Readings: Dollar Sign on the Muscle

Recently, in these pages, I made a case for a way of discussing books in a manner conducive to NotGraphs. You can read those exact words, if you want. Alternatively, you can just believe me when I say that the basic idea is to share lightly annotated passages and ideas from interesting baseball-related books.

The Text in Question
Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting by Kevin Kerrane

On This Book and Why I’m Reading It
Despite the fact that it might disappoint my mother, it’s a fact: if Rob Neyer told me to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, I would effing go jump off that bridge, stat.

Why? Probably for like a thousand reasons. Like, because Neyer is the freshest of princes. Like, because while some people* cling desperately to their spot in the public consciousness, Neyer has repeatedly used his notoriety to celebrate and recognize the work of those less well-known. Like, because Neyer remembered my frigging birthday — something even my jerky college friends can’t be bothered to do.

So when, this past summer, Neyer mentioned that Dollar Sign on the Muscle is more or less the definitive book on scouting, it immediately became a priority for me.

*I can’t put up with those people because they’re bastard people.

On the Limited Availability of This Book
The availability of this book is limited. You can’t, for example, let it (except by way of interlibrary loan, I mean) from the University of Wisconsin — i.e. home to the 13th-largest research library collection in North America. Also, buying it isn’t so great: the cheapest available copy at Amazon is going for $61.39 used.

Luckily, for me, the Madison (WI) Public Library holds the book. Will you be so lucky?!?

On What I’ve Already Learned from This Book, Just Four Pages In
Examined via the wonders of the bullet point:

• The word scout comes from the French écouter, “to listen.”

• There was a scout named Broadway Charlie Wagner (pictured above) who (a) as Kerrane notes, was “once named by Esquire as one of America’s best-dressed men” and (b) according to his Wikipedia page, died at 93 on his way home from scouting a Reading Phillies game.

• There was a scout — one of the earliest full-time ones, according to Kerrane — named Sinister Dick Kinsella.

• One of the epigraphs comes from Branch Rickey from a book he appears to’ve written called American Diamond — i.e. a book I can only assume is excellente.

• Kerrane refers to two other texts that’re almost definitely worth a damn: Pat Jordan’s A False Spring and Roger Angell’s “Scout” — an essay that appears in toto in Angell’s Five Seasons.

Image of Charlie Wagner stolen shamelessly from Boston Dirt Dogs.