Fred's Book Club: Prophet Margin.

Welcome back, my friends, to the Hump Day feature that never ends! Yes, it's the Humpback Writers, our feature with the stupid name that runs on Wednesday. We try to get a wide variety of books here in the book club, sometimes seasonal, and this one is pegged to the start of baseball's spring training games on Sunday. 

Prophet of the Sandlots: Journeys with a Major League Scout is a book every fan of baseball ought to read, especially one interested in the history of the leagues and how they recruit players. Author Mark Winegardner traveled with Tony Lucadello, an elderly scout for the Cubs and the Phillies, who signed up 49 major leaguers in his career, including Mike Schmidt and Fergie Jenkins. Well, he signed hundreds of players, but 49 made it to the Show. This book is the story of Lucadello and Winegardner's scouting trips through the Midwest in 1988.

Lucadello was 75 when they made that trek, and even in 1988 was a dinosaur in the world of baseball. He drove around the country, visiting, revisiting, and re-revisiting prospects from the time they were kids until they were old enough to sign. Initially he could sign up any player he thought had potential. But that changed in 1965.

Tony claimed he'd never said a swear word, but if he ever slipped, he must have used the same inflection as when he says "draft." Before 1965, when major league baseball instituted the draft, if Tony found a player he liked, he could offer him a contract on the spot.... Since 1965, though, the only way Tony can sign a player he likes is by convincing the Phillies to draft that player. 

Tony's method, seen many times in the book, was the cultivation of relationships, expecting that when the time came for the boy to sign, he'd sign with the man who had been so encouraging as he grew up. 

"Tony is different," said [Phillies scouting director Jack] Pastore, who's known the old scout almost twenty-five years. "He's like a gardener; he cultivates his players. He takes an interest in them at a younger age, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. And he keeps in touch, maybe by sending a Christmas card, and he really gets close to the player and the family, probably closer than most scouts today. You know, most scouts would just say, 'Well, the kid's going to get drafted. What's my chance of getting him?' They can find twenty reasons why not to, but Tony takes the one positive reason and he does it the other way. If we draft one of Tony's players, the negotiations are a lot smoother, the probability of signing that player is a lot better, because the families appreciate that personal touch." 

But he didn't just leave young prospects with a handshake; Tony Lucadello also left a plan for the boy and his people to develop his abilities. One method was the wall, his baseball-themed answer to all the basketball hoops in Midwest driveways, which encouraged throwing and fielding skills:

Tony watched Jason throw about fifty balls off the wall. Tony has a scout pose: hands thrust deep into overcoat pockets, hat brim tilting forward, head nodding, face impassive. That blank poker face is a master scout's stock-in-trade, developed over the years to prevent lesser scouts from learning what ball players Tony likes and then going after them. Tony has had so many prospects stolen out from under him that he has not only perfected the poker face but also scouted in secret, concealed in his car or behind telephone poles or on rooftops or even -- at the age of sixty-eight -- from the top of a loblolly pine.

Another method Tony recommended to youngsters involved plastic golf balls, having someone throw them for the prospect to hit. The tiny ball developed the eye; and it could be practiced indoors, as the author discovered, pitching to a prospect at Wright State University. 

Lucadello could be a little underhanded himself, faking tears with onion juice in one well-told incident to use emotion to get a prospect signed. But the fact that other people (including a prospect) that Winegardner spoke to in the book had heard the story from Tony shows that the old scout was willing to tell that one on himself. 

The is a terrific profile of an American original, the kind of hardworking scout one always expects to see on the back roads of the nation but won't find anymore. It's a great book, with wonderful baseball stories and an interesting look at the lives of young baseball dreamers. 

Lucadello did not find a way into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, but his personal papers were donated to the hall's library, which shows a modicum of the respect he'd garnered in his long career.