Lowenfish, Lee. Baseball’s Endangered Species: The Craft of Scouting by Those Who Lived It. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023. Pp. 344. $34.95 Hardcover and ebook.
Reviewed by Łukasz Muniowski
Rarely has a man been more suited to produce a book on the history of a given issue than is Lee Lowenfish fit to write the history of baseball scouting, a dying art during the data-driven era of professional sports. A member of Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and the New York Pro Scouts Association since the late 1970s, Lowenfish witnessed how the men he grew up idolizing became replaced by a new generation of talent evaluators, who relied on statistics rather than guts when making their roster decisions. Instead of long hours on the road, they spend long hours evaluating numbers and trying to determine how they will translate to a player’s performance in the pros.
Doing research for his vast project was complicated by one of the golden rules of the baseball community: baseball scouts oftentimes dodged any sort of credit, as it was the organization that was of utmost importance, not the individual who discovered a particular player. How that mindset often is misunderstood from the outside is best visible in the reaction to Chicago Bulls’ general manager, Jerry Krause, who suggested during a 1997 interview that it was organizations who won championships, not teams. The backlash that he was met with, after supposedly disrespecting future Hall of Famers Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and coach Phil Jackson, was the result of ignorance, as the reactionists were overlooking Krause’s background in baseball scouting and his philosophy of giving credit to the whole of the franchise, not just one or two individuals.
Baseball’s Endangered Species covers over a century of long days on the road, dirty motels, fast food joints, piles of phone bills and buckets of coffee, all of which were an integral part of the life of a baseball scout, always on the lookout for the next big thing in the sport. Sometimes these discoveries were completely based on instinct, as scouts needed to carefully assess every detail of a given player’s body language, build and demeanor because the sample size was so little. If the scout was lucky or respected (or both), he got to talk to the player, making the most of the trip, which for those less fortunate was a complete waste of time. That sort of devotion is worthy of admiration. Yet, due to the refusal to take credit, a Hall of Fame for scouts is a constant work in progress, completion of which moves further away as time goes by.
The book is divided into three parts and focuses on ten names: Charley Barrett, Branch Rickey, Paul Krichell, Red Murff, Art Stewart, Gary Nickels, Paul Snyder, Gene Bennett, Billy Blitzer and Bill Eno. Out of the 10 men, I only knew about one, which is proof of my limited knowledge of baseball. Lack of familiarity of America’s “national pastime,” however, did not prevent me from enjoying Lowenfish’s book, as each page is filled with so much information that, at times, it is overwhelming. This impacts the flow of the narrative, as Lowenfish’s extensive knowledge of baseball prevents him from sacrificing the information he has for the sake of narrative. But I am not the target audience, baseball aficionados are. And they should love the book, considering how deep into the history of baseball it digs.
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