The Mariners Are a Nursing Home for Crotchety Old Scouts

The seeming intent of this USA Today piece about old baseball scouts is to generate sympathy for longtime scouts, who work for peanuts and often go broke when they can't scout any more.

But the actual result is to make me feel that even at $8,000/year, some of these guys are overpaid.

You want to be sympathetic to men who've spent their lives in baseball, but not when they say ridiculous things like this:

"I'll tell you in plain English, if there were no (bleeping) scouts, there would be no baseball." -- Phil Rizzo, 78, scout for the M's.

"People talk about how great A-Rod is. I saw him strike out four times in a game this year. I never saw Joe DiMaggio strike out four times in a month." -- Dave Garcia, former MLB manager.

"I trust my eyes, not some computer." -- Al LaMacchia, scout for the Dodgers

Charming, fellas.

Mr. Rizzo, the idea that there would be no baseball without (bleeping) scouts is a little strange, since there was baseball before (bleeping) scouts.

Mr. Garcia, your hero Joe Dimaggio, while he didn't strike out much, definitely struck out four times in a month, in fact that's about what he averaged.

Mr. LaMacchia, I'm sorry you dislike computers. But my own grandfather is about your age, and he used computers for business as early the late 1970s, and was one of the first people I knew with a home computer. If you'd been as forward-thinking, maybe you'd have gotten a front office job, and be relaxing with a nice pension, instead of schlepping to minor league games in Texas.

Our very own Seattle Mariners seem to be the primary source of employment for scouts in their eighties, due to Bill Bavasi. "No one has done more for the older scouts than he has," one baseball insider says.

I'm wondering more about what the older scouts have done for him--are these the same scouts who thought Jeff Weaver, Horacio Ramirez, Brad Wilkerson or Jose Vidro were worth investing millions in?

Mariner scout Bob Harrison, still with the team at 87, signed Ken Griffey, Jr. And that's a fine thing--the way I hear it, there was a certain amount of drama behind that signing, and Harrison navigated it well. But, in the age of the draft, is it really that much of an accomplishment to sign a player that's been drafted? I mean, it's one thing to discover a guy on some playground and get him on your team, but Griffey was hardly an unknown quantity.

Meanwhile, here is Dave Garcia's all-time team:
C: Bill Dickey
1B: Lou Gehrig
2B: Charlie Gehringer
SS: Joe Cronin
3B: Pie Traynor
LF: Ted Williams
CF: Joe DiMaggio
RF: Mel Ott
RHP: Bob Feller
LHP: Carl Hubbell

Really? There's not a single player born after 1918 who belongs on your list? Perhaps, just perhaps, there's a built-in bias with some of these guys...and that doesn't seem like it would make for particularly good scouting.