By John Klima
Staff Writer

If you picked up a bat and a ball in Los Angeles anywhere in the past 40 years, thought yourself to be a high school or a college player with a chance to play professionally, made yourself good enough to get a look, then chances are that scout George Genovese gave you one.

“I lived by one rule,” Genovese, 85, said. “If I made a mistake on a player, I wanted it to be my own. I didn’t want to be influenced by anyone else. I wanted my decision to be my own call. I wanted to stand with that, no matter what kind of player the kid became.”

Genovese was right at least 35 times, and the players he signed, mostly for the San Francisco Giants, hit some 2,400 major league home runs. As baseball celebrates the Hall of Fame inductions of Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken Jr. today, the Hall of Fame continues to miss the call on scouts, neglecting a crucial part of the game and contradicting their own mission statement.

Good scouting is all about what everyone feels is lost in baseball. A good scout exudes trust, in the players and in his employer. A good scout is honest and loyal.

A good scout can’t cheat. No drug can make you a better talent evaluator. It’s attention to detail. It’s respect for the game – long hours spent on the road, at the park, in front of the laptop filling out hundreds of reports a year, on the phone, stuck in a hotel room, a life where an off-day might mean an eight-hour drive between parks.

This is not to imply that all scouts are saints, but then again, some Hall of Famers aren’t either. Some scouts don’t work hard. Some of them act like the ballplayers they cover. Some claim players they had little to do with. Some younger ones see scouting amateur players as a climber’s path to becoming a General Manager. They scout amateurs off rag lists and web site rankings and don’t work hard to dig out the bushes.

They look at radar gun readings instead of movement, differentiation and character. They look for one-dimensional hitters and overlook skill. They seek the safest bet. They ask others for fear that their own judgment might be flawed. They commit the high sin of letting high school and college coaches evaluate for them. It is an imperfect business of perfect egos.

Some are better politicians and self-promoters than they are evaluators. It is up to the club to weed out the workers from the work-shirkers. As the fictitious writer Joe Gillis famously said in the movie “Sunset Boulevard,” there’s nothing wrong with being 50 unless you’re acting 20.

For the clubs that downplay the significance of scouts and characterize them as a bunch of lazy bums who like to abuse their expense accounts, well, maybe the problem isn’t your scouts. Maybe it’s the ones you hired to replace the ones you fired. A computer cannot tell you anything about a player’s totality.

There are clubs that consider character, yet are won over by talent. They pay the price when that player has a mug shot in the newspaper or ends up dead in the minor leagues. Once a club hires good scouts, it should listen to them before it listens to every agent. Don’t overspend for that ‘once-in-a-decade’ player and learn two years later that he’s soft.

As the game has moved from family ownership to corporate entities in the past 30 years, scouts have become a bigger target than ever. The days before the draft began in 1965, when they were essentially assistant General Managers with autonomy and power, are long gone. To the uninitiated, scouts are paper chasers and extra expenses. Why hire more people when the rags and the web sites will do it for you?

Long a target for clubs to cut costs, scapegoats for bad playoff outings, targets of anger and frustration when something goes awry with the big club, this doesn’t change the fact that scouts have always been the key to an information business. But even as technology has multiplied, baseball’s 162-game grind keeps it an honest human endeavor.

A wise old minor league catcher once said that if he could invent a machine that would measure a player’s heart and commitment, that it would make him a millionaire. Until that happens, a team’s best bet to ensure that their money is spent wisely is to invest in scouting and to develop scouts as they would develop players. That way, you won’t get ripped by the local media when your $2 million bonus baby can’t do things like hit.

A Hall of Fame award for scouts would validate the profession on a historic scale. The Hall needs to dispense with the autocracy of arrogance and recognize scouting. Since change in baseball doesn’t happen as quickly as global warming does, here are some suggestions.

Buy a large plaque.
Mount it on the wall.
Engrave three new names a year.

You don’t need a new building, just an award. That’s all it takes.

Segment that scouting award into three divisions: amateur, international and special achievement. Devise some basic criteria. Create guidelines. Here, let me help:

Amateur scouts should focus on pre-draft (1965) scouts, but since most of them are dead, start with Genovese, who came in the year the draft began.

That way, legendary Ivory Hunters such as Hugh Alexander would be honored, as would modern-era scouts such as Bob Zuk, who would finally get the last laugh on every club that ever fired him.

Since many amateur scouts today want to do a two-year hitch and move on, any scout honored in any category should have 20 years devoted to one of those three specialties. You won’t get many new guys, but you will get the worthy lifers.

Howie Haak would be a good start for International scouts. Joe Cambria can go next.

Special achievement would focus on professional coverage and administration. Behind every great trade is a great report, the heart of pro coverage. Longtime Dodger Clyde Sukeforth comes to mind. This category would also allow for baseball men such as scouting director Paul Snyder of the Atlanta Braves, one of the great baseball minds of the last 60 years, to be honored. It would open the door for scouting executives such as Roland Hemond and Jack Schwarz.

Do the homework. Bring in experts. Don’t omit guys who should be there. Don’t pull another Buck O’Neil. In fact, since you missed Buck once, he’d be a great pick for special achievement because he had a hand in every aspect of scouting.

This will always be a grass-roots effort, and the heart of the effort is in Los Angeles. Credit Dennis Gilbert and Hemond for founding the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation, which gives back to scouts the way many clubs never do, with a helping hand for those who really needed it.

The foundation created an award named after Genovese for scouting achievement, and until Cooperstown does more than collect random artifacts, this is the closest thing to a scouting award, a Hall of Fame, that there is.

Gilbert isn’t afraid to wield his financial clout. Hemond uses his baseball influence to garner support from clubs to support the old timers the game abandoned.

The foundation isn’t going away, does much of its charity work under the radar, and isn’t about putting the attention on itself.

That is what scouting is about. It’s a low-paying, abusive, selfless occupation, which is why so few guys want to spend their careers doing it. Scouts are the real baseball writers, the reporters who know who can play, who cannot, and where the bodies are buried.

The Hall’s mission statement says it is “dedicated to fostering an appreciation for the historical development of the game.” Scouts have become the new Negro Leaguers, who the Hall ignored for decades. Only yelling will open the doors to recognize a group that deserves it. It’s time for the Hall of Fame to validate what people inside the game have known for years. As Genovese wisely believes, make the call.