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    Can He Play? A Look At Baseball Scouts and Their Profession
    Unavailable
    Can He Play? A Look At Baseball Scouts and Their Profession
    Unavailable
    Can He Play? A Look At Baseball Scouts and Their Profession
    Ebook697 pages9 hours

    Can He Play? A Look At Baseball Scouts and Their Profession

    By Bill Nowlin and Jim Sandoval

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    They dig through tons of coal to find a single diamond. They spend countless hours traveling miles and miles on lonely back roads and way too much time in hotels. Their front offices expect them to constantly pro- vide player reports and updates. So much of their time is spent away from family and friends, missing birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays. Their best friend is Rand Mc- Nally. Always asking the question, “Can He Play?” Such is the life of a professional scout.

    Can He Play? collects the contributions of some 26 members of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) on the subject of scouts, including biographies and historical essays. The book touches on more than a century of scouts and scouting with a focus on the men (and the occasional woman) who have taken on the task of scouring the world for the best ballplayers available. In “Can He Play?” we meet the “King of Weeds,” a Ph.D. we call “Baseball’s Renaissance Man,” a husband-and-wife team, pioneering Latin scouts, and a Japanese-American interned during World War II who became a successful scout—and many, many more.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSociety for American Baseball Research
    Release dateAug 8, 2013
    ISBN9781933599250
    Unavailable
    Can He Play? A Look At Baseball Scouts and Their Profession
    Author

    Bill Nowlin

    BILL NOWLIN confesses to have left Game Three of the 2004 ALCS before it was over - due to a 13-year-old son at home with a friend. But since the 1950s he has attended countless Red Sox games at a place he often calls his "second home." He waited 59 years to see the Sox win it all. He is one of the founders of Rounder Records; the one Hall of Fame into which he was inducted is the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. He has written and edited many books, mostly on baseball and mostly for SABR, but has not gone far in life - he lives in Cambridge, maybe 10 miles from where he was born in Boston.

    Read more from Bill Nowlin

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    Reviews for Can He Play? A Look At Baseball Scouts and Their Profession

    3/5

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    • 4/5

      A Look at Baseball Scouts and their Profession, says the subtitle. This book, built around a couple dozen biographies in the usual style of the Society for American Baseball Research's Biography Project, is an exploration of what baseball's scouts do and how they go about their jobs. As always with SABR's BioProject books, the biographies are very good to excellent, and much of the supporting material is useful and interesting. Unfortunately the book lacks some helpful contextual information which makes it less than useful to a reader who's not already aware of the organizational environment scouts work in.

      I rather expected the book to begin with an overview of the place scouting occupies in the typical baseball organization, with other chapters explicitly discussing the history and development of scouting practice, the role scouting plays in player development (and perhaps some discussion of how specific organizations have employed different scouting/player development strategies), and an explication of the things scouts look for when they watch a baseball game. The book contains all of that material, at least in part, but only the what do they look for part has a specific discussion, and that is tucked into a rather brief chapter introduction. The other general topics can be gleaned from the book's material, but at best there are only partial summaries.

      The result is a specialist's book, best suited to a fan who already knows the context. There's some very valuable material if you fit that profile. Dan Levitt's chapter describing Ed Barrow's decision formalizing Yankee scouting and player development is just terrific. Also valuable are the word portraits of Al LaMacchia (by David King), Jack Doyle (Neal Mackertich), Joe Cambria (Brian McKenna) and George Omachi (Bill Nowlin). Less valuable for a scouting book are the portraits of Charley Wagner (Nowlin) and Sam Hairston (Rory Costello); both are excellent biographies but concentrate on the person's playing career and give few details about their work as scouts.

      Not all of the chapters are biographies. While, for instance, the Tom Greenwade (Jim Sandoval & Rory Costello) chapter includes the standard biographical details, including the Mickey Mantle signing which is his most famous success, there's also a long discussion of the below-the-radar work the Dodgers put into signing Jackie Robinson. Fred Glueckstein nicely tells the story of the signing of Tony Lazzeri, from the standpoint of the Yankees organization. Ron Anderson's interview with George Digby is, I'm afraid, more interesting for what it shows of Anderson's excellent interviewing technique than for anything Digby says; personally I'd have edited it, but an introductory note would have been worthwhile. There's a short chapter about the Scouting Bureau, and Astros intern Ben Jedlovec offers a dramatic essay about draft day preparations. Bill Nowlin has a great profile of Deacon Jones and what Deacon's job as an advance scout involved. And Gib Bodet's disparaging description of his National Cross-Checker job is absolutely delightful.

      This is an excellent resource for further research. Virtually every chapter has a bibliography, some of which are quite extensive. Most chapters have footnotes, as well.

      I've left lots of material out, much of it excellent. It's a valuable book if you're looking for what it contains; my only real concern is that there's too little explanation of why and how scouts matter.

      This book is currently only available to SABR members, but will soon be made available to the public. I'll post a link when that occurs.

      This review has also been published on a dabbler's journal.