The Art of Scouting, by Art Stewart with Sam Mellinger

Art Stewart is the elderly man you might have seen on TV during recent champagne celebrations in the Royals clubhouse. Art is a legend. He has been a scout for seven decades. It feels like it took him seven hours to write this book, which is approximately how long it took me to read (and kind of enjoy) it.

            The typos and bad formatting made me cringe. I’m sure they make Sam Mellinger – a great sportswriter – cringe too. You can tell this book was done on a shoestring budget by Ascend Books – which is probably appropriate since Art was often scouting on a shoestring budget, especially during the dark years when David Glass first took ownership of the Royals and tried to run the club like Walmart. Actually, he ran it more like K-Mart. Everything from the fonts to the photos in The Art of Scouting is tacky.

            The forward by George Brett is pretty bad. Art’s stories are interesting but not very deep. There are the obligatory, well-known stories about Brett and Bo Jackson. I did read some things I might have forgotten. That Willie Wilson was a catcher in high school. That Billy Butler studies a lot of film and Mike Moustakas could care less. And that the Royals really do pay attention to new developments in baseball. Art tells us that Mike Groopman and John Williams run the analytics department. Being an expert reporter and detective, I Googled them. Both fit the mold – Ivy League degrees in math and science.

            Art also recalls his days as a scout with the Yankees, back when players could be signed on the spot. My favorite story is about two former Yankee pitchers who swapped wives. “They traded wives, children, even dogs…Ben Affleck and Matt Damon announced they wanted to make a movie about it…We’ll see.”

            I enjoyed Art’s stories about the generosity of Ewing Kauffman, about the Royals Baseball Academy, about scouting in the Dominican Republic, and about various negotiations with players. The book really does give a lot of glimpses into the life of a scout.

            Art talks about drafting Zack Greinke, which is cool, and how the Royals got both Hunter Dozier and Sean Manaea in 2013. But I wish he would have gone into even more depth about particular trades and past drafts – specifically why the Royals chose certain players, what the bonus situations were like, and especially how those drafts worked out (and how David Glass was a cheap bastard even if he has always been considered a good baseball guy by insiders.)

I also wish Sam would have had more time to edit this book and that it was not published by Ascend. It could have been a classic, like Art Stewart. And it definitely could have been worthy of second edition, an update – now that the Royals have finally made it back to real relevance in the wake of the book’s publication. Now, there are a lot of new stories worth telling. It would be interesting to get the insidery scoop on the strategies used by men like Art and Dayton Moore to assemble the 2014 team.