Scout's Honor decided to suck.
suck horribly, at that. the book is nothing more than a collection of stories. while Moneyball gives the overarching goals and limitations of the oakland a's - how they have a tiny payroll and how that forces them to exploit flaws in the baseball market, which the statistic-oriented approach allows them to do by drafting guys who will sign for cheap, drafting batters who have a proven control of the strike zone, and drafting pitchers that are already developed. why? because they don't have the money to resign them when they become free agents and thus they don't have time to wait for them to develop because the young guys need to be productive on the major-league level, as that is how talent is replenished for the a's.
anyways, it's described well and it makes sense. you see the limitations and you understand why the a's are taking the approach they take.
the author of Scout's Honor, besides sucking, misses the point. he thinks the point is that scouts don't matter as much as stats. the thing is, the a's look at things like "does this guy wanna play ball?" and "does this guy have a good attitude?" there was even a passage where billy beane gave one prospect a "major plus" because his dad was a major-leaguer. at the same time, the a's 'overdrafted' a few players who did not necessarily look in shape or weren't 'true athletes', but still controlled the plate and had incredible on-base and slugging numbers. they didn't allow scouts to just say "i have a gut instinct that this guy is good", they want numbers to go with the attitude and the gameday observations. the basic idea is that the questions about 'makeup' (whatever that means, they don't even try to define it in Scout's Honor) are answered by a really good on-base percentage over a long period of time as much as it is answered by if the kid wants to play baseball. i seriously doubt any scouts claim that a player has the 'makeup' of a major-league player without citing some statistics to back him up. the fact that Scout's Honor seems to be arguing for an approach that examines how fast prospects can run and how hard they can throw the ball and how great their mystical 'makeup' is but refuses to discuss if they can actually play baseball is a huge strike against it.
the thing that makes the braves different, the thing that Scout's Honor author bill shanks doesn't seem to get, is that the braves have money, and thus they have time to let projects develop and they have the luxury of having bad drafts. they got lucky with a few guys, they signed a few strong free agents, and they made a few strong trades and signed extensions with guys who the a's simply are not able to afford. tim hudson is a perfect example - the a's could not afford him, the braves traded for him (and got the bad end of the trade overall) and signed him to a four-year extension that the a's could not afford. shanks and the majority of Moneyball critics don't seem to understand this fundamental reasoning behind the approach beane and the a's take to baseball.
Scout's Honor is just a series of stories. some of them talk about some guys who get drafted as projects because they have a great attitude and wanted to play ball or play for the braves. other stories are about how great the scouting director for the braves was, cuz he's a real great guy. this is an actual excerpt
Snyder stayed on as Scouting Director until 1990, when the new GM brought in his own Scounting Director and made Paul a Special Assistant to the General Manager. "I was hurt," he admits. But five years later, in 1996, Snyder was named Director of Scouting and Player development once again. "I felt good again," he says.thanks for that stunning insight. and really, there's nothing useful in this book's first 50 pages. i'm probably going to return it tomorrow, though reading the chapter on how the braves knew chipper jones would pan out, unlike todd van poppel (a famous bust) might be interesting... or it might just be stupid and hokey, like the rest of this book.
people who don't believe statistics tell you more about baseball than how someone looks are the creationists of the sports world. they are the carl everetts who argue that dinosaur bones were man made. they ignore mountains of evidence, evidence that is simple to approach and powerful to use, because they are both anti-intellectual and elitist at the same time. these people want baseball scouting and baseball management to be a mystical place where common people cannot comprehend what is happening. the truth is, much like any job, anyone can understand the basics of running a baseball team. not everyone can do it, but trying to inflate the importance of the gut instinct of people who happen to run baseball teams only succeeds in making them look like bigger jackasses when their teams don't do as well as the oakland a's.
anyways, don't read Scout's Honor - it sucks. read Moneyball instead.