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The book starts with a short history of scouting. The bird dogs were the scouts from the dawn of the professional era till around 1919. They generally would spot a decent player, point him in the direction of a minor league club, and receive a commission if the player worked out. Or they'd find a player on a minor league team, point him out to someone they knew in the majors, and, once again, receive a commission if the player was good enough to make it. These scouts didn't work for any team in particular, they often scouted for whoever would pay the best commission. One of the most famous of the bird dogs was "Sinister" Dick Kinsella. With the rise of Branch Rickey and his system of team-owned minor league teams, the era of the Ivory Hunter scouts came to fruition. The motto of the ivory hunter was quality out of quantity. They figured that the more players they signed, the more likely one of them was to turn out good. There were still fewer than two dozen fulltime scouts in the country during this era, but they generally worked for a specific team, many of them for Rickey's St. Louis Cardinals. By 1939, the Cardinals owned 32 minor league teams and about 650 players. The Bonus Era came about after the war. "The typical scout was no longer an ivory hunter searching for unknowns," Kerrane writes, "but one territorial salesman among many, competing in something of a buyer's market. Amateur players had higher expectations, and most owners had new money to meet them." Then with the advent of the draft came the modern era, in which scouting changed drastically. A scout was now no longer free to roam the country, hoping to find that unknown or to persuade that big prospect to sign with his club for a bonus. More time was spent checking out "sure things" and cross checking other scout's "sure things." Many of the scouts that Kerrane follows had been in the business for forty or fifty years and they had stories galore to tell Kerrane. They talk of how the draft has ruined baseball and how Branch Rickey and others used to deceive questionable prospects by signing them to contracts without dating them. If the player worked out, the contract was backdated and the player was kept on. If the prospect turned out to be no good, the contract was torn up because it wasn't legal without a date and the player was left high and dry, often in an unknown town 500 miles from their home. One of the more interesting characters in the book is longtime Pirates scout Howie Haak, the man responsible for stealing Roberto Clemente from the Dodgers. "...he sent Branch Rickey a scouting report on a Latin pitcher with good PHFB underlined; when the frugal Rickey phoned him in Cuba or Venezuela (or somewhere else it cost a lot to phone), Howie deciphered the code: 'pecker-high fastball,'" says Kerrane of Haak. The scouts all have their glory stories to tell about their big finds or their big misses. One scout tells of a 14-year old Harold Baines coming to a tryout camp he was holding. "I knew he was a star then," the scout says. The stories of the discoveries of players such as Roberto Clemente and Brooks Robinson and Bill Mazeroski, among many others, are told in Dollar Sign on the Muscle. In fact, Kerrane makes it clear that most scouts who have signed a big-name player such as Clemente or Robinson often spend the rest of their career looking for the "next Clemente" or the "next Mickey Mantle" and ignore other types of players. It's a trap that's hard to resist. One of the interesting things about reading this book almost twenty years after it was written is to see the names of 1981 prospects who have either made it big since then or completely missed. One scout, Leon Hamilton of the Indians, goes against the opinion of most of the other scouts in the book who are busy touting high school pitcher Vance Lovelace as "the next Bob Feller." "(Lovelace is) on the same American Legion team with another black pitcher name of Dwight Gooden, who's a year younger but for my money a better pitcher," Kerrane quotes Hamilton. "The difference is hard to put your finger on. When I watched Lovelace pitch, I didn't get that good feeling. That's all." Lovelace was drafted by the Cubs in 1981 in the first round, Gooden was not drafted at all that year. Hamilton proved to be right a year later when the Mets took Gooden with the fifth pick overall and two years later he was mowing down big leaguers while Lovelace never made any impression at all in the bigs. Some of the other names mentioned in Dollar Sign on the Muscle as prospects are Darryl Strawberry, Joe Carter, Vince Coleman, Ron Darling, Julio Franco (who was signed at the age of 14), Kevin McReynolds, and Bip Roberts, among others. Pro football players Boomer Esiason and John Elway are also mentioned. Of course, many more of the prospects in the book never made it to the big show. The Gooden story brings up one of the things that amazed me most about the scouting process while reading Dollar Sign on the Muscle--how much of it is based on gut feeling. The scouts say time and time again that scouting baseball prospects is nothing like scouting in football or basketball, where college recruiters have already done three-quarters of the work for you. "The Good Face" is a mystical quality that the scouts look for in baseball players and it's based on pure personal feeling. "Some players have the good face, others don't," one scout says. "The ones that don't usually don't make it." But none of the scouts are able to define the good face, they just know it exists. Kerrane spent the entire 1981 season in the world of the scouts. He takes you from early spring when the scouts are out at high school and college games; through the summer when they are busy preparing for the draft; on to late summer when many scouts work at the major league level as advance scouts; into the fall when tryout camps are held across the country; and back to spring again when the whole process starts anew. Kerrane is a fantastic writer. Along with Richard Grossinger, he edited Baseball, I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life, the 1977 classic anthology of baseball writings that were considered too eclectic to be included in the more traditional Fireside Books of Baseball, edited by Charles Einstein. It is his wonderful style of writing and his gift for interviews that allows you to completely sink into the world of scouting in Dollar Sign on the Muscle. I can't recommend this book enough. It is one of the "must reads" for any baseball fan. Dollar Sign on the Muscle may be available for purchase on the web at one of these sites. --JingleBob, April 17, 1999 © 1999 JC White |
