays hard. He’s a great teammate on the club. It wasn’t lack of effort, but he never could put it together. How do you figure? It didn’t come together. [Note: Kingman was never in the Royals (or Braves) organization and didn’t play in the minors after he was first brought up to the majors until he was 38 years old.] That is always the dilemma to me. I had Mike Epstein. He had tremendous power. Very intelligent kid. Went to the big leagues, played for seven or eight years, but never became.… First year we had him in Stockton, hits 30 home runs. I jump him to Triple-A, he hits 29 home runs. Minor League Player of the Year. But never becomes that player in the big leagues.

Take Carlton Fisk now. When Fisk is at Double-A, they don’t think Fisk is going to be a big-league catcher. Maybe a backup at best. I think they made a trade for someone, as I remember, when they brought Fisk up. They felt Fisk wasn’t going to do it. Fisk ends up in the Hall of Fame. How did he progress beyond that point? What takes a player at a certain stage and brings him beyond?

The first year of spring training in Kansas City, we only have about 65 players. We’re just starting with the big-league club. I’m down at the minor-league club with John Schuerholz. And Charlie Metro is one of our special-assignment scouts. We got about 55 or 60 kids. Some we’ve signed. Some are released players. We drafted a few kids. So they’re doing their laps around the ballclub. They’ve only run about two or three laps and Metro says to me, “Release that kid.” I say, “Why?” “He’s got a bad face.” “What? What do you mean, he’s got a bad face?” The old scouts could judge by his face, his visage. If they didn’t think he looked like a competitor, they wouldn’t think he could play. It was an old theory, going back to Branch Rickey thing. “Charlie, let him throw a baseball first.”

Another story. Ewing Kaufman, the owner, comes in the office and he’s puffing his pipe. He sees the board behind me. I think we only had four minor-league clubs at that time, and we had a limited number of players. He said, “Go to the board and point me out your prospects.” So, I go to the board and say, “We think this boy…and we think this boy….” He said, “All those boys aren’t prospects?” I said, “No, some of them will get better. Some of them are fringe, and some of them aren’t, but you need them to help develop your prospects.” He said, “No. I want you to release the nonprospects and put them all on one club.” I said, “You can’t do that. Certain players mature at different levels. If I take a kid at the rookie level and put him in Triple-A, it’s like taking a kid from the ninth grade and putting him in graduate school. He’d be totally overmatched, and he’d lose his confidence totally.” He’s thinking save the money. I remember when I was in Baltimore. We had Paul Blair. We picked him up as a $10,000 acquisition. Blair hit A ball and hit, I’ll say, .260. So he goes to the big-league camp, and at that time we didn’t have a good center fielder. He could always run and throw and go get the ball. So, he goes onto the big-league roster and Bauer sees him right away and says, “He’s my center fielder.” So, we have a meeting – MacPhail and Dalton and I – and we say we’re going to play him at Double-A, he’s not ready to play in the big leagues. “No, no, he’s my center fielder. He’s the best outfielder I’ve got.” “He can’t hit there.” “No, he’s going to open the season for me.” He was so bad the fans were booing him. Our ticket manager, a big, big baseball fan, came to me and said, “Why the hell did you get that guy? He couldn’t play in the Little Leagues.” “No, no. He’s just overmatched.” He spent most of the year in Double-A and he struggled there all year. When he came back in September, when you have the call-up, MacPhail was saying, “Let’s all pray he gets a base hit.” It took him two years to find himself. Certain players can handle a certain level, but if you put them beyond that level, once they lose their confidence, they’re in trouble. You reach the point… one of the great trades, I think, was when Duquette traded Heathcliff Slocumb for [Jason] Varitek and [Derek] Lowe. Slocumb had lost his confidence. He couldn’t get anybody out. Same with a young player, when you put him at a level he can’t handle, you’re going to run the risk of losing him. You’re going to have to put them at their level.

Now some players can move fast. Paul Splittorff, college player, went to Corning, bang, Triple-A, bang, the big leagues. Brett – three years and he’s in the big leagues. But I had Al Cowens, who played ten years in the big leagues. Cowens went rookie league, A league, Double-A league…but he became a big-league player. He matured at a different level. I think you have to be able to read that in a player.

The other thing to know, kids in California, Florida, that play baseball all year, against better competition, are advanced against kids from the East. When you go to spring training, it’s easy to make a judgment on a kid from the East and say, “Well, I’m not sure….” but keep in mind he hasn’t played a lot, hasn’t faced the same competition. He might take a little longer to develop. To be able to read those things is important.

Scouting will never be an exact science. It will always be an inexact science. But when you’ve got people with good judgment and you know their judgment is good, you can push your neck out for them because most of the time, they’re going to be right for you. Everybody will make a mistake once in a while. But 99 percent of those guys…there are scouts that I know…Joe McIlvaine, who used to work as my scouting director, is one of the best judges of high school talent I’ve ever been around. I remember when I was with the Mets, I went to see Dwight Gooden pitch. I liked him a great deal. But I saw a shortstop at a high school in Brooklyn named Shawon Dunston. Dunston was the best hitter at high school that I’ve ever seen. That I’ve ever seen. You’d go to games and the clubs wouldn’t pitch to him. I went to a game, and I had my Mets jacket on. There were about ten scouts there. A coach came up to me and said, “Are you with the Mets?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Do you want to see Dunston hit?” He said, “OK, I’ll have them pitch to him for you.” He hit balls out of the ballpark like big leaguers hit! I thought that this kid had a chance to lead the league in hitting, he was that good. He played in the big leagues for 14 years, but never ever became…. So, I sent McIlvaine to see him. He said, “How would you compare him with Dwight Gooden?” I said, “How would you compare him?” He said, “Gooden’s a better prospect.” I said, “If you feel that way, don’t worry about him. I’ll take Gooden.” We had the fifth pick. Dunston became the number 1 pick in the country. The Cubs took him. But he never became as good a hitter as I thought he would become. He faced the same kind of competition as Gooden did.

On the other hand, I go to see a kid up in Hazard, Kentucky. A kid that played shortstop for the San Francisco Giants for about nine years. Johnny LeMaster. They’re playing on a high-school field that actually had been a cornfield. A cornfield! It was like this – bumpy and slanted. There are 16-, 17-, 18-year-old kids. They’re all spitting tobacco. If you looked at this kid and said, “How would I ever think he’s going to be a big-league shortstop?”

BN: International scouting is a whole different area. When you first began, was there much of anything in the way of international scouting?

LG: No. The only clubs that were big at that time were the Giants and the Pirates. The Pirates had a scout named Howie Haak, who was a legend. Howie Haak was involved in signing Clemente if I’m not mistaken. He was a legend in the Latin countries. They loved him. He would go down there, and the Pirates would sign player after player after player out of there. We didn’t do a good job, even in my years here, in Latin scouting. It was an area I felt we were very deficient in. It was maybe my fault for not pushing it. We never did a good job down in the Latin countries. I think the advent of putting those camps down there is tremendous. The Dodgers had them for a long time. Campanis was a legend down there too. Haak and Campanis, they spent years down there. The Pirates had them for a long time. Houston had them for a long time. The Red Sox finally did it when Theo took over [under GM Dan Duquette, the Sox shared a complex with the Hiroshima Carp]. Those are important to do. The kids down there, they look at a Sosa, a Manny Ramirez, a Pedro – and they want to be like them. It’s their ticket out of poverty. I’ve been at tryout camps down there. With the Mets, I went down three or four times to the Dominican and we ran a tryout camp at a town near La Romana. About 50 kids showed up, and all those kids wanted when the tryout was over was to know, can we give them balls and bats? They can’t afford a ball and bat. A bat was a big thing for them. We gave all we had. They love baseball down there. They play it with sticks and stones. I think that Latin scouting was something that the Giants and Pirates were way ahead of everybody else.

As a kid growing up in the ’40s, I remember they had those traveling all-star teams. They had teams would go to Hawaii and to Japan. Same thing in winter ball. The players didn’t make the money they make today. They’d all go to winter ball to make the extra money, play in San Juan to get the extra money.

It’s getting more and more expensive. In the early days, the Giants would sign 8 or 10 or 12 kids and just ship them over here maybe $500 as a signing bonus. Rickey’s theory was…when I was in Baltimore, a guy who joined us later on, a guy named Walter Shannon, he’d scouted for the Cardinals for 27 years. I used to love to listen to him talk about scouting. He’d worked for Rickey for years. He told us stories. They’d hold tryout camps all over the country. They had two criteria: if they could run and throw, sign them. Great speed, great arm? Sign them. If they hit, we’ve got a prospect. If they don’t, we release them. Their theory was: If they could run and throw, if we sign enough of these guys, eventually we’ll get some hitters. And when we get a hitter combined with the other skills, we’ve got a ballplayer. And you weren’t paying any money. They’d sign for a bonus – $100, $500. They had 17 farm clubs. When I signed with the Phillies, they had 15 minor-league clubs. I went to spring training as a kid with Del Ennis and Robin Roberts and Puddinhead Jones. They were all kids. I didn’t know who they were. They had two minor-league camps in spring training. They had 300 or 400 kids in spring training. Today, you can’t afford that. You draft now. Your number 1 draft – [Craig] Hansen, what’d he get, $4 or $5 million? That would run your whole minor-league system. Today, your number 1 draft is getting X. Your number 2 is getting X. In those days, you could just sign a kid for a contract, for a chance to play. You could run 15 clubs for what you pay today for four or five.

The advent of the camps has been a great, great thing.

One year when I was in Seattle, I brought the Hanshin Tigers to train with us in spring training. They trained with us for four years. Worked out a schedule to play the Giants, the Cubs, the Indians. It was fun being around them and working with them. They loved baseball, and they loved to play you and beat you.

There’s baseball in Italy now. Major League Baseball sends a team to different…for example, in the World Baseball Classic, Bruce Hurst was the pitching coach for the China team. He was pitching coach to the Chinese team. Bruce told me that a couple of years ago, he had spent almost seven weeks in Italy working with the Italian team. Korea’s starting to get more into it.

Let’s talk about scouting. If Minnesota had Ortiz right now, it would change their whole … how’d they let Ortiz go? I think back a couple of years ago, when Houston let Johan Santana go…they had Clemens, Pettitte, Oswalt, and Santana. Think of that pitching staff. Pedro Martinez was let go by the Dodgers. Lasorda thought he wasn’t going to be able to pitch in the big leagues and they traded him to Duquette for DeShields.

BN: Haywood Sullivan had been a scout and a scouting director. Some general managers and owners are more attuned to scouting… LG: Schuerholz was. You know who is really good? Gillick. He’s a baseball junkie, if I can use that term. He’s deep into baseball theory and ideas. Signed by the Orioles, pitched in the system a number of years. Very intelligent guy, loves the game, loves the scouting end of it. Built the Toronto Blue Jays into a couple of world championships. Gillick is more standard, old school. Terry Ryan’s old school.

Another guy that is a very good judge of talent is Jack Zduriencik of the Milwaukee Brewers. His title is special assistant to the GM and director of amateur scouting. I don’t know Ken Williams of the White Sox that well, but he was a scout most of his life. Dayton Moore in Kansas City, Schuerholz tells me he’s going to be outstanding.

BN: You used to have all the scouts come in and work the winter meetings? Does that still happen now? Do all the scouts come in for that purpose?

LG: You bring in about six to eight scouts, your top guys. Generally, they work the lobby. What they’re looking for is to pick up information, tidbits. You’d assign each guy to, say, the Braves, the Giants, and the Dodgers. See what they’re looking for, what they want to trade. Each guy was assigned. Each day we’d get back together again, say at lunch, and say, “OK, I talked with this guy. It looks like they would consider trading this guy and this guy and this guy, and they’re looking for this and this.” By the end of the second day, you’d have a pretty good feel who is going to move who, what might be available, what you’re going to have to do to make a move. They all operate the same way.

The GMs generally stay up in the suites. Then what you do is you call the other club. When we did the Lee Smith trade, I had rumors that Jim Frey, who had worked for me and was the Cubs’ general manager then, they were unhappy with Lee Smith. The scouts picked that up in the lobby. They said, “Look, I think that Smith is available.” “What are they looking for?” “They’re looking for pitching.” So, we discussed what we could do. Well, we could move Nipper. Maybe move Schiraldi. Smith would give you an outstanding reliever. We had a little depth in pitching at that time. We had Schiraldi at that time. Hurst and Clemens. Oil Can Boyd. So, we knew that there was a possibility. I called and said, “Jim, if you’ve got an opening, I’d like to come and talk with you.” We met the next day around 10 or 11 o’clock. We’d sit there and chitchat, then finally I said, “We’re looking to try to help our bullpen. Is there anybody you’re moving?” They said, “Well, we might consider moving Smith if we got some pitching back.” I think Zimmer was the manager there. We ended up talking about it, and he brought up Smith’s name. I said, “Well, we could talk about Nipper to you. Why don’t you bring up some other names?” They brought up three or four and one of the names was Schiraldi, so we were able to put together a trade. We talked the next day and worked it out. When we made the trade, everybody said, “He’s injured. He can’t pitch.” Someone said he fell down the Mets steps and he hurt his back and he can’t pitch. Our reports said there wasn’t any injury at all. We thought he was OK, and of course he was.

Once in a while you get burned. We got burned on the Matt Young thing. Our reports didn’t show that Matt Young could not hold a runner at first base. I mean, how could you not pick that up? How do you not pick that up? If he walked a guy, it was a double. A single was a double. He can’t hold them on. We were desperate for a left-hander. I read through the reports and the reports didn’t give any indication that he had that problem at all. No one seemed to indicate that when we talked to them. Sometimes you’re going to get fooled on that sort of thing. You’re going to make a mistake. I hadn’t seen Young except based on the reports.

BN: You might see somebody three or four games, and the pitcher doesn’t have a play at first…

LG: Yeah. And there are occasions…when Dan [Duquette] signed Pedro, he knew what Pedro could do. He had Pedro [when he was GM in Montreal.] I knew Spike Owen. I’d seen Owen play 8 or 10 times. I knew Baylor. Some players you’ll know yourself, but there are a lot that you don’t know and you’ve got to go on the judgment of the people who are doing it.

BN: Would you convene the scouts any other time of year?

LG: Oh yes. Every year, first off, in spring training you’d bring in certain scouts. We had a scout one year in Baltimore who had scouted for the Phillies for 17 years. We had him about three years with us. Dalton said, “Gee, that guy’s judgment is awful. So inconsistent. I don’t think we can hold on to him. We get burned by his judgment.” I said, “Harry, why don’t we bring him to spring camp and let him sit there with our other scouts and look at the players we’ve got in camp and let him see who we think are prospects and who we don’t think are prospects, and see if that helps his judgment. At least it gives him a frame of judgment.” You see kids in a certain area where the competition isn’t so good, and the best kid in that league becomes the best player in your mind.

BN: That’s why I was good when I was a kid. No competition.

LG: Well, we were all that way. So we brought him into the spring camp and we had him sit there. “Do you like this kid?” “Yeah.” “Well, that kid’s name is Jim Palmer.” Mark Belanger. Sparky Lyle. I asked, “Why do you like him? Tell me why you like him or why you don’t like him.” We’d break it down. The other scouts would talk to him. We left camp and he said, “Lou, this is the best thing that ever happened to me as a scout. My frame of reference is so much better now than when I came in. Thank you for doing this.” But it never changed. He never got off that, and eventually he ended up getting let go.

You have other guys, you do that for him…Gary Rajsich, who scouts for us now, I had him as a player with the Mets. He was a first baseman with the Mets club and I loved the guy. I said, “Gary, I’d like you to stay in the game as a scout.” I said, “Dan, this guy is a good quality guy, he’s played baseball at a high level. Good college player.” “Nah, we don’t have a job for him.” So he went to that scouts school. They have a scouts school, and they rated him highly in the scouts school. So finally Duquette said, “Maybe you’re right” and we hired him, and he’s become one of our better scouts. He’s one of the guys who helped with this kid we just signed, this Bard kid. Daniel Bard. Sometimes guys have a feel for it, and sometimes they don’t. You can’t change that. There are so many cases of a scout whose judgment will get better. Some never get better. Some, because his frame of reference is bad. 

We bring them in to spring training – six or seven of them – so they see the talent in the system, and they help with judgment and evaluation. Then at the end of the season, we have a scouts and managers meeting. Every year. Bring all your scouts in, all your managers in. We sit for five or six days. Bring them all in. We do it in Florida, and we do it while the instructional league is going on. We meet in the morning, then go watch the game in the afternoon. Bring them back and have a light dinner and discuss the kids in the program. Do that for two or three days, then the last two days purely just discuss the players. Have a cocktail party and get to build a little morale, get to know them better. We do that every year. You’re always constantly working with them. You’ll call them on the phone. You’ll have them call you on the phone a lot. Get a feel for them, get to learn our judgment. From their standpoint, they get to see the whole system, to hear other scouts evaluate. You do that constantly. It’s the way you build morale, it’s the way you build judgment, and it’s the way you build an organization. We would do that every year. Then we’d go to the general managers’ meeting. That’s generally held right after the instructional league is over. All the GMs come in. You get a chance to feel out what might be available, meet for lunch, meet for dinner.

BN: In your book, you talk about the very detailed scouting reports that the Red Sox had on the Mets in 1986. You had just come over here from the Mets. How do you think the detail stacks up today?

LG: Much more. Much more in depth. The scouting quality and the depth of it is much greater. They have so much more means to do it. They’ll film things. You’ve got scouts that are territory scouts, grassroots scouts, but then you have the double-checkers and the top scouts that do the pregame coverage, the advance scouts. They would have video with them. They all have computers. They all have every technical thing you can give them to deal with it. They  can tie their reports into the computer and feed it to you right away. I think the technology that they work with is greater and I think that they do a lot more in-depth reporting. You have a lot more clubs now that do a lot more statistical compilation than clubs did in the past. I think it’s good. No question, you use it. It’s just a question of where you place the emphasis.

The computer has a role. You don’t overlook it. A lot of things that you do today, you can’t overlook. But you can’t let it absorb you. It’s got to be, I’ve got this part of information. I’ve got this part and I put it together. Not this that dominates everything. Marge Schott’s quote is, I think, like Moneyball, they paint the scouts as idiots. Guys that chew tobacco and play on the road, old theories and old ideas. Marge Schott used to say, “I don’t know what we pay scouts for. All they do is go to ballgames and watch players.” That’s what their job is!

I watch scouts many times in the ballpark. They’ll be talking, but their eyes are never off the player. They can be talking, but their eyes are always focused on the player. People look at them and say they’re strange characters, they’re old school, it’s the buddy system. Yeah, but if he’s not doing a good job, you don’t keep him. Your job rests upon their judgment, too. They all have contracts. Some have a one-year, some have a two- or three-year, but they have a contract. If you had your scouting and no statistics, I’d want the statistics.

I’d want to look at them. I’d look at the conference the guy’s in. One conference is better than another. One is not so good. High-school baseball in Florida and California, Michigan and upstate New York is much better than in other parts of the country. You begin to look at this and say how does this shape up vis-a-vis this area. You have to know how to weigh the statistical information, and what its import is, and what its value is.

BN: Would you have one of those old scouting reports from ‘86?

LG: They’re probably all filed away at Iron Mountain. Most of the ones we had here, when Dan took over, we sent to Iron Mountain. You’re getting reports constantly all year long. The manager would file a midseason and an end of the season report. Besides our club, you’d report on every other club in the league. The one thing your manager’s going to tell you on your own team, he’s had them for 140 games. He knows their makeup, their work ethic, how they handle failure, how they handle winning, what kind of a team player they are, what kind of a competitive spirit they have. That value of the makeup is important. A scout might not see that. He can judge his physical skill.

We did something called the “Whole Player” which we started in Baltimore. We drew a circle. Across the top part of the circle, we tried to evaluate all the physical skills you could see. The lower half of the circle was what you couldn’t see – the psychological part of it, all of the things that determine what kind of a competitive player… Things you can’t see, how do you find those out? How do you decide? You can watch him in games, see what kind of drive he has in the ballgame, what kind of desire he has.

BN: An area scout will probably want to spend as much time as he can with the family.

LG: Exactly. Plus with the coach, guidance counselor, peers on the club. The best judge of a player is his peers, the guys who play with him. You don’t fool them.

You try to get to the teachers, the guidance counselor, his teammates. Get as close as you can to the people around him. You talk to his parents, but his parents might give you a different perspective. They might look at it through rose-colored glasses. You want to know, how is he when things aren’t going well, when he’s struggling, how does he handle that? How does he handle it when things are going good? How hard does he work every day? You ask the scout to get as much of that as you possibly can. This is important. You can have guys with all of these skills [top of the chart] but don’t have this [bottom of chart], but if you get a guy with all of these skills and good makeup, you’ve got a chance to have a great player.

[On the Whole Player circle] When I was in Baltimore, one day we were sitting with the scouts talking about physical skills. Schuerholz and Dalton and I were talking about it and we decided to draw up a picture of it. When I went to Kansas City, I had it there. When Metro came over, he had been with the Dodgers and the Cubs, so he brought all the Dodgers books with him. We took all their books, and we created our own book. We had a book, for example, on how to scout, how to evaluate, for full-time scouts and part-time scouts. We took all the Dodgers theories and ideas and all the Orioles theories and ideas and I used those and combined them with Kansas City’s. Went to Seattle, we did pretty much the same thing. When I went to the Mets, we did the same thing there. Cashen, of course, knew the thing. Charles Steinberg talks about it all the time. He loves that circle. It was a way to show the scouts about the nonphysical skills.

The evaluation of the minor-league staff was always good to get. They may not sometimes be as good a judge of the physical skills as the nonphysical ones: how intense is he? How does he handle failure?

You can judge speed and velocity with the guns today. You can judge quickness with the bat. A lot of things you can’t pick up…I had a kid one year that we drafted. A number 1 draft. A kid out of Texas. His name was Rex Goodsen. He came into camp. We gave him a big signing bonus – I say big, it was like $150,000 in those days. He played at San Jose, in his third year, made the all-state all-star team, hit about .330, stole about 40 bases. Next year, came to camp went to Double-A. The next year, was in camp about a week and said, “I want to quit.” I said, “What do you mean, you want to quit, Rex?” He said, “I don’t have the desire to play anymore.” “What do you mean you don’t have the desire to play?” He said, “I don’t want to play. I don’t enjoy it.” I said, “Rex, our guys think you have a chance to be a big-league player. A chance to make a lot of money in this game if you play in the big leagues.” “I just don’t have any desire to play anymore. I want to quit.” I was stunned. We talked and talked, and I said, “Why don’t you think about it a while? Just wait a week. We’ll talk in a while.”

So, he stayed around, and he came back in about a week and said, “I haven’t changed my mind. I want to quit.” So, we put him on the voluntarily retired list. He went home. Went to Texas, I think Texas Christian or Texas A&M, played a little bit of football but then dropped out of school. Many years later, I asked around and found out he was running a Gulf gas station. He just lost his desire to play. That’s strange for a kid to do that. It just happened. You went back and read all the scouts’ reports and they all thought he’s got good makeup, he’s a hard worker, he’s a good competitor, a tough kid…but all of a sudden, he just lost that desire. That’s an unusual thing to happen.

One of the funny things that happened, Joe Gordon was my minor-league manager running the minor-league spring training and in those days in the ’70s kids had the real long hair. So, we had a rule about cutting the hair, reasonable. We had a kid named Joe Zdeb – later played in the big leagues. Decent backup outfielder. He came into camp with the hair way down to here and Gordon wouldn’t give him a uniform. He said, “I want to see Mr. Gorman.” “Fine, but you’re not getting a uniform.” So, Joe called me on the phone, he says, “He’s coming up to see you. Don’t give in to him. Make him cut his hair.”

So up comes Zdeb and the secretary brings him in. I said, “Joe, what’s on your mind?” He said, “Mr. Gordon won’t give me a uniform.” I said, “Well, Joe, I can see why. Your hair’s a little too long and we have a rule about cutting your hair.” He said, “Can I ask you a question?” I said, “Certainly.” He said, “If I cut my hair, am I a better player?” That’s a deep philosophical question. It kind of stunned you a little bit. I said, “Joe, you’re right. It has no bearing on your ability. No bearing at all. If you had hair all the way down your back, it has no bearing on your ability to play. The only thing is that you represent the organization. It says, ‘Kansas City.’ It doesn’t say ‘Joe Zdeb,’ it says, ‘Kansas City.’ You represent more than you. You represent an organization. And that’s our rule. You represent the city and the organization and the entire people in the ownership. If you want to wear it where it says, ‘Kansas City’ you have to cut your hair.” “I won’t cut my hair.” “Fine, don’t get a uniform.” He walked out, but he came back two days later and cut his hair and played a little bit, played Triple-A and then finally got briefly to the big leagues.

BN: Just like Johnny Damon joining the Yankees.

LG: Yes, a good example. If you went to Marine boot camp… when I went to OCS, I had a Marine gunnery sergeant, an assistant company officer, for 22 weeks in your face from 6 in the morning until 9 at night, and he’d pound that stuff about wearing your uniform properly. You represent your country, not you.

Some of the kids will hit you with questions. Floor you sometimes. Much more today than the old days. When I went to camp, you didn’t ask anybody. You didn’t want to even see anybody. If the farm director ever talked to you, you’d be afraid of getting cut. I’d want to avoid him, not get near him.

Today, the kids will ask you why do I have to do this, why do I have to do that? To be able to give them an answer is important to them sometimes.

It’s funny. I won’t mention the guy. He was a great major-league ballplayer. I hired him as a minor-league hitting coach. I loved talking to him. He was terrific. But he couldn’t communicate. I remember one day, Brett came to me and said, “Mr. Gorman, can I talk to you?” I said, “Yes, George.” He said, “I like so-and-so, but I get confused with him. I’d rather he didn’t work with me.” Now when you get to that point that the players starts saying he gets confused, you just can’t keep him here. I can’t have him teach any more. I had to let the guy go. A two-year contract and I had to let him go. You feel badly about it because the guy was a pretty good major-league player. But he couldn’t communicate.

You could take Stan Musial tomorrow and I’ll bet you he could not teach anybody with that crazy stance he had. He just did it with pure ability. You got a guy like Charlie Lau, who was a very marginal big-league catcher – and not much of a hitter – who was a tremendous teacher of hitting. He could communicate, and he had theories and ideas. He couldn’t do it, but he could teach it.

I used to tell managers: Don’t hire someone because he’s your friend. If he’s not good, you’re going to get fired. You want to hire someone who can help you become a better manager. If he can’t help you, it’s going to hurt you.

BN: Are there semiannual evaluations of scouts?

LG: Yes. What we would do, in the front office, is sit and evaluate the staff – the minor-league staff, the minor-league managers, the coaches. That’s when we talked about Butch Hobson. Hobson had gone to a Double-A club and taken them to the Eastern League finals. Then he took the Pawtucket club – 27½ games out of first place the year before – and took them into the International League playoffs. He was also picked as the Minor League Manager of the Year by Baseball America, and the International League Manager of the year. All of the people in the organization said to us, “We think he can manage in the big leagues.” Based on their evaluations, I brought him in and had Haywood and [John] Harrington evaluate him. We spent four hours quizzing him on this and that and they all thought his answers were great. Hire him! And yet here’s a guy we should have known…because we had him in our system…maybe we didn’t do as good a job with him as we should have.

When you’ve got somebody in your system, I think you want to evaluate every single one of those people. If you’ve got a scout that can’t be productive for you, maybe you can’t keep him. Guys that are good will always have a job.

BN: Is there a lot of back and forth between organizations?

LG: A lot of times what will happen is that ownership changes or management changes, and they want to bring their own people in. I remember when the Major League Scouting Bureau was first formed. The intention was to cut down on the number of scouts you had and save money by having this national group to provide coverage and give you reports. All you would do is double-check their reports and provide your own judgment. The original intention was that each club would protect only eight or nine scouts; all the rest could be selected by the Bureau. Your first thought was to protect your best scouts. Then it became 10, then it became 12, then it became 13 that everybody kept. When I was with Kansas City, we had a very good scouting staff. We had about 30 good scouts. I had to put some scouts out, to be in that, because they were really good scouts. I called the director and I said, “Look, the people I’m leaving out are damn good scouts. They could help any organization.” Sometimes you let people go, but not because you want to.

On the other hand, when new ownership comes in, new baseball operations people, they want to bring their own people in. Generally, the good scouts are known and someone picks them up right away. Sometimes scouts will change jobs, but often not because they’re not good. It’s just because someone else brings their own scouts in. When you deal with someone, you have no idea how good their judgment is.

Theo brought in some of his people. Duquette did the same. He brought [Ben] Cherington in, and [Dave] Jauss in. When I came, they didn’t want to do that here. They wanted to stay with what we had here. It was a question of me adjusting to them. They had people who were good. Sometimes you might like to have one or two of your own people, you can send in to make a judgment.

BN: With cross-checking, you have two or three scouts seeing the same players sometimes.

LG: Generally for your cross-checkers and your advance scouts, you use your top guys and you use them all the time. When you come here, though, you don’t know them. You don’t know their judgment. How conservative or liberal they are. You learn it as you work with them. Interpreting their judgment is vitally important. Even if you know your own people, you’ve still got to be able to read their judgments correctly. You can misread it. You can misread a guy’s evaluation of a player. That’s happened a few times to me on a player that you’ve drafted. After you draft the player, he might say, “Well, I didn’t really say that.” I’d say, “Yeah, but your report indicates that.” “But I didn’t mean that.” The more you’re familiar with the people, the more that you work with them, the more secure you feel in dealing with them.

Scouting’s not easy. Some people can scout forever and never find a player. They just can’t do it. They’re just not cut out for it. Other people just fall into it. They just have that ability to do it. Jim Russo was a schoolteacher and I made him a part-time scout, and right away he was good. When I was with Kansas City, I needed a scout in New York/New Jersey. You’d like someone bilingual. I had Joe Torre’s dad working for me as a part-time scout. Gary Blaylock, a scout who’d been in the Yankees organization, said, “I have a buddy, a guy named Al Diaz. Pitched in the Yankees system, pitched Double-A, Triple-A. Bilingual. From New Jersey, I think. He’d be a hell of a scout up there for you.”

I said, “Where’s he living?” He said, “In Dubuque, Iowa, someplace. He’s working with the YMCA.” So I call him on the phone – I don’t even know the guy – I said, “Gary speaks so highly of you. Did you ever think of getting back into baseball?” “I’d love to get back into baseball.” I said, “Well, have you ever scouted?” He said, “No. But I can scout. I know that area pretty well.” “Would you be willing to take a two-year contract?” Never scouted. I put my neck out. Way out. We had to move him to New Jersey. The house he bought had a problem. Had to put him in a motel for three months and pick up his expenses for his family. He’s in the business for just one year and he said, “I think I’ve got a player who’s pretty good, at Iona College.” I said, “Iona’s a basketball school, not a baseball school.” “No,” he says. “I think I’ve got a player who’s pretty good. His name is Dennis Leonard. You better come see him.” I sent in three or four scouts. He obviously had a good arm. We take him number 1. He’s been scouting one year and he recommends him.

A year later he called me and said, “I’ve got a player. He’s going to go pretty high in the draft. His name is Willie Wilson. Summit, New Jersey, High School.” Stunning. He could have been a bust, but I had so much confidence in Blalock. Blalock really sold me on the guy. Diaz became a better and better scout. Sometimes you get lucky like that.

There’s no substitute for good scouting. You can’t see every player in the National League. If you’re going to make a trade, you can’t see every player in the league. You’re going to rely on your scouts. When I made the trade for Larry Andersen, the scouts said – Kasko and two others, Wayne Britton included – we think he’s the best setup guy in the National League. If you get him, you’ve got a hell of a good pitcher. We were down to one pitcher at the time. Unfortunately, we lose him because of the collusion thing. And we obviously misjudged Bagwell’s potential. But Andersen helped us win the division. We just couldn’t get by Oakland. Keep in mind that McGwire and Canseco are on that club. I think they hit between them 86 and 87 home runs and drove in about 240 runs. In the series, I think Canseco hit three home runs against us and McGwire hit two. Of course, Eckersley killed us in the bullpen.

Scouting is so important to you. The judgment is so important on the players that you’ve got. Particularly in Boston, it’s a little different playing here. This atmosphere is different here. I’ve been in Kansas City and Seattle, and it’s laid back there. Even St. Louis is more laid back. But this area, the intensity of the fans…they’re on top of you, the emotion is there, the passion is there. When you’re going good, they love you. When you’re going bad, you’ll hear it. Some guys don’t handle it too well. I think [Hanley] Ramirez last year [2005], I think that bothered him. I’m convinced it did.

He’s a better player. I know when they made the trade, I talked to Schuerholz, and I said, “Do you guys like Ramirez?” They said, “What did you think about him?” I said, “Well, I didn’t get to see him much because I don’t get to the dugout that much, but the few times I’d be down there for an on-field ceremony and sitting next to Francona, I’d see him come out and I’d say hello to him and talk to him. He looked like a very shy kid, like he needed someone to pat him on the back.” They said, “Lou, we love him. We don’t like him. We love him. We think he’s potentially going to be an All-Star shortstop.”

The pressure of playing here…the media can get on you pretty bad. The media can get very tough on you, and some players don’t react very well to that media thing.

Lou Gorman was interviewed by Bill Nowlin on September 5, 2006.

In the 2007 Astros scouting operation, the country was divided into two regions, East and West. Some scouts covered several states while others shared one, depending on the usual level of talent produced in the area. Florida, California, and Texas saw more coverage than the Dakotas, for example. Each region had its own set of supervisors and a cross-checker. The two regional cross-checkers worked directly under the national cross-checker. He reported to the coordinator of amateur scouting, who reported to the scouting director, who reported to the assistant GMs and the general manager.

For the majority of draft-eligible players, a local scout saw him play and “liked” him well enough to submit a scouting report on him. If the submitted report drew the interest of one of the cross-checkers, one or more would make a trip to scout the player. If the player was really special, the coordinator of amateur scouting or even the scouting director himself might make a trip to watch him play. Anywhere from one to six scouts might watch the top prospects before draft day.

The first month-long stretch of draft preparation meetings began in mid-May. The first week was devoted to all draft-eligible players from the Western half of the country. The Western scouts, supervisors, cross-checkers, and head scouting personnel met in what was known as the War Room, which was stocked (by baseball ops interns) every morning with soda, water, chips, pretzels, candy, chocolate, and any other kind of snack food you can imagine. The scouts stayed a block away, at the Inn at the Ballpark, and each morning around 8:15 they headed to the fifth floor of Union Station to settle in for four hours of meetings, a quick lunch break, and then another four hours of evaluating the best amateur talent in the country. They looked somewhat conspicuous in the office; in the midst of a building full of suit-and-tie employees, the scouts marched in dressed in their customary Hawaiian T-shirts with a day’s supply of chewing tobacco in the front pocket.

Players were evaluated from several perspectives. First, the local scout summarized the player’s scouting report, listing his position, school, age, and physical characteristics. Then he pointed out the player’s most attractive tools or characteristics. Each scout who saw him prepared an extensive report on the player.

Hitters were evaluated based on the five basic tools, but were also graded on more specific abilities, such as raw power, power frequency, attitude, instincts, and coordination. Each pitcher was graded on each pitch currently in his arsenal, velocity, movement, and control. The scouts dissected each player’s hitting and pitching mechanics, discerning which flaws are hindrances, which are correctable, and which would cause problems against tougher competition. Radar gun readings for each pitch and running times were listed. The scouts were asked to grade the player’s current ability and also to project his potential ceiling as a player.

Scouts also commented on a player’s background, makeup, and signability, which would play a huge role later in the process. A somewhat all-inclusive ranking, the Overall Future Potential (OFP) number, was calculated from the grades and was used as a guideline for assembling a preference list for the several hundred players who would be discussed.

Once the local scout had his say, any other scouts who saw the player chimed in with their thoughts. Oftentimes, the scouts disagreed on everything from which position the hitter would play at the major-league level to the chance that a pitcher would hold up under a starter’s workload. Sometimes one scout might see the player hit two home runs while another saw him strike out four times in one game. Most often, the player’s true ability level was somewhere in between, and it was up to the collective wisdom of the scouts to figure that out.

In addition to the verbal descriptions, scouts browsed the Major League Scouting Bureau’s reports, medical reports, statistics, and psychological tests on each player. Teams also had sent potential draftees general questionnaires to gather medical and background information on the players. (It was the interns’ job to assemble several three-inch binders of all of this information and sort it alphabetically for hundreds of players.)

Each player’s name was printed on a magnet that was then placed on whiteboards that covered the walls of the War Room. Players were sorted into one of many categories, with the most preferred players going in Group A, and the least preferred in Groups E and F. There were also groups for players with unresolved medical issues that went in a group labeled “Medicals”, and one group labeled “Unsignables” for the players asking for signing bonuses far greater that what the team was willing to offer.

The issue of a player’s makeup was treated almost exactly as Michael Lewis described in Moneyball. A player did not need “off the charts” makeup to make the cut, but the name of a player with character issues or legal problems might be tossed in the trash with the empty candy wrappers and pretzel bags. Numerous players had stories about brawls or bar fights attached to their names. Occasionally, a scout would stick up for one of “his” players when another scout questioned the kid’s makeup or ability, and the player might keep his spot on the board, at least for a while.

One by one, players were discussed and temporarily assigned to one of the groups. By the end of the week the scouts were growing tired of each other and might start confusing the hundreds of players with each other. After the entire body of players from the Western US was assigned to groups on the board, it was time to bring in the Eastern scouts and repeat the entire process with a few hundred new names. The new set of scouts, supervisors, and cross-checkers sat in the same chairs and repeated the same conversations the Western scouts had just concluded, but with different names in their places. Cross-checkers and scouting directors have an amazing ability to keep all of these players separate and somehow maintain their sanity.

After the Eastern scouts finished a similar week of deliberation and headed back home, the cross-checkers and head scouting personnel met to re-evaluate and re-sort into one comprehensive draft list the top 600 or so draft prospects from across the nation. Players from both sides of the country were discussed one more time and assigned a spot on the draft board. They were helped in evaluating some of the players’ mechanics by video compiled by the Major League Scouting Bureau of more than 100 of the top prospects. Several of the minor-league roving instructors were present and provided more thorough analysis of the footage. Special assistants to the general manager, such as Nolan Ryan and Jeff Bagwell, also stopped by to offer their input. The general manager and assistant GMs were present but let the scouts run the show.

The Monday before the draft, the team held a workout for 30 potential draftees. Most of the players were from the Houston area or were players the scouts wanted to get one more look at before the draft. The workout allowed the scouts to interact with the players and scout them firsthand using wooden bats in a major-league ballpark. The position players took fly balls and groundballs to show their arm strength, accuracy, and fielding mechanics, while pitchers threw in the bullpen and off the mound. The hitters took a few rounds of batting practice on the field, then headed to the cages behind the clubhouse for a few more swings. The scouts could see for themselves if a player had the physicality to play every day in the majors, or if he had fully recovered from a recent injury that may have affected a scout’s previous evaluation. After the workout, the scouts reassembled to discuss what they saw from the prospects and re-evaluate the draft board.

After going back through all the players and sorting through every piece of information, adding all the last-minute health and signability updates, the team was finally ready for draft day.

When Draft Day 1 arrived, reorganizing the draft board was complete. The GM, assistant GMs, scouting directors, coordinator of amateur scouting, cross-checkers, and a few supervisors gathered in the War Room to see how it all played out. The scouts were on their phones trying to gauge what players would fall to the Astros and what players were increasing their bonus demands at the last minute.

Because of free-agent signings of Carlos Lee and Woody Williams, the Astros did not have a pick until the third round. They had three players targeted for the third-round pick, but so many things could change after the first few rounds that it was almost pointless to speculate. For a team with what Baseball America considered one of the weaker farm systems in the league, there was a lot of pressure on the front office to have a strong draft.

With the draft being televised for the first time, all eyes were glued to the TV to watch how the first round played out. Even though the Astros didn’t have a first-round pick, the team sent “delegates” to the draft in Orlando at Major League Baseball’s request. Those in Houston saw them on TV; they were pretending to be busy and make important phone calls when the camera was on them for appearance’s sake. In reality, they had no clue which players were currently being discussed in the War Room back in Houston.

Tampa Bay selected David Price with the first pick, and the two-day marathon began. We watched with amusement as Rick Porcello fell to the Tigers late in the first round. (Editor’s note: Porcello was thought to be asking for too high a price to go early in the first round, Detroit ended up paying him way over slot.)

As one of the scouts said, “You can have a really good draft just by spending a couple million more dollars.”

The first round moved slowly, but the scouts occupied the time commenting on each pick. The scouts checked back with their sources to monitor the latest rumors just like any baseball fan keeping up with the draft. As the first round moved along, our Group A took big hits, and a few players from Group B and even one from Group C had come off the board. We wanted some talented players to be there for us when our picks came up, but we also wanted to be able to sign them. The room collectively started rooting for other teams to select the guys we considered unsignable.

After the first round, the draft went to a 30-way conference call. Each team made its selection through an electronic system online, and then announced its pick through the conference call.

Through the supplemental first round and second round, names kept coming off the board. While Houston’s draft rankings were created entirely by Astros scouts, it was clear that the list closely resembled other teams’ boards. The majority of Group A players were taken before the Group B players started disappearing, and soon the Astros were left with a handful of Group B’s and most of Group C. The room started counting the number of picks left until ours, and we began to eye the names we thought might be left when our turn finally arrived. The scouts are working the phones, trying to get an up-to-the-second gauge of which players would still be there when Houston’s pick arrived at number 111.

Finally, our pick arrived, and one of “our guys” was still there: Derek Dietrich, a shortstop from an Ohio high school who made the trip to Houston for our pre-draft workout earlier in the week. He stood out at the workout, driving balls across the field and flashing some impressive wood-bat power.

Clearly, he made an impression on the scouts, enough to convince them he was a worthy third-round selection of the Astros. The scouting director and coordinator of amateur scouting made the final decision while others present provided input or were simply along for the ride. The local scout responsible for recommending Dietrich received congratulations from everyone in the room, and he picked up his cell phone as he stepped out of the room to call the newest Astros draft pick and relay the good news to the Astros’ first selection.

Having landed their third-round selection, the room breathed a collective sigh of relief. The pressure was off, and the atmosphere became much more relaxed. The mindset changed from panicking to scheming as the scouts started looking at who they could nab next. At this stage, the draft pace had picked up considerably since the first round, but it still took quite a while to complete each round. With the fourth- and fifth-round picks, the Astros took high-school pitcher Brett Eibner and Lamar University outfielder Collin DeLome. It was a special day for the Houston-area Astros scout who recommended both players.

For a scout, having one of your players selected, especially this early in the draft, is a reward for a year’s worth of hard work. The rest of the player’s career is more or less beyond the scout’s control, but when the player’s name is announced through the conference call in front of the other 29 teams, an undeniable bond is formed between scout and player. The scout was responsible for getting the player drafted, and the player will hopefully return the favor by moving through the minor-league system quickly and contributing at the major-league level, reflecting well on the scout who recommended him.

In a way, a scout’s career is forever linked to the player’s. The scout will follow the player’s career more closely than anyone except the player himself, hoping that one day his former draft prospect will make it to “The Show.” Even if the player is traded or the scout moves on to another organization, the two will often keep in touch well after the contract is signed and the signing bonus is cashed.

With five rounds down and 45 to go, MLB called it a day. Teams took the evening to evaluate, regroup, and set their sights on the next day’s target players. The scouts got back to their phones to see if their player’s signability had changed after a nerve-wracking Day 1.

Day 2 moves much more quickly. It was clear that by the fifth round, the teams’ draft boards overlapped a lot less directly, so teams could plan their selections several picks in advance. Several rounds into Day 2, we began planning three or four rounds ahead. As each selection was being read into the speakerphone, one of the scouts called the player to congratulate him and welcome him to the organization.

After a few rounds into Day 2, the “best available player” mindset became “who else is interesting?” which turned into “what positions do we need to fill for our short-season and rookie ball rosters?” We took a shot at a couple of high-school guys who might change their mind and turn pro, but most of the late picks were college juniors and seniors who we were sure would sign for slot money.

With the new August 15 signing deadline, the draft-and-follow process has been all but eliminated. Teams have less of a need to draft 50 rounds worth of players, so teams start dropping out in the late 30s/early 40s. We were done after round 44.

The baseball operations staff had an evening to recover before it had to start signing the new draftees. Short-season leagues and rookie ball were to begin in a few days, and the organization needed to have a roster together before then. Meanwhile, the scouts headed out in search of next year’s top amateur prospects, and the 12-month process began again.

BEN JEDLOVEC worked as a baseball operations intern for the Houston Astros in the summer of 2007 and graduated from Rice University the following year. Now a research analyst for Baseball Info Solutions, Ben works with John Dewan, Bill James, and the BIS team on a variety of publications and projects. His contributions can be found in The Fielding Bible books and on ESPN.com.

In 72 plate appearances, he hit .250 with three homers and achieved a .348 on-base average, stealing five bases. He appeared briefly in the ALDS, ALCS, and in the 2008 World Series, successfully stealing a base in his one and only Series appearance, a pinch-running role in the ninth inning of Game Five.

Called up once again in September of 2009, he saw his OPS drop from .781 to .412 in 35 plate appearances. In 2010 Perez spent the year in Triple-A with the Durham Bulls, and in 2011 at midseason, he began the season playing with the Iowa Cubs, the Triple-A team of the Chicago Cubs, but was released in July, almost immediately signed by the Mets and assigned to their Triple-A team in Buffalo.

Asked what it had been like, being scouted near the beginning of the 21st century, Perez shared his thoughts in an August 20, 2010, interview with Bill Nowlin.

BN: When did you first realized that there were scouts looking you over?

FP: Not in high school whatsoever. Really, the first time I was aware of them was my junior year of college [Columbia University]. We were playing down in Florida and a few of them were coming to games … mostly to look at other players … and one of them approached me expressing some interest. It ended up being the scout that signed me, Brad Matthews. I was pretty surprised.

Perez said he was very, very skeptical as well. His home state of New Jersey isn’t exactly a hotbed of talent, he explained. He also said that he downplayed any feelings he might have had, not wanting to become optimistic about something he never expected to see come to fruition.

He’d be near our bench during games. I could tell he was watching me. I could feel that he was as concerned with what I was saying as what I was actually doing on the field. I remember that spring starting to understand what the whole thing was about, and starting to get a sense that I might actually get drafted.

BN: So you were at Columbia, kind of in Lou Gehrig’s footsteps …?

FP: It was a lot different. When Lou was there, they actually liked baseball. They used to play baseball on Center Campus. Now, sports is an activity which is not exactly looked on … I was more apt to make sure that I had no trace of athletic regalia on when I was in my classes.

BN: When you first met Matthews, were there other scouts from other teams there at the same time?

FP: Not that made personal contact. Later on, I learned that there ends up being a share network of information. Some other scouts had heard by that time. I’d been approached by an agent and I think that he sicced some other scouts on me, but for the most part he was the only guy that I talked to during that period. He’d give me a call every once in a while. He was trying to psychologically profile me, and I was doing the same thing, trying to gauge what was happening.

The Major League Scouting Bureau came to a workout that we had at Columbia. We had all of our players run a college workout in the fall. The Bureau came and a few area scouts came. I ran like a 6.2 60, and I’m pretty sure that that’s where he heard of me and then came down to Florida where we start the season.

The coach who recruited me, he ended up leaving before the start of my sophomore year, kind of abruptly. He wanted to go to a big program, where you could recruit players regardless of their baseline knowledge of Kierkegaard. He went to Boston College. When I first got to school, I was just kind of there. I was thinking of baseball really more as an activity and I was just taking in everything at school. Freshman year in New York City. Pretty impressionable. The coach said to me right off, “You’re going to learn. You’re going to get a little bigger. You’re going to become a student of the game. You’re going to become the best player in the Ivy League. And you’re going to get drafted.” I remember thinking that he’s selling me lies. I was not necessarily down on my talent, but just very skeptical of dreams like that.

BN: Did any family members ever get involved in giving any advice of one kind or another?

FP: Not at all. In my junior year, I remember sitting down at dinner with my parents at a favorite restaurant on the Upper West Side and explaining to them that I was probably going to get drafted. My mother would have nothing to do with it. She said, “No. You’re not. You’re going to finish school and you’re not going to follow any irrational pipe dream of becoming a professional athlete. What are you thinking? You’re going to Columbia University. You need to study more.” Once I kind of explained to her that they were going to pay me to skip my spring semester and that they would pay me to go to fall semester, no strings attached, she sort of reconsidered.

BN: When in the process did you first actually meet, or interview agents, or did you just meet one that you clicked with?

FP: Before the draft, I had only one agent get in touch with me. Andrew Mongelluzzi. After the coast was clear with my mother, when she didn’t think that the draft was the Devil, he went up and met with my parents while I was at school and kind of explained things to them. He ended up being my agent for the first couple of years of my career. He’s no longer my agent, but he was for the first couple of years. He was my adviser, but my junior year, right before the draft, I got injured so it ended up being very unnecessary for me to even hire an adviser.

It didn’t really end up mattering, because all of the teams I talked to, I did essentially all of the negotiating there was to do. Most of the teams, if they cannot talk to an agent, they’d rather talk to the player, and with all of the teams, I was the one who spoke to them, I ended up being drafted by the team which had followed me the most all along. Then the day of the draft, I got calls from like ten or so different agencies. A little bit weird.

There was one glaring experience I had. The week before the draft, there’s a few pre-draft workouts. I’d not really hit much with wood. I was injured going into the draft, hurt at the end of my junior year, so I was in kind of a holding period but I did some acupuncture for a pulled hamstring, and I got better. The first workout I went to was at the Phillies place. I did OK. I did the running, the hitting, the throwing. I ran really well. I threw OK, hit OK. Afterward, one of the guys from the Phillies tried to pressure me into doing a pre-draft deal. He basically said, “Why don’t you wait around and don’t go back to your car quite yet.” I don’t know if he thought I was just some idiot, but basically, what the guy did was he tried to convince me that I was not a good player and that I would probably not get drafted, and that my best shot of playing professional baseball would be like to sign a $20,000 contract with him right there on that day.

He was saying, “Well, why would I draft you? I have all these high-school kids that are better…and this and that.” I asked, “Well, then, what are you trying to sign me for?” I looked at him kind of like the guy was crazy, thinking, “Are these really tactics that work?” I thought it was funny at the time and I remember kind of laughing in the guy’s face, getting in my car. It was actually really embarrassing for him. He ended up calling me on the day I got drafted and apologizing for the way that he spoke with me.

I had a similar experience with the Mets. I had a workout with them, and I was supposed to go on to this predraft workout in Arizona. The Mets guy said, “I’d like to have a special workout with you and some of our top brass. We’re thinking about taking you with a very early pick.” I’m thinking to myself, “Well, you guys already saw me. I went to your workout. It wasn’t my best workout, but that doesn’t matter. I already have plans to go to Arizona.” The guy says, “Well, I think it would be in your best interest to skip that general workout in Arizona, because you’re going to go out there and there’s going to be a hundred other players out there. This is going to be just you and the general manager and a couple other people.”

I left for Arizona but for some reason, my flight got canceled. I was stranded in Chicago and I realized that I could be back in New York the next day if I got on a plane. I called the guy from New York — and he told me that he made that up so that I wouldn’t go, and that there wasn’t any workout! The guy actually confessed to me. “Don’t come to Shea Stadium. There is no workout. I was just making that up so that you wouldn’t go to Arizona.” That was right before the draft. I was kind of getting an idea how primitive and salesman-like the whole thing was.

BN: That stuff, I suspect, is “illegal” under the system. That sounds like these guys were trying to subvert the system, in both cases.

FP: Oh yeah. Absolutely. I hate it to sound like the perfect story, because I’m with the Rays now, but going to their workout, it was a pretty good workout. I remember talking to the scout director, R.J. Anderson. At least it had this guise of being very, very honest, but I could tell by talking to the guy who signed me, there were certain objectives that he had, and of course objectives that I had, so it wasn’t a super, super honest perfect dialogue. But still, I remember talking to R.J. Anderson on the field after the workout. He asked, “Where do you think you’re going to get drafted?” I remember lying through my teeth, saying that I think I would get drafted in the fifth round. I was just saying that because I thought that that was the right thing to say. If I hadn’t been drafted at all, I wouldn’t have been surprised really at all.

R.J. Anderson said, “Well, we’d like to take you in the fifth or sixth round, but I don’t think you’ll be available.” This is a scouting director. I decided that he must be fairly knowledgeable. This was one of the first times that I thought this was really going to happen.

Really, I was one of those players who benefited from scouts who were going to see bigger prospects. The year I got drafted, there were a bunch of good prospects in the Ivy League who got drafted. Ross Ohlendorf was a fourth-rounder. They had B.J. Szymanski. They had tons of scouts out to watch them pretty much every time that they played. It wasn’t really like that for me. During a midweek game, it’s not like there’d be any scout, and on a weekend day, there really wouldn’t be too many anyway. But when we played Princeton, I guess I benefited from the scouts being out to see brighter prospects.

BN: Did you have any discussions with Tampa Bay or other organizations about signability?

FP: Yeah, there was that. I definitely had to convince people that I was for real, that I really wanted to play baseball. A lot of that was done by my coaches. He asked, “There’s a lot of guys calling about you. Do you want me to give them the impression that you’re signable and you want to play?” At that point, I knew that this is what I wanted to do. I said, “Yes.”

Toward the draft, it got a little closer when I was talking to the Rays. It was in that sort of secretive bargaining jargon about what it would take. However I learned it, I learned to maintain some ambiguity but to make sure that you unflinchingly show a desire to play. In my case, I was very lucky that they were actually real concerns. If somebody was going to offer me $10,000 or $20,000 to play, I would have just gone back to school. I didn’t think that this thing was going to happen anyway. I wasn’t going to leave school for no reason. And I really, really did want to play.

I had this really odd feeling of being in somewhat of a driver’s seat, entering the week thinking that there’s no way anybody is going to draft me into baseball, but as things sort of progressed, there were all these sort of signs like teammates around me … I remember talking to R.J. on the field, where he thought legitimately that I would get drafted in the first couple of rounds – which gave me the impression that I would get drafted by like the 20th or 25th round.

BN: Was the seventh round in the first day or the second day?

FP: First day.

BN: So you didn’t have to wait overnight then.

FP: No. I went to the beach actually. I was on LBI in New Jersey. Long Beach Island. I just sort of took the day off and I went to the beach. I got a call in the sixth round. I said I would sign. They called back and said, “There’s this guy we really, really want to take. Will you sign in the seventh round?” And I said, “Yes!” I remember thinking, “Just hurry up and draft me.”

BN: Was any other team in touch with you that day?

FP: That day? No.

BN: By taking you in the seventh round, they had to be concerned that someone else would take you before it got around to the eighth round.

FP: The only team he’d really been in touch with other than the Rays was the Diamondbacks. The guy who was my adviser said the Diamondbacks were interested after the 10th round. If the Rays would have waited, maybe I would have gone to the Diamondbacks. I didn’t really mention much to my friend [when we went to the beach]. I just had to keep the phone on me. He was a friend that I had played baseball with and didn’t really believe that this was happening. He’d been lobbying for me to quit baseball for a long time. Then I got the call.

“A day later, we’ve got to play again and he comes back. ‘I want to see you one more time,’ he said. I had another good night. In fact, I led the tournament in hitting and I got a couple of trophies, one as an infielder and one for the batting championship. He said, ‘I liked what I saw, kid. I’d like to sign you’ and he made an offer of money. He threw twenty-five hundred dollars at me. Jesus. I never saw that kind of money; we’d be lucky if we had five bucks to spend. When the tournament was over, I went home and told my little brother we had a chance to get a few bucks here. My folks sure could have used it.”

One Detroit Tigers scout recalled how they would even follow Johnny to the ice rink. “We used to sit around those ice joints with our teeth chattering,” he moaned. It was Ernie Johnson’s manner and personality that won the day for the Red Sox, even though the offer he conveyed was not at all the best financially. Johnson lived in Santa Monica, California, and had the entire West Coast as his territory for the Red Sox. Johnson was a former major leaguer, with a ten-year career for the White Sox, the Terriers, the Browns, and the Yankees, spanning the years from 1912 to 1925. He’d been scouting for over a decade when he found Johnny. The home office was convinced not just by Johnson, but also by the “constant suggesting” of Red Sox pitcher Jack Wilson, a Portland native who had seen Johnny play. Wilson had apparently bent Red Sox manager Joe Cronin’s ear on the subject as well.

Ernie Johnson wisely cultivated the Paveskovich family as well as the prospect. In this case, it paid off – and saved the Red Sox some money. Johnny remembered Johnson’s approach. ”He would come into the house. We didn’t have the best house, but it was always clean. He would bring my mother these beautiful flowers. He’d bring my father a bottle of I.W. Harper, that nice bourbon in those days. My father liked to nip a little bit. He’d savor that for about two months.

“I had another club that was going to give me more money, but Johnson got to know my parents. Either my oldest brother or my oldest sister would be there to interpret for them. They had a language barrier. He used to watch our games and kind of latched on to me, you know, being a middle infielder. He liked what I did.

“Johnson and the Red Sox hadn’t said anything yet, just an overture of some five hundred dollars. Butler came and he talked to my parents. My mother just shook her head. She said, ‘No. I don’t care about the money. Mr. Johnson is the one we’re going to deal with.’ My mother said to me, ‘Mr. Johnson, he was very nice to us. You stay with Mr. Johnson and Boston.’

“Cy Slapnicka from Cleveland was a scout out there. He came in, too, but Johnson came in two or three times and he always went in the kitchen and had coffee with them while I was at school. He looked around; he knew everything was nice and clean. My mother liked this guy. We had this other offer, but anyway, my mother said, ‘No, Johnny. Boston. Mr. Johnson, Johnny. Nobody else. He take care of you, Johnny.’”

When Johnny’s brother Vince talks about it, one gets the sense the family held to other priorities than the dollar. “We didn’t have much when we grew up. Today we can count our blessings that we did have parents who provided three meals a day. A good home life and all that goes with it – the love and affection. Really, even today that’s still the hallmark of perfection – kids that have loving parents and a good home. This is what we all live for: to have a better life in the future. I think we did well.”

Johnson never upped his offer. ”We got the five hundred, but if we stayed in the organization – I was supposed to stay for two years – they’d give me a thousand dollar bonus. After the first year, they gave me the thousand dollars. So really fifteen hundred is what I got. Still a thousand less than the other club. The money could have done a lot for my family but mom said no. My brother and my two older sisters were working; they were bringing money home. They were maybe getting twenty dollars a week, maybe twenty-five dollars a week. That’s in the late ’30s, early ’40s. My mother she said, ‘No. Mr. Johnson, he take care of you, Johnny.’

“No one had money in those days. So that’s how it turned out. That’s why I signed with the Red Sox, and it was the best thing that could have happened. I signed with the Red Sox and I’m glad I did. It turned out pretty good.” Marija Paveskovich’s instincts were correct. The Red Sox did take good care of Johnny. And vice versa.

Johnson’s homey approach carried the day, even when at least one other scout offered five times as much upfront money. These were still Depression times and to turn down a full $2,500 to sign with the Red Sox for just $500 was a bold decision for the family to make.

As Johnny finished his first year with the big-league club and was about to head into the Navy for who knows how long during the Second World War, Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey had a treat for the rookie. In the process, he earned himself and the ballclub a loyal friend for life. “The last week of the season in ’42,” Johnny tells, “There was a note on my chair to go up and see Eddie Collins. Of course, we were never allowed upstairs. Ted [Williams] sees this thing and he says, ‘What’s that?’ I said ‘I gotta go up and see Mr. Collins.’ ‘Well, hurry up.’ So, I went upstairs. He called me in his office and said, ‘Sit down.’ So, I sat down, and he says, ‘Well, you had a fine year, Johnny. You played well and you weren’t any problem off the field for us.’ There wasn’t much of that off-the-field activity in the years we played; you couldn’t afford it. Well anyway, he handed me this envelope. So now Ted is waiting for me in the clubhouse. ‘What the hell happened?’ ‘Well, he called me in and gave me this envelope.’ So, he says, ‘What the hell’s in it?’ So, I opened it up and there was a check there for five thousand dollars.”

Johnny had been sending money home, as it was, but now he was able to take the bonus – an amount in excess of his entire $4,000 salary – and pay off the new house on Overton Street, a house his brother Vince still lives in today. “That money paid for the house. I think the house cost about $4,800.

“It has stayed with me, what Mr. Yawkey did. That’s why I have always loved the Red Sox – with Mr. Yawkey – because of what he did not only for me but for my family. They were so darn nice.”

This article is adapted from Mr. Red Sox: The Johnny Pesky Story, by Bill Nowlin (Cambridge Massachusetts: Rounder Books, 2004).