Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 324: Kevin Kerrane on Scouting and Dollar Sign on the Muscle

Episode Date: November 7, 2013

Ben and Sam talk to author Kevin Kerrane about the Dollar Sign on the Muscle reprint and the world of scouting.

Dallas signs in my eyes, all I see is money. Dallas signs in my eyes, all I see is money. Dallas signs in my eyes, all I see is money. Good morning and welcome to episode 324 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. And today our guest is Kevin Corain, who wrote one of the best baseball books ever Maybe the best baseball book ever

Sam and I have both read it and loved it Sam read it more recently than I did I'm hoping to go back and reread it soon The occasion is a reprint of the book This book was originally published in 1984 It's a book about scouting, the history of scouting, scouts themselves, scouting stories, players who were scouted. And it's been out of print for a while now, and it's become legendarily difficult to find.

So Baseball Perspectives is reprinting the book. It's been... Why don't you name the book? Did I not? Oh, okay. The book is named Dollar Sign on the Muscle. And we are putting it out in pretty much every format you can imagine. There's the PDF and the MOBI files and the EPUB files. You can also get it in paperback.

I'll give you the details at the end. You can also get it in paperback. I'll give you the details at the end. Kevin, as we record this on Wednesday, I'm looking at the listings for Dollar Sign and the Muscle on Amazon. And if you want to buy a new copy of Dollar Sign right now, you can get one for $299. You can also get one for $410. And you can get one for $1,233. And I'm thinking that these people should probably lower the price because their market is about to disappear.

I think so, too. which would have been about 10 years ago, the publisher, which was the University of Nebraska Press, shredded boxes of them without telling me I would have been happy to buy them. And over the years, people have been in touch with me hoping to get a copy, and I gave a lot away. But I didn't know what to tell them. I mean, these things were selling for three figures, not that I was seeing any of that money. And I felt bad about that. I remember about 10 years ago, J.J. Piccolo at Kansas City, director of scouting, wanted to do a workshop and use the book.

And they wanted to get 50 or 75 copies of it. And I said, look, I will let you photocopy anything you want, but if I ever need a ticket to a KC game, you've got to come through for me. Well, I still haven't. Those photocopies are going for $75 now. Yeah. Well, in any case, I didn't actually hit them up for tickets to Kansas City Royals games, but I did get wonderful cooperation from the KC scouts in the course of going back this summer

to kind of re-explore the world of scouting. So they did their bit, too. I was going to ask you what the craziest story you've heard, what the highest amount anyone has ever paid to get this book or track down a copy, story you've heard, what the highest amount anyone has ever paid to get this book or track down a copy, because it's such a popular book, not only among fans who want to learn more about scouting, but people in the industry are just crazy about it. A lot of people got into scouting by reading this book or were introduced to scouting once they got into the industry. Someone gave them this book. Did that start more or less right away

as soon as it appeared? Did you start hearing from a lot of people in the game? I would say so. I've always had very good responses from the scouts themselves. And I remember we read recently that Kevin Towers lent his copy to somebody who didn't get it back and was really PO'd about it, and wound up spending $100 and some dollars to get it off of a used book site. But anyway, that's very rewarding to me. I've never made that much money off the book, but I've been very pleased to see that the people the book is about liked it and thought that it was generally accurate, and that when I went out to do a new update of it, I had a lot of help because people knew the book from its original form.

And the book was kind of a long time in the making, right? Can you talk a little bit about how you produced it? Because you got really access that I imagine would be very difficult, impossible to get today. That's true. I live in Newark, Delaware, close to Philadelphia. And in this town, when I was playing semi-pro ball and just hanging out with baseball people, I ran into two scouts, one full-time scout for the Phillies, another part-time scout for the Pirates, who were two of the most interesting men I knew. And they were looking at baseball from a

different perspective than mine. Instead of caring about the outcome of games, they were sizing up talent when it was still pretty green. And I realized nobody had really, other than, I think, an essay by Roger Angel and some of Pat Jordan's writing, nobody had delved very deeply into this. Well, our university here, the University of Delaware, has benefited so much from the generosity of the Carpenter family. And at that time, the Carpenters owned the Phillies. time, the Carpenters owned the Phillies. And the fact that somebody from this university wanted to kind of explore scouting and through the lens of the Phillies organization, they thought that was a great thing. They were very proud of the number of prospects that they had groomed and produced. And I may be wrong, but I think in 1981, when I started my research for the book, there were something like 44 major league players

who had come up through the Phillies system, and they had been traded or let go or whatever. But nevertheless, that was more than any other ball club. So they wanted publicity about that. And even though the team was about to be sold by the Carpenters, maybe because it was about to be sold, they said, we don't care. You can come and sit in on our draft meetings. You can go through our files. And I used to go up to their offices, which are less than an hour's drive from my house, and just comb through for hours old reports on some of these guys when pete rose was in high school that kind of thing and uh with you know just making lists of what might be interesting to follow and then i was really i started looking at who's writing these reports guys like tony

lucadello and eddie bachman who have basically kept this franchise afloat in its lean years they were writing the brilliant reports. I mean, they would make you see the player, you know. And so I basically got as interested in the people who were doing the scouting as I was in the major league talent they were finding. Anyway, the Phillies under the Carpenters could not have been more helpful to me. under the Carpenters could not have been more helpful to me. And recently I ran into Rooley Carpenter, 32 years after the team was sold,

and I had a great time just kind of catching up with him. I imagine at the time there hadn't really been a lot of interest in scouting, and there certainly hadn't been a book about scouting on this level. They probably didn't really have any idea what the final product was going to look like, that it was going to necessarily be as in-depth as it turned out, and certainly that it wouldn't have had the impact that it had after it was published. What was their response to seeing it all in print? They liked it pretty much.

I mean, one of the guys said, Hugh Alexander, when he read the chapter, he says, you've got me cussing a lot. And I said, oh, you should read the Hallie 8 chapter. You know, they got past that pretty quick because they're not used to having sports writers be able to transcribe. But if anything, I kind of toned down much of what they were saying. But I remember one guy who really liked the book right off the bat was Paul Owens, who was the general manager of the Phillies at that time. And he said, young man, well, I was about, I wasn't that young. But anyway, he said, you can come, you can work for me anytime. And I said, well, can I be master of the ball girls? And he said, no, you can't. That job's taken. master of the ball girls and he said no you can't that job's taken but anyway he he himself had been a scout back in the days almost the wild west days of scouting before the draft and he thought that

the stories about that era were particularly uh funny and interesting to him. And what about the players? This was also an era before prospects were big names and before there were publications focusing on them. And a lot of these players, I imagine, got more attention than they would have otherwise gotten. Was there any... I don't know, did you get the sense that it was weird for any of them to be being paid attention to at such a young age? Oh, not so much.

I mean, there were some, I remember Biff Roberts, who was always one of my favorite players, a little guy who wasn't supposed to make it and so on. He loved the portrayal of himself, and it's only, I mean, there are probably two paragraphs on Biff in the whole book. But he thought that was great, that in other words, he was being looked at through the lens of somebody whose job it was, you know, ruthlessly to size up talent. And that Eddie Bachman, the Philly scout on the West Coast, must have written a dozen different reports.

Don't write this kid off because of his size. Take him seriously. He can play and so on. And yet, of course, the organization didn't have much regard for him because of his size. The Pirates did. And somebody described Biff Roberts as a typical Pittsburgh draft, fast, black, a high school kid. And he was all that and more. He was a great, I think, a great utility guy. So there are parts of the book where, you know, it's more or less a traditional narrative. You're telling a story or you're telling the history of scouting.

There are other parts that are more like an oral history where you just sort of step aside and let the scouts talk and write down what they say, and those parts are really just as good. What is it about scouting stories? Why are they so good? Why is the language so interesting, do you think? Well, the language is something I was paying particular attention to, partly just because it was helping me look at the game in a different way. But I found that these guys were wonderfully self-expressive.

I mean, I had imagined before I got into this that scouts would be crusty and suspicious and not want to talk to you. And instead, I think they felt unappreciated and some of them very lonely. They're on the road a lot. And you could often ask them something like, well, what's the biggest mistake you ever made? And they go, oh, man, let me tell you. You know, it's like talking to a fisherman about the ones that got away. Or a racetrack tout, you know, who didn't put his money on the horse that he had an instinct about.

So I found them really easy to talk to. Sometimes they didn't want to tell you, of course, about current prospects that was, you know, this would be an industrial secret, if you will. So, but, you know, once the draft is over, they tell you about all sorts of stuff that was pre-draft information. And if you went back a year, it was the open season, you know. So when they talk to each other, they like to tell stories. And one of the scouts that I was spending time with said,

man, you should come to Johnstown in August for this AAABA tournament, partly because there'll be 50, 60 scouts there. And you can just hang out with them. Well, I did, and it was gold mine. So, you know, they entertain each other with stories, not just writers like me. So I'm such a huge fan of this book that I would want to speak to you, even if you hadn't updated it. But now I'm particularly interested in the process of updating it.

For one thing, I wondered why you did want to update it. You told us that you thought of this book as a time capsule and that a lot has changed since then. A lot of books, even as they kind of lose their relevance, they stand unchanged for hundreds of years, and they are a time capsule and they don't change. Why did you feel like it was important to update it, to take another look at the industry and to sort of modernize parts of it? Well, I realized that there had been some big changes.

For example, pro-scouting is a whole enterprise in itself. That really, that was not the case 30 years ago when I was doing this book. And so many organizations now, like Kevin Goldstein, the next BP guy, is the head of pro scouting for the Houston Astros. And Gene Watson in Kansas City. These guys have armies of scouts who are only looking at pro talent in other team systems or in their own minor league system. And that really struck me as interesting. It's one area where statistics and statistical analysis seem to matter the higher you climb up the ladder.

And really intelligent decisions can be made about acquiring talent at the pro level, especially in the wake of Moneyball. I was really interested to see what Moneyball had changed. And some things haven't changed. Jason Parks has made this point very well, that the traditional scouts did not need to be brought in for kind of re-education when Moneyball came out. What needed to happen was that people in front offices needed to blend traditional scouting with statistical and analytical thinking.

And in many cases, that's exactly what's happened. So, but on the other hand, I see that scouts now often will talk in a way they didn't used to about, let's say, the contact percentage of a hitter or the strikeout walk ratio for both hitters and pitchers. And I came to feel, I mean, this is something I didn't put in the update, but I kind of wish I had. When you look back at the original book, the one player of the class of 1981, of the people in that draft, who stands out as a Hall of Famer is Tony Gwynn. He was a third-round draft pick, and the scouts, pretty much, at least the ones I was with, were putting him in pretty much as a third-round draft pick.

And the reason is that they didn't see him as having great tools as a runner or a thrower or a power hitter. Today, I like to believe that somebody would say, look, this guy hardly ever misses. When he swings, he hits the ball. His contact percentage is like 94%. And that this third round draft pick, somebody might see that contact for him is as much of a tool as any of the things we normally call tools, like running speed. I mean, just the ability to put the bat on the ball the way Joey Votto does today. That's extraordinary, and it's got to be innate in some way. And I like to believe that today somebody like Tony Gwynn,

who was, by the way, a great athlete, he got drafted by the NBA. But I think he might be at least a second round, if not a first-round draft pick. But anyway, I think that there be at least a second round, if not a first round draft pick. But anyway, I think that there are people in the offices who are looking over the way that in St. Louis, when Sig, who's now Sig Bedroll, who's now in Houston, you know, was looking at college statistics for Alan Craig and then conferring with the area scout. And they wound up taking a chance, not really that much of one, on this eighth-round draft pick.

For $15,000, they acquired one of the best middle-of-the-order hitters in the game. So I think there's a lot more of an intelligent blending of field scouting, traditional field scouting, and quantitative analysis. Do you think there's a difference in the players themselves compared to 30 years ago? One thing that I think that most of us thought that we had noticed is that pitchers throw a lot harder these days. And you write that a large part of that effect is actually just a change in the radar guns that people use,

that the numbers that flash are higher, more than the pitchers are actually throwing harder. Are there differences, though, in a player who's coming up now compared to 35 years ago? To tell you the truth, I don't really see pitchers throwing harder. I think that when I was traveling with scouts in the early 80s, the radar guns were the, God, I can't even think of the name, the Ray Gun, R-A-Gun. And the typical Major League Fastball was said to be 86 miles an hour. And at the time, scouts would say, if you use the Juggs Gun, and I think the Stalker is a version of that, and I think the stalker is a version of that, it'll give you a higher reading because it's catching the ball,

measuring the speed as the ball comes out of the pitcher's hand rather than when it crosses the plate. I suppose it's possible that young pitchers are aiming more for velocity now. Scouts certainly talk about velocity as a key, but it doesn't seem to me they're throwing harder. The big change I notice in players is that the pool of American talent, at least a lot of scouts say, is getting thinner. And there's no wonder that Latin talent is getting a little greater, the percentage of Latin players and foreign players, a little greater each year. And it just feels to me, this is the one disappointment, I would say, of my summer trying to update the book. It feels as if baseball just doesn't mean as much to young

kids coming up today. And the demographics are such that, you know, a lot of the best athletes in America are not playing baseball. You know, a lot of the best athletes in America are not playing baseball. Do you think that the makeup of the scouts has changed at all? Did you find that scouts today are in any way different from the ones that you knew when you were talking, you know, back in the 80s? If you or if someone set out to write a book like this today, would the stories be just as colorful? Would the language sound the same? I think there'd be colorful stories, but they wouldn't be about the era before the draft, of course, when it was just incredible. It's like espionage. There might be some great stories in Latin America, which I just haven't had access to, where it's more like an open market.

But I find the guys interesting. And I'll tell you, I know that, Ben, you were at scouting school, and you're picking up a lot of really sharp capacities for recognizing talent, almost like somebody would learn how to spot enemy aircraft, you know, with just a quick look. What I notice about the young scouts that still inspires me is that they have so much energy to go out and find talent. It's not just recognizing when you see it. And I put a story in the update that I just like a lot. I was at one of the showcase events in Syracuse where all of the top-ranked high school juniors,

seniors-to-be, are invited, maybe 150 of them, being watched by 300 scouts. And I said to one of the scouts there, do you think it's still possible to find the kind of unknown player today? And he said, man, it's not very likely. And then he brightened it. He said, but there are exceptions. And he told me about finding this pitcher who was, the games that he was supposed to pitch kept getting rained out.

This scout found out that this pitcher named Christian Binford, who was going to private school in Pennsylvania, was going to be pitching on a Sunday morning in New Jersey. So he drove over to the game, and he looked at this 6'6", 220-pound right-hander with a 93-mile-an-hour fastball and a great curve, and he's saying, are you kidding me? He's looking around to see if there are any other scouts there or trees or behind bushes or whatever. And I said, when I was talking to him, I said, you know, I bet that some of those scouts were in church that Sunday morning praying that miraculously some prospect would find them.

So here's a guy who got out of bed and went and found the talent. And I think that still happens. I mean, the ability to take the initiative and to go beyond what your assignment is, I think that's what makes scouting great. Yeah, I wondered about that because a big part of the book is about how drafting changed, how the draft changed scouting and took away a little bit of the opportunity for individuals to really stand out as scouts. And, of course, now the draft is completely institutionalized, and they've done some of that with the international market, too, limiting what teams can do to stand out.

And so I did wonder whether there are still great scouts. I mean, I think we all appreciate what scouting does as an industry and how much it contributes to the level of talent in the game. But, you know, I always wonder, like, is there a scout out there who individually is adding a ton of value to his team and sort of maybe is worth millions on his own. Well, I don't know how you would compute the value of scouts like that, but yes, there are scouts like that.

The one that I wound up this update with was Mike Toomey of the Royals. He's known throughout the world of baseball as Toomes, T-O-O-M-S, and he is convinced that there is terrific talent in the country of Columbia. Even though that's better known as a soccer nation than baseball, a few players, Red Terria and Orlando Cabrera, have come out of Columbia. The pitcher, Julio Terron, with the Braves. But any general, he says, you know, people are telling me, eh, there's not talent there. He says, but there is talent there, and I'm going to find it. And he has that attitude, and I think he will. He's already signed a couple of players who are

in the minors now. Who knows whether they'll make it or not. But I think his attitude is always just to go one step beyond what everybody else is doing. And I put in two scouting reports in the book that he wrote that just are wonderful. He was doing pro scouting for the Royals, and in one case saw this little left-hander, Tim Collins, 5'7", pitching in double-A ball, I think of the Blue Jays system, and saw right away. I thought, you know, I'm looking at maybe what could be a Bobby Shantz-type pitcher. This guy got it. Well, he's only 5'7".

Mike Toomey himself is 5'7". You know what I mean? He's the kind of guy who is not going to write off somebody because of his size. And Tim Collins leapt to the major leagues very quickly and is a great back-of-the-bullpen guy. He's not a closer, but he's a valuable piece of the puzzle. And so anyway, here was a scout who saw something that other scouts weren't seeing and had to sell his ball club on the player.

They were saying, Tim, who? 5'7"? Are you crazy? Well, and he showed them some video footage and described in specific detail what this kid could do. So anyway, I don't know how you put a price tag on what Toomey brings to a ball club, but he's doing more pro scouting than amateur scouting. And I think he's really looking, as Billy Bean would say, for value.

What is the difference between what this guy's trade value is and what I consider his real value to be as a member of our ball club? And I think that takes a special kind of knack. And so of all of the scouts I ran into this summer, I think Mike Toomey of the Royals was the most inspiring, really. Did you get a sense as you were doing the update about how front offices are applying analytics to the scouting reports, either evaluating scouts' performance

or maybe normalizing the the grades somehow to get them on on a similar scale i didn't get a sense of that in detail because teams don't like to talk about it right proprietary so i had a great conversation with sig medial down in in houston but whenever we get to anything very specific, even about what he had done in St. Louis, he'd get really squirrely. So I'd say, now, when you looked at Alan Craig's college numbers, were you looking at his contact percentage, his ability to hit to all fields? So he'd go, well, something like that. You know, then he'd say, and then I talked to the scout, Dane Clark, I think was the guy's name, Dane something. And, you know, they were confirming each other's opinions. This guy's got really quick hands, for example. guy, uh, Wollner, is he in Cleveland? Keith Wollner. Yeah. And yeah. Um, so anyway, I think the teams certainly are open to that. There are very few teams, uh, who don't have quantitative

analytical people in the office. Uh, I just think that as Jason Park points out to make really efficient use of that information, you don't need to retrain your traditional scouts. You just need to intelligently blend what they're providing. So if people don't know your background, you're not a baseball writer filing three times a week for ESPN or anything. You're a professor, an academic, the editor of various anthologies of drama. And so I wonder about your perspective on the sort of observed fact that a disproportionate amount of great sports writing happens in baseball. Do you think there's a reason why baseball gets so much good literature out of it? I don't know.

You're right, it is. It's been a wonderful – that, and I'd say baseball and boxing have been the two great sports for writers. Somebody in Sports Illustrated about 30, 40 years ago had what was called the small ball theory. It said the smaller the ball, the better the writing. Golf has always been great for writers and so on. And at the time, they couldn't think of any really great basketball writing, although I'm sure there's been some by now. Who was the guy who wrote the book?

Yeah, the Bill Bradley book. The last shot. Oh, I don't know that one. I don't know that one, but John McPhee's book about Bill Bradley is one of the great sports books ever. But that's an outlier. Yeah.

But I think McPhee's great anyway. Well, my own background is not just drama. I mean, I teach and have done a lot with journalism, and I think the kind of journalistic interest that I have helped me a lot in doing interviewing and just getting to get people to cooperate with me. But beyond that, I don't know. I feel in my department here at the university that I'm kind of a utility guy. I kind of see, like, what do we need?

You know what I mean? My interests are pretty broad, and if somebody dies or retires, there's kind of a gap in what, there's nobody to teach this or something. I mean, well, maybe I could do that. So I like the variety that the job allows me to have. Okay, well, again, the book is called Dollar Sign on the Muscle.

The author, Kevin Corain. We're not just being company men and shilling for baseballball Perspectives here. We really, really love and admire the book and think that you should all get to enjoy it. So you're welcome to go buy it for $1,200 on Amazon if you're so inclined. Otherwise, you can get it for something closer to $12 at Baseball Prospectus and all the various ebook formats and PDFs and paperback and should be available for purchase on amazon.com as of today, November 7th.

But go to the Facebook group, go to Baseball Prospectus, you'll see links. We'll put the information there for you to find this book. And I'm sure that you'll enjoy it as much as we do. It's not only the older material, but the updates, the foreword from Kevin Goldstein. It is all worth reading. Thank you, Kevin, for updating this and for coming on. Well, thank you. And the fact that Baseball Perspectives does it is very flattering

to me, and it's given me an opportunity to read your writing, Ben, and Jason Parks, a number of other people that are basically scouts as journalists. So thank you for the insights you provide on a regular basis. Well, thank you. That's very flattering. And I should also give some credit to Dave Pease, our VP at Baseball Perspectives, who kind of put this whole thing together and did a great job with the layout. So thank you to Dave as well. That's it for us today. We will be back tomorrow with one more show this week.

You should send us emails because tomorrow is the listener email show at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.