Customer Reviews

Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting (Fireside Sports Classics)

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An excellent book for any baseball-fan. Extremely funny and entertaining. Everybody will learn more about scouting und the new edition lets you know how the career of the players scouted turned out.I fully agree with the assessment of Rob Neyer of espn.com, who included the book as honorable mention amongst the best baseball books of all time.

Dollar Sign on the Muscle was the first work of serious literary journalism I ever read. I bought in the sixth grade, in the gift shop at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., which I was visiting for the first time with my parents. I read most of it in the airport and on the flight home to Florida.

The book had a more significant impact on me than the trip to Washington did. It was astonishing to me that books like this existed in the world. When we returned, I raided all the narrative nonfiction books about sports from the Palm Beach County library. Most of them weren't so great, but I did, by way of this search, find my way to George Plimpton, Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, etc., which set me on a lifetime course of better and more fulfilling reading.

I recently reread Dollar Sign on the Muscle, and it's better, actually, than I remembered. It's a historical document, now. The scouts and the world of old-time baseball men belong largely to the past. The era of Theo Epstein and Billy Beane, with its emphasis on all things quantifiable, is probably good for baseball, but it's not terribly romantic.

But that's not what makes the book so good. It's the knack Kerrane has for rendering his characters whole. You feel like you know these guys, you know what makes them tick, you know what it's like to spend an afternoon with them, you know what they want, need, desire, what makes their hearts beat hard. Many of Kerrane's old scouts are likely dead now, but in the pages of Dollar Sign on the Muscle, they live and breathe like they did then.

Perhaps with time, this book will find its way into print again. I hope so. Meantime, see if you can find a used copy somewhere. It'll be worth whatever it costs you, I promise.

This is a great book. It covers virtually the whole history of the "modern" game, from the early teens to (almost) the present day, and does so from the perspective of the baseball scout -- the keenest evaluators of talent in the game. Here are a series of larger-than-life characters, each with a silver tongue it seems, and an endless reservoir of anecdotes - often amusing, sometimes tragic. It is one of those books that is a pure pleasure to read and sink oneself into, filled with earthy but incisive baseball talk and analysis.

This book reflects a huge amount of research, but comes across with an easygoing quality, wearing its scholarship lightly.

It's unfortunate that it's out of print, and that used copies are so expensive. But if you can find one for a reasonable price you wouldn't be disappointed.

Dollar Sign on the Muscle belongs on any short list of the best baseball books ever written. It has the ability to change the way you look at baseball by taking you inside the fascinating world of baseball scouts and their never-ending search for the "arm behind the barn," the "good face" and the many other phrases that you'll never forget after reading this book. Kerrane is a marvelous prose stylist but one who never draws attention to his own felicity for words -- instead, he uses that gift to effortlessly draw the reader into the scout's world (especially the bygone era of scouting before the advent of the amateur draft). I can't recommend it highly enough.

For the baseball fan interested in all angles, this is required reading. Written well before "Moneyball," it gives a more balanced view of what scouting entails and presents scouts in a much more favorable light than Lewis' book. Too much of recent baseball discussion, especially for the casual fan, has become an either/or of the Dark Ages vs. The Enlightenment when the various schools for thought on finding and developing baseball talent should be viewed as complementary tools geared toward building a winning team.

"Dollar Sign on the Muscle" gives a very good account of what being a scout is all about. A number of the stories from the older, pre-draft scouts are truly amazing tales of trying to find baseball talent.

On my list of favorites, I'd put Kerrane's book right next to John Helyar's "Lords of the Realm." While I didn't particularly like Michael Lewis' extra helpings of snark in "Moneyball," it too should be required reading for baseball fans of all stripes.

During 1981, author Kevin Kerrane followed the scouts for thePhiladelphia Phillies baseball club. The resulting book - Dollar Sign on the Muscle - examines the scouts' lives. In doing so, Dollar Sign exposes a little-known culture - even die-hard baseball fans are apt to learn a lot from reading it. Also, Kerrane keeps the story moving for all of its 300 pages, making it an easy read.

People often comment on the millions earned by baseball players. The scouts, by contrast, must work for love of the game. (The starting salary in 1981 was about $18,000; a veteran scout earned about $25,000). Scouts also work hard; some spend 45 weeks per year on the road. Unsurprisingly, the job is very hard on family life.

Dollar Sign focuses on long-time scouts. Most of the veterans in the book started well before the amateur draft, at a time when prospective players could sign with the team of their choice. Many of the old timers lament the changes in baseball (and - in particular - in scouting) through the years. The tensions between the independent-minded, veteran scouts who sign players based on intuition and the number-crunching, "corporate," younger scouts is a major focus in the book.

I first heard of this book when Sports Illustrated listed it as one of the 100 best sports books of all time. After reading Dollar Sign, I think that the ranking was well deserved. Kerrane f came up with a real rarity - a unique sports book.

This book is so well written, so enjoyable, so entertaining that I couldn't put it down. Kerrane's writing and reporting are exceptional, but the stars of the book are the scouts he interviews. The scouts that
catch his eye are those who began prior to the creation of the amateur draft in 1965 and were still active in 1981 when he wrote the book. The common denominator with these select few is that each seems capable of tracing his baseball lineage in one way or another back to Branch Rickey, the godfather of scouting and the man behind the scouting motto, "the dollar sign on the muscle." Rickey seemingly had an innate ability to recognize a player ("never sign an overstrider")and then to put a price tag on the player's worth. He also had the callousness to bury players in the minors and renege on their contracts.

Aside from its great narrative and readability, the hidden story here is the educating in Baseball 101. The scouts reveal how to play the game and why. They also expose faults and flaws that can and cannot be overcome.

I loved every page. Why this book isn't in print any longer is a total mystery to me. The prices attached to it by used book sellers tell you how much it is valued by those who have read it and spread its reputation to others.

If this is the same book I remember from many years ago...it is worth reading again, as it about the kind of people that are a part of "Money Ball"...