Dollar Sign on the Muscle

The World of Baseball Scouting

This is a wonderful book, but I don't know if I can quite explain why. As a study of baseball scouts, it's a great work, but the book really shines when Kerrane allows the old baseball scouts to speak for themselves. There are long passages of oral history included here that rival anything in Lawrence Ritter's classic "The Glory of Their Times."

Kerrane spent the entire 1981 season with baseballs scouts. Admittedly, the book does seem a bit dated now, and I have a feeling that it may have seemed a bit dated even then, as it was in many ways a book about a bygone time. Scouting changed dramatically after the institution of the amateur draft in 1965. In the old days, scouts would spot a prospect and then be able to sign him on the spot. After the draft started, the personal connections made between the scouts and the players mattered much less when the team had a 1 in 30 chance of drafting the player.

In 1981, starting salaries were still somewhat reasonable, but now a player's signability matters almost as much as his talent when being drafted. Even the term "dollar sign on the muscle" has become obsolete. This referred to the dollar amount a scout placed on a player, "the highest figure you would go in order to sign a player if he were on the open market."

It was usually a number below $100,000, but when, for example, a number one draft pick like Stephen Strasburg is expected to get a $20 million bonus from the Washington Nationals after being drafted tomorrow, these numbers begin to mean nothing.

Perhaps the most enjoyable chapter is the one on the language of the game where I was able to learn several important items such as the distinction between horseshit and bullshit.

Horseshit: A universal term of disparagement in baseball -- Any baseball talent, body, body part, effort, action, player, team, city, or scouting assignment can be horseshit. The term covers everything but the world of words -- the world of stories, explanation, and scouting reports -- at which point bullshit takes over.

A real sentence spoken by a scout discussing a former colleague: "His written report was all bullshit, and that's when I knew he was a horseshit guy."

Bullshit can be a verb; horseshit can't. ... Novices sometimes elide the word into horshit, but the veterans get the first s down deep in the throat, with the tongue at the back of the palate, lots of air whistling past the lower teeth, and then they follow through for full emphasis. Horsse-shit!

Now, that's scouting. So to summarize: Kevin Kerrane, definitely not horseshit; this post, possible bullshit. That is all.