Crack of the Bat

By David Rawnsley

 

The Baseball Technological Revolution, A Personal Look  --  Part One

 

I was talking with a scout friend of mine the other day and he had some nice comments about Perfect Game's "Baseball Web TV" and the amount of scouting information available even in these early stages of Web TV's development.

 

His general comments were more along the lines of "Just think how things have changed!"

 

He and I had worked together with the Astros starting in 1989.  He reminded me of some of the ways we kept track of scouting information back then.

 

Now, many of you might think of 1989 as the not too distant past.  On the other hand, some of you reading this weren't even born in 1989.  A member of the 2007 high school class, a junior, was most likely born in 1989. 

 

Since I've spent much of the past few weeks writing up reports on players from the World Underclass Showcase, which featured mostly players born in 1989 and 1990, the time has definitely come when I'm writing up more players who weren't born when I started scouting than had then crossed onto life's playing field.  I guess that's some kind of watershed in one's career, although not one that I'm necessarily celebrating.  But it puts a perspective on things.

 

Like Age.

 

The real perspective is in looking at how the scouting industry handled information from then to now.

 

In 1989, we used 3-ply carbon paper to write scouting reports.  The top two copies were sent into the office via the mail.  The original went alpha order in the big file cabinets, the other copy went into the scouting director's binder so he had easy access to them when he was traveling.  The third copy was kept for the scout's records.  Copies of reports were made for a scout's cross checkers and mailed to them in the twice weekly mass mailing.

 

We had file cabinets with scouting reports back to the 1960's, all pretty much using the same scouting language, the same scouting report forms, the same grading scale.  It was fun looking back at the scouting reports for some of the players I played with and against in high school in Northern California:  Kevin Bass, Bob Melvin, Paul Noce, Tony Brewer, Phil Dalton...I think I played with/against 9 future big leaguers at one point or another.

 

Of course back in the mid 1970's, there weren't showcases and national tournaments.  I played from February to August and probably played 50 games.  Today, a player in Northern California plays twice the number of games and just in one WWBA tournament might come up against 20 or 30 or more future Major Leaguers.

 

 

The big technological advancement around 1989, though, with the growing use of the "Voice Box".  A company called Voice Genesis had most of the baseball scouting market for the dreaded Voice Box, which was really just an advanced message service.  You called into an 800 number on a push button phone (I hate to say it, but all phones weren't push button back then), entered your own password, recorded a message, then punched in the "mail boxes" of the desired recipients.

 

A typical use of the Voice Box was leaving cross checking messages for your scouting supervisors.  There was a set protocol for leaving the message so as to avoid long, rambling reports (this was often ignored) that went something like this.

 

"This is David Rawnsley, Friday, April 15.  National Cross Check player Andy Ford, Cedar Rapids HS, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  Outfielder.  6-5, 190.  R/L.  OFP 54.  Big left handed bat.  Plus arm, good athlete.  Lots of schedule left, schedule has been mailed to the office."

 

That message would be sent to the scouting director, assistant scouting director, the two national cross checkers and the regional cross checker.

 

A typical nightmare day as an assistant scouting director (my job) would begin with the 800 number, the voice box and code (I think I still remember my voice box number, 8088) and the cheery computer generated voice "You have 37 new voice mail messages".  Thank goodness for speaker phones.

 

The Astros scouting director, Dan O'Brien, was a stickler for details and procedure, so our scouting staff used the voice box system extensively.  You were charged by the minute by Voice Genesis and evidently we made them plenty of money.  They took Dan and I out to a nice meal at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse every Winter Meeting for many years.

 

So the next time you sign on to the Internet and have what you think are too many emails in your in box, have some sympathy.

 

 

The use of computers was the next big step.  I seem to remember that the Blue Jays were the early leaders in use of computers by their scouting staff but the Astros weren't far behind.  We had been receiving Major League Scouting Bureau reports via computer for a couple of years, but there were just entered into the MLSB computer in their office and transmitted to the teams that way.  The big step was entering in reports and schedules from the scouts in the field and transmitting them directly to the office instead of using the US Postal Service.

 

The scouting people at the forefront of the use of computers knew the time lapse advantages of sending reports in by modem instead of by mail, but the real advantages from the beginning were in organizing the information in data base form and in being able to transmit those reports immediately to other scouts (i.e. cross checkers) out in the field.

 

It was nice to be able to hit a few keys and pull up all the names of the best prospects in Texas, let's say, by OFP (Overall Future Potential) order.  It was even better if you could call up all the games scheduled to be played in Texas for the next weekend, so you could do your schedule and backups in 5 minutes instead of wrestling with 60 individual pieces of paper.

 

With a good programmer (and we had one), the software was pretty easy to write if you knew what you wanted, had thought about data base implications and had a concept of "user friendly" when the user was potentially a 55 year old scout who had trouble using a push button phone.  The problems were with a) getting modems to work properly and using transmission software, and b) teaching the scouting staff, many of whom considered a stop watch high technology, to use the PC's and the software.

 

I remember standing in a computer office in the catacombs of the Astrodome one afternoon waiting for our first attempt to connect a PC to the Astrodome mainframe via modem.  It was probably about 1994 or maybe 1993.  When the telltale grinding buzz of a modem connecting via slow dial up kicked in, we all jumped around like someone had just hit a walk off home run out on the field.  Not that it went smoothly all the time.  But once we could hook up from a phone line to the main computer, we were in business.

 

Teaching the scouting staff to use the computers was a much bigger challenge.  The younger scouts took to it easily for the most part.  The older scouts who had trouble with just getting reports written or expense reports added up the old way took much more time, hand holding and convincing that this was the way not only of the future but of the present. 

 

We scheduled 3-day regional scouting/computer seminars around the country for at least two straight years during the off season to get the staff up to speed on what today, in relative terms, is not much more complicated than logging on to AOL, checking your email and seeing what's on ESPN.com.

 

"What button do I push now?" is a question I frequently heard in those days.  Not something my 9 year old boy would ever think of saying today.  He'd be more likely to say "Dad, don't you know how to do anything on the computer?"

 

My kids don't believe me when I tell them that I actually got paid for designing software and teaching people how to use it.

 

 

NEXT:  The cell phone, email and the Internet.