Scouting in odd places

I came across this article from the Toronto Sun: The Twins have hired the main Canadian scout away from the Scouting Bureau, a centralized service run by the commissioner's office for all 30 clubs..

I haven't followed this particular development all that closely, but the Bureau is under new management, and the new chief, former big-league general manager Bill Bavasi, is refocusing the Bureau from scouting for the next draft to medical reports, early identification of prospects and what one might call new markets -- Asia, Europe, Australia. It's a good guess that Walt Burrows decided he didn't want to be part of that transition.

A dozen or so clubs don't have a full-time scout assigned to Canada; the Twins were, according to the article, using a Minnesota-based scout to cover the Dominion. Presumably Burrows will take that burden off Mark Wilson. 

Looking for talent under rocks other teams ignore has long been a trademark of the Twins. They've probably signed more Australians than anybody. Grant Balfour was probably the biggest success, but most of what he accomplished in the majors came years after his Twins tenure. Max Kepler, a good prospect out of Germany, has a real chance to be an impact player in the next few years. And the most issue of Baseball America has a blurb about a pitcher named Vladim Balan who the Twins signed for a pittance out of Moldova, an Eastern European country of less than 3 million population who has shown a 96-mph fastball. He's 22 and very raw, so the odds are very much against him. 

Most teams focus their scouting efforts in the places that generate the most talent -- California, Florida, the Dominican, Texas. The Twins can't afford to ignore those places, obviously. But they seem to be more determined than most to find talent in places the others barely glance at, and the hiring of Burrows is something of an example. Canada isn't exactly ignored by other organizations, but it's not all that heavily scouted either.

The updated "Dollar Sign on the Muscle"

The re-release of "Dollar Sign
on the Muscle" features the story
of how the Royals landed Tim
Collins, the little lefty shown on
the cover.

Away back in 1981, a college instructor named Kevin Kerrane spent the year burrowing into the world of baseball scouts. He delved in depth into the Philadelphia Phillies scouting system, and branched beyond the Phillies to get other perspectives from some of the game's most storied scouting veterans.

It took a couple years, but Kerrane turned his material into one of the best baseball books in my collection, "Dollar Sign on the Muscle," published in 1984. I got my paperback copy in '85, and for years revisited it regularly.

The book has been long out of print, and I stopped rereading it some time ago, fearing that its description of the scouting world was no longer relevant in the age of "Moneyball" -- another insightful look into the mysteries of player evaluation, and itself based on a season more than a dozen years in the rearview mirror.

Well, the book is back in print under the auspices of Baseball Prospectus. Kerrane rewrote and updated the conclusion and added a new chapter on the current world of scouting -- going in-depth on Pat Toomey, a scout for the Kansas City Royals (a profile that demonstrates that the colorful scouts aren't completely gone) and on the Washington Nationals' and St. Louis Cardinals' overall approach, but also touching on a Twins area scout, Jack Powell.

One of the conflicts in the original was the romantic individualism of the old-school scouts vs. the organizational bureaucracies, represented by the draft, scouting directors, cross-checkers and "the Bureau," a centralized scouting organization. (It's worth remembering that in 1981, the draft was only 15 years old, and the old-timers like Leon Hamilton and Hugh Alexander missed the days when, if they found a prospect, they could just sign him.)

That particular battle has been decided, if only by attrition (to a man, the old-timers profiled in the original have died in the intervening decades). The Bureau in 1981 included a majority of teams, but not all; today it is run by the commissioners' office and every team is part of it. The draft, for better or worse, isn't going away. The money involved puts the amounts scouting directors fretted over in the early '80s to shame, upping the need for organizational control.

But, as Kerrane makes clear, there remains room in the mysteries of scouting -- in the task of looking at a 17-year-old and deducing what his athletic future holds -- for the obscurities of "the good face."

"Dollar Sign on the Muscle" remains not only a good read. It remains relevant to the baseball world of today.