Baseball scouts have been the backbone of America's pastime for over a century – have they got a future?

Former MLB manager Pat Gillick won three World Series titles and served as general manager of 4 baseball teams from the Seventies to 2000s.

But after we interviewed him for our documentary “Fielding Dreams: A Celebration of Baseball Scouts“He deflected the praise.

“Without the people in scouting, I wouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame,” he said. “Those are the people who deserve all the credit, not me.”

Although they seek for talent everywhere in the world, often working on annual contracts and being away from their families for weeks at a time, there are not any scouts on the earth National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Their recent streak of bad luck has also gone largely unnoticed. The occupation has been under attack on multiple fronts, be it competition and layoffs from analyst advocates or the crisis Dimensions redundancies in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A draft requires a military of reviewers

In the primary half of the twentieth century, scouting was a given.

Team owners willing to spend the cash could send scouts to exit and sign whomever they wanted, with contracts often handwritten and players signing on the spot. When Iowa teenage phenom Bob Feller was signed by the Cleveland Indians scout Cy Slapnicka In 1935, Slapnicka simply took out a pen, wrote a contract and had Feller and his father sign it, since Feller was a minor.

The contract terms? A dollar and a signed ball.

Major League Baseball The first draft took place in 1965partially to assist level the playing field between wealthier teams just like the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals and everybody else.

With the appearance of the draft, scouts became much more vital: every team now had a scout an enormous pool of players to interview, evaluate and evaluate.

The draft includes only US amateur players. International players aren’t subject to the draft, so some teams have established training facilities in countries akin to the Dominican Republic and others Mexicowhere their international scouts find and sign promising young players.

Do you’ve gotten the strength to crunch the numbers?

But because the turn of the century, some journalists and executives have questioned the worth of Boy Scouts.

In 2003, creator Michael Lewis published “Money ball“, in which he documented the success of the 2002 Oakland Athletics and the team Embrace the sabermetricsthe statistical evaluation of baseball data.

The Athletics were consistently successful and had one among the bottom payrolls in baseball, and other team owners took notice.

Could data analytics exploit inefficiencies and deliver higher results than scouts? Could teams get monetary savings by reducing the variety of old-school pros and all of the human bias they brought with them when evaluating talent?

The acceptance of sabermetrics modified who was drafted. As raw data became more vital, college players—with longer statistical track records—became more attractive than highschool athletes.

The transition to data-driven decision making has had some unintended consequences.

For highschool players to realize recognition in today's environment, They contact travel teamsan expensive option that enables a player to take part in more games and gain more experience, more footage of their game, and more exposure.

Players from lower-income families often cannot afford to participate – and this includes young black athletes. who’re disproportionately more more likely to grow up in poverty. A recent study found that Black athletes made up just 6.2% of MLB players on Opening Day rosters in 2023, in comparison with 18% in 1991.

As a retired black utility player Lou Collier told us: “A child like me would never have had a chance today. …If I couldn't afford any of these events, you would never have heard of Lou Collier. But when I came up, the scouts found the Lou Colliers.”

“Moneyball” or makeup?

Scouts may even let you know that analytics is nothing recent.

“We evaluated the player,” said the previous Atlanta Braves scouting director Roy Clark. “And when our scouts said, 'We think this guy can play in the large leagues,' the subsequent thing we did was gather all the data we could – evaluation. But then we focused on makeup.”

It's an understanding of this idea — “makeup,” or a player's character, drive and grit — that scouts say differentiates their work from data-driven evaluations.

“It comes down to guys who have a really good head on their shoulders,” Toronto Blue Jays scout Matt O’Brien said.

And scouts will let you know that makeup exists each on the sector and off the sector.

“You have to talk to your school counselor, you have to talk to your coach, you have to talk to your teammates, you have to try to talk to other students,” Gillick explains. “Is he a good baseball player and is he a good person?”

This personalized approach, specializing in a player's heart and mind, has continued to make scouting relevant. Even with the appearance of analytics, the variety of MLB scouts remained remarkably consistent into the twenty first century. It gave the look of the fear “Moneyball” evoked was unfounded.

That modified in 2020.

The Cost of COVID-19

COVID-19 not only shortened the 2020 baseball season from 162 to 60 games, nevertheless it also shrank baseball's scouting ranks.

USA Today reported on it About 20% of Scouts were laid off in 2020. Many of them weren’t rehired.

“It was just an uncomfortable feeling,” recalled Christie Wood of the MLB Scouting Bureau. one among the few female Girl Scouts in the sport.

By 2021, in keeping with Baseball America magazine Seven teams had reduced their scouting staff by double digits.

The Tampa Bay Rays and Milwaukee Brewers each cut 10 scouts. The Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants had 13 fewer on their payrolls. The Chicago Cubs lost 20, while the Los Angeles Angels and Seattle Mariners each reduced their scouting ranks by 23.

At the beginning of the 2019 season, teams employed 1,909 scouts across their amateur, skilled and international divisions. By 2021, that number had fallen to 1,756. And a lot of the laid off scouts were older, more experienced scouts who earned higher salaries.

As of June 2023, 17 former Scouts sued MLB for age discrimination. They alleged that the league and its teams acted intentionally to forestall the employment of older scouts after the pandemic.

A giant win for the Scouts

The current situation in scouting is mixed.

Some teams appear to prioritize evaluation. But other organizations – the Pittsburgh Pirates, Toronto Blue Jays, Houston Astros, Minnesota Twins and Texas Rangers – have actually added scouts to their payrolls since 2019.

The Rangers organization has opened its doors to our documentary film team for the past 4 years and allowed us access to our inner sanctum. We were in a position to see firsthand the organization's emphasis on scouting and witnessed the relationships the team's scouts built with prospects and their families.

When the Rangers won the World Series in 2023, baseball scouts across the league rejoiced: the team's success confirmed that an emphasis on personal touches and folks could still repay.

“I’m just proud of all the scouts that are here and have worked so hard,” Texas Rangers scout Demond Smith told us during a playoff game. “At the top of the day, it’s baseball. From the start it's Little League, and then you definitely dream. And here we’re.”