BaseballBookReview.com

While scouts have not been part of all of baseball’s long history, they have been part of it for well over 100 years. They travel the country and the world, looking for young players who show the promise of turning into a big leaguer. They rack up tens of thousands of miles, watch more games in a year than some people will watch in their lifetimes, and have to make informed decisions on the prospects of a young man often with only a few exposures to him on the field.

And while the idea of being a scout probably sounds idyllic to many fans, each of the 19 men profiled in Eye for Talent are quick to testify that the reality isn’t as great as the romance.

P.J. Dragseth, who produced Go Pro Baseball Wise in 1999, edits together interviews with 19 scouts who together have amassed centuries of professional experience both playing and scouting baseball at the amateur and professional levels.

When this title first crossed my radar, my interest was instantly peaked, thinking that Dragseth might have compiled a fresh look at baseball through the eyes of scouts, those individuals charged with finding the players that will amaze, entertain and inspire future generations with their talents and hopefully bring a World Series championship to our favorite team.

Having been around baseball for a few years myself, I was hoping that this book would be one I could recommend to fans looking to become smarter about how they watch baseball: what to look for, what traits young players exhibit that indicate potential for greatness down the road and so forth. I wanted gold, because scouts have so much information between their ears that having someone tackle the task of compiling it and writing it down excited me tremendously.

However, none of that emerged and after 234 pages, I was left incredibly disappointed.

What Dragseth does is give these scouts an open platform on which to ramble about their backgrounds, accomplishments and funny stories while not holding them accountible for sharing things with the reader that turns them into a better and smarter fan. There is no argument presented in the book by Dragseth, although there are a few things all these veteran scouts repeated throughout the book that they agreed on:

• They are horribly underappreciated and generally horribly underpaid.
• Things (meaning baseball business, free agency, statistics, computers and so on) aren’t like they used to be.
• The institution of the draft in 1965 forever changed the game of baseball and the way that they did their job.
• Almost every fan doesn’t know what a scout really does and thinks that scouting must be the greatest job in the world, when in fact it’s nothing close to that.
• A lot of folks currently working in baseball don’t know as much about baseball as they do.

Eye for Talent shares a commonality with the men profiled in the book: just like scouts often have to sort through hundreds of players to find one who will make the Major Leagues, you will have to sort through hundreds of words, stories and ramblings in order to find useful information. Even then, I can’t recall anything I read that I will take with me to the ballpark next time I go and feel smarter for knowing it.

If anything, Eye for Talent just adds a bunch of names, places and stories to baseball history, which may come in handy for some researcher down the line, but not for the average baseball fan.

I suspect many readers would go into this book looking for insights from scouts who have spend decades honing their craft, unfortunatley that expectation never manifests in any form.

While I have no doubt that Mr. Dragseth did a good amount of work putting this book together, to say that it was edited would be a generous term. Editing, at least as it was taught to me, involves cutting and cropping to put together a finely tuned finished product. If the term editing is truly appropriate for this work, something that only Mr. Dragseth and his publisher likely know, than I can’t imagine what these “interviews” must have come out looking like in their original form. Rather, what you are given is a stream-of-consciousness that could be interesting while sharing a beer at a ballgame or over dinner, it falls flat in the context of this book. As opposed to interviews, it seems Dragseth just started the recorder and let it run as opposed to asking questions and guiding his subjects to provide answers to topics. One scout profiled simply wrote a letter back to Dragseth, which he published seemingly whole in the book. To think that he had the opportunity to question these men and get them to open up is an enviable thought, as few people would ever get that level of access to these kinds of figures within baseball. There seems to be a gap far and wide between what I consider and hope to generate from an interview and what Mr. Dragseth does, as evidenced by his seemingly hands-off approach to the topic.

Like a scout who believes in a player only to see him stumble after signing him and never make anything out of himself in the game, I felt let down by what could have been a remarkable book based on the individuals whom Dragseth solicited for their thoughts. Yet because Eye for Talent is focused on individuals instead of themes and key points, the knowledge and insight never shines through.

Unfortunately, other than the above points that get rehashed by almost every one of the 19 scouts, there is neither an argument laid out nor any kind of compelling information that warrants a recommendation to read this title. With a $39.95 list price, it makes it a borrow recommendation if you absolutely have to read it, because there is no way I could justify that price for what I got out of it.

If you don’t mind sifting through a lot of stories to find the occasional nugget, or you like to sit around and listen to old men tell stories, you’ll likely enjoy Eye for Talent. If not, I suggest you wait for a title to come out that tackles this subject in a more compelling way, as Bruce Weber did in As They See ‘Em, his seminal work about the life of umpires and their role in America’s pastime. Hopefully the publishers of the world will be able to keep their eyes open for an individual to providen this much needed look at the world of scouting and deliver it in a more usable format.