I could really go for a midweek Birmingham Barons game right about now.
I mean, I'd take live baseball in any form right now, so it doesn't need to be that specific. But after reading "Future Value: The Battle for Baseball's Soul and How Teams Will Find the Next Superstar" by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel, I've found myself wanting to get to a half-full park and bounce between home plate and the open side, trying to apply some of what I've learned.
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Reading the book doesn't make me eligible for an area scout job -- a certificate insert would've been nice -- but over the course of 100 or so pages in the second half of the book, the prospect writers for Fangraphs and ESPN.com get into the nitty-gritty of evaluating pitchers and hitters, delving into a bunch of details my eye isn't drawn to. I'll watch a pitcher's delivery for a physical description to relay to readers, and I'll chart the velocities and effectiveness of pitches, but I can't say I've ever paid attention to the stability of the front leg. I wouldn't mind grabbing some open side video of a hitter in April and compare it to some video from August and see if I can spot any differences.
Longenhagen and McDaniel give plenty such details over the course of 13 chapters. The first half covers the administrative side of the game -- the draft, the international market, deploying a scouting department -- while the second half handles what scouts try to identify, and what the industry argues about. It sounds like it has the potential to get bogged down into the "scouts versus stats" subgenre that Moneyball inadvertently launched, but the authors generally lead by example around that rut, weaving sabermetric and technological concepts into their in-person intel and vice versa.
You may not find all the chapters necessary -- I'm not a high school player or the parent of one, and I'm not hustling for employment with a team -- so my ideal version of this book might have folded some of the concepts into earlier sections. That said, if they're trying to provide a guide to their world, you'd rather have them provide too much information than too little. I'd recommend reading the book sequentially, but it's not necessary, especially if you'd rather start at the end to see what they say about the White Sox.
PERTINENT!
Listen to Josh's interview with Eric Longenhagen on the most recent episode of the Sox Machine Podcast.
If there's one drawback to the book -- besides not having live baseball to apply my findings -- it's that McDaniel and Longenhagen are employed in the game and wouldn't like to burn contacts or bridges, so they're unwilling or unable to relay as many specifics as everybody would like. The stories are entertaining when scouting directors open up on their processes and spin yarns about their individual hits and misses. When it gets to more modern-day areas, the secrecy of front offices means a lot of sentences have to start with "We've heard..." or "We've seen" or "We've spoken to clubs that..." or "One [title] told us...".
That's understandable, since exposing them would be for little to no gain, but the namelessness makes it a little harder to impress stories into the reader's mind. The moments of the book that stick with me tend to have names attached. The anecdote about a team waiting until the 10th round to pick a guy they liked in the second is easy to remember because the Angels and Howie Kendrick are identified. The case studies and cautionary tales are harder to absorb when they're about unnamed fringe prospects who topped out in Triple-A, or a journeyman middle relief profile.
Maybe a workaround could be achieved with more colorful writing, but the two-author, collective first person approach makes a more offbeat voice harder to pull off with any consistency. Plus, the ultimate goal of this book is providing a comprehensive guide to player scouting and development, and if cleverness interferes with the most accurate delivery of facts, it's not worth the trade-off.
All this makes it a difficult book to excerpt because there are few mindbending moments (FanGraphs has an attempt). Rather, Future Value impresses over the course of its chapters, which I'd say is a more important kind of successful. It's a downright useful work. You might know a lot about a given facet of player scouting and development -- how July 2 works, how draft boards are assembled and shifted, what grades and tools mean -- but McDaniel and Longenhagen layer on the knowledge thick. I might open a chapter nodding and agreeing and thinking about skimming ahead, but it's better if you just trust the depth of the details to seep into areas you didn't realize you didn't know.
I can't quite speak for the beginner baseball fan, but I'd venture to guess that my reaction to the shape of chapters speaks to the book's accessibility. If you're new to the game, or if you're a longtime fan who only pays attention to the big-league product because you can't devote the time to delve into the intricacies of markets that aren't necessary to your baseball enjoyment, this book is probably the best way to do it, and a pandemic delay is probably the best time.
Next up: Keith Law's new book, "The Inside Game." (bookshop.org link). If enough people here are planning to pick it up or have already started it, and are interested in a book club approach, let me know before I make my review/interview plans.
