Baseball’s Endangered Species: Inside the Craft of Scouting by Those Who Lived It by Lee Lowenfish (review)

Reviewed by: Baseball's Endangered Species: Inside the Craft of Scouting by Those Who Lived It by Lee Lowenfish Mitchell Nathanson Lee Lowenfish. Baseball's Endangered Species: Inside the Craft of Scouting by Those Who Lived It. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023. 344 pp. Cloth, $34.95. If you've ever had the hankering to spend some time chewing the cud with the old-timers who traveled the highways and byways of America and beyond to find the ballplayers you've watched on television since you were a kid, here's the book for you. Lee Lowenfish, the author of Branch Rickey: Baseball's Ferocious Gentleman, revisits Rickey's farm system through the eyes of Charlie Barrett, who Lowenfish describes as "Rickey's first and most beloved scout," (5) as well as spins the tales of eight other scouts who span the history of the game from 1919 through the late twentieth century. It's a journey down memory lane that will almost make you want to go out and beat the bushes yourself. It's not, however, an insider's guide to the craft of scouting, as the subtitle suggests. This is not a "how to" book by a longshot. Nor is it a detailed analysis of the merits of this scout over that one or this method as opposed to that method. Here again this marks an occasion where the subtitle gets the better of the book itself, diverting potential readers from the thrust of text that [End Page 122] is contained between the covers. I'm not sure why it is that the subtitles of so many books commit this unforced error, but here it is one more time, which is too bad because the book itself is a thoroughly engaging romp through the small-town, backwater origins of so many of the ballplayers most fans know only as established Major Leaguers. It's just not the book readers might think it is when they first scan the cover. Herein are tales of a handful of scouts as gathered by Lowenfish. Or, to be more precise, herein are tales that begin with perhaps a story centered around the scout whose name heads the chapter but then meanders here and there into stories of how this team or that team was built, some of which might arguably be attributable to the efforts of the titular scout himself. Lowenfish's narrative tends to bleed here and there, off to one aside and then another, but in a book like this the method works. After all, a book that attempted to draw a straight line between the work of any given scout and the success of his big league employer years down the road would be not only impossible but impossibly flawed; there are simply too many variables that affect the development of a given player between the day the scout signs him and the day he steps onto a big league diamond. What's more, it's simply more enjoyable to follow the ebb and flow of a narrative that goes wherever the story takes it, regardless of whether the scout himself gets lost in the shuffle on occasion. Most fans have never heard of any of the scouts around whom Lowenfish chooses to anchor his chapters, but they probably have heard of big leaguers who crossed their paths even if indirectly so Lowenfish's decision to widen rather than narrow his lens will probably be a comfort to most readers and, let's face it, more fun. Although the book doesn't present a scientific argument for the methods of "eyes and ears" scouting (as Lowenfish terms it) over the recent craze of more data-driven methods of prospect analysis, it does make a more general case through the course of the book's nine scout-centered chapters for the merits of the traditional approach. It's hard to tell, though, how and why one method might be preferable over the other. In the end, through either approach, players get drafted and a few reach the majors; fewer still succeed at that level. The analytic approach might have its drawbacks and blind spots, but, to this reader...

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