Chapter 1: The Scouting Era: How Baseball Decisions Were Made Before the Numbers Took Over

The first time Earl “Red” McKinnon stepped into a professional dugout as a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1965, he carried a leather-bound notebook, a beat-up stopwatch, and a set of unwritten rules that had governed baseball talent evaluation for nearly a century. By the time he retired as the National League’s senior scouting director in 1998, he had filled 127 of those notebooks, evaluated more than 12,000 players, and watched the entire system he’d grown up in crumble under the weight of its own biases. “We didn’t evaluate players back then,” he told me in his 2019 oral history interview, recorded for the Baseball Hall of Fame’s scouting archives, his voice still rough from decades of shouting over minor league crowds. “We evaluated how much they looked like the players we already thought were good. That was the whole job.”

McKinnon’s career spanned the exact transition period between the intuition-only scouting era and the data revolution that would upend every front office in the sport by the early 2000s. For the first 80 years of modern professional baseball—from the founding of the American League in 1901 through the late 1970s—roster construction, trade negotiations, and even in-game pinch-hit decisions were made almost exclusively by veteran scouts and old-school coaches, with statistical analysis treated as a afterthought, if it was considered at all. The hierarchy was rigid, the standards were unwritten, and the consequences of bad calls were borne almost entirely by the players, not the men who evaluated them.

The core of the scouting era’s evaluation framework was what insiders called “the three Fs”: face, form, and feel. A player’s on-field production was a distant fourth priority, if it was weighed at all. “A good face was everything,” McKinnon explained, leaning forward in his recliner, a faded Dodgers cap pulled low over his eyes. “We weren’t looking for guys who looked like they’d just rolled out of bed. We wanted guys who looked like they’d been raised by a former major leaguer in a leafy Connecticut suburb: square jaw, broad shoulders, clean-cut, stood up straight even when they were tired. You could teach a guy to hit, but you couldn’t teach him to look like he belonged in a big league clubhouse.” The second F, form, referred to the aesthetic quality of a player’s mechanics: a “pretty” swing, a smooth pitching delivery, a graceful stride when running the bases. The third F, feel, was a catch-all for perceived mental toughness, “clutch” performance, and the vague, unquantifiable quality scouts called “the will to win.” These three criteria were weighted to make up 80% of a player’s evaluation score, with on-field statistics accounting for the remaining 20%—and even those stats were limited almost exclusively to batting average, runs batted in, wins, and earned run average, metrics that had been the standard since the late 19th century.

The flaws of this system were not hidden; they were baked into its very design. But for decades, the people who ran baseball had little incentive to change it, because the system had produced some of the greatest players in the sport’s history. Men like Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and Willie Mays had all been discovered by scouts who relied on intuition rather than spreadsheets. The problem, as McKinnon and other insiders would later admit, was that for every Mays the system found, it discarded dozens of equally talented players who failed to fit the narrow, subjective mold of what a “ballplayer” was supposed to look like.

No story better illustrates the absurdity of the three Fs than the 1936 scouting report that nearly kept Ted Williams out of the major leagues. At the time, Williams was a 17-year-old phenom playing for the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League, a top-tier minor league circuit. In 74 games that season, he hit .391 with 34 home runs and 145 RBIs, numbers that would be considered elite even by today’s analytics standards. But when Boston Red Sox scout Eddie Collins Jr. traveled to San Diego to watch him play three games, he came away unimpressed. His handwritten report, preserved in the Hall of Fame’s archives, reads: “Swing is too long and stiff. Tries to hit every pitch out of the park, no plate discipline. Looks too skinny, arms like pipe cleaners, won’t be able to handle big league velocity. Arrogant, didn’t even acknowledge me when I introduced myself after the game. Pass.” The Red Sox passed on Williams in the 1936 draft, selecting a far less talented outfielder named George Dickey instead. Dickey would play just two seasons in the majors, hitting .242 with 3 home runs before being released. Williams would be signed by the Red Sox as an amateur free agent the following year, and would go on to become the greatest pure hitter in baseball history, winning two Triple Crowns, two MVP awards, and finishing his career with a .344 batting average, the highest of any player with 500 or more home runs.

Williams later joked about the report in his 1970 memoir, *The Science of Hitting*, writing that the only thing Collins Jr. got right was that he was “arrogant enough to think I could hit any pitch anyone threw at me.” But the report was not an outlier. Across the sport, scouts routinely dismissed elite production if it didn’t come with the right look. In 1979, the Montreal Expos passed on a 5-foot-8, 155-pound outfielder named Tim Raines because their scouting staff agreed he was “too skinny to handle major league pitching.” Raines had just finished a season in Single-A ball hitting .315 with 42 stolen bases, but the Expos’ lead scout wrote in his report that the young man “looked like a high school kid, not a pro athlete. No power, no frame, will get knocked around in the bigs.” The Expos selected a far larger outfielder in the second round that year, a 6-foot-2, 210-pound prospect named Rusty McNealy, who would hit .245 in parts of four major league seasons before retiring in 1985. Raines, meanwhile, was signed by the Chicago Cubs as an undrafted free agent a month later, and would go on to play 23 seasons in the majors, make seven All-Star teams, steal 808 bases (fifth most in history), hit .294 for his career, and be inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2017. When asked about the Expos’ scouting report in a 2017 interview with *The Athletic*, Raines laughed and said, “I still have a copy of that report taped to the wall of my office. I look at it every time someone tells me I’m too small to do something.”

These high-profile misses were not anomalies. They were the inevitable byproduct of a system that prioritized subjective aesthetic judgment over objective performance data, and that was riddled with unacknowledged biases that systematically excluded entire groups of players. The standard scouting evaluation form used by most major league teams in the 1950s and 1960s included explicit sections for “physical appearance,” “personal demeanor,” and “coachability,” alongside far less detailed sections for on-field performance. A 1955 scouting report for a young Roberto Clemente, then playing for the Montreal Royals of the International League, is a stark example of the prejudice baked into these forms. Filed by a Brooklyn Dodgers scout who had watched Clemente play three games, the report reads: “Good arm, good speed, can hit .280 in the bigs if he gets consistent playing time. But he is quiet, does not socialize with the other players, seems to have a chip on his shoulder. Might be a clubhouse problem. Not recommended for immediate promotion.” Clemente, a Puerto Rican player who faced constant racism and language barriers in the deeply segregated minor leagues of the 1950s, would go on to win three MVP awards, 12 Gold Gloves, and lead the Pittsburgh Pirates to two World Series titles, dying in a plane crash in 1972 while delivering aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1973, just months after his death. The Dodgers sc