Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
An Embarrassment, Really, December 14, 2005
If you are a huge Braves fan, you won't mind reading line after line describing how the Braves system can do no wrong. If you are a serious baseball fan, you'll just roll your eyes. Some of the profiles of minor leaguers are interesting at first. But as one other reviewer noted, the profiles all seem to be the same. You'll find yourself skipping several pages at a time.
Most would acknowledge that the Braves are a top-notch organization. It's just silly, however, for anyone to assert the Braves have done EVERYTHING right. I don't think the book contains even mild criticism of a Braves employee, trade or scouting decision. Everything is painted in a light most favorable to the Braves.
In addition, whenever possible, the author takes a shot at Michael Lewis, Moneyball, Billy Beane and the Oakland A's. Fine, the Braves have a different approach and it works. Is there only ONE way to build a solid baseball team? Seems unlikely. And why take cheap shots? For instance, at one point he is discussing the A's acquiring Dan Meyer and Juan Cruz, two young Braves pitchers from the Braves. He sneers at the A's, in effect saying, if Moneyball is such a great system, why did you come crawling to the Braves for young pitching? Well, guess what? Everybody needs young pitching. You know who the Braves got in the Cruz/Meyer trade? Tim Hudson. A pitcher. A pitcher developed in the Oakland A's farm system.
It's just embarrassing. The author is a Braves employee -- and not even a baseball man -- a broadcaster. This book reads like a propaganda piece commissioned by the Braves. As a baseball fan, I'd rather read an objective account of how good the Braves organization is. When a company man writes it (and never adds criticism when criticism is due), it loses all credibility.
Why does the best organization in baseball need to commission a book like this? Doesn't winning your division 14 of the last 15 years say all there is to say?
***
Note: The writing is done at a pretty basic level, and there are lots of typos and grammatical mistakes. Golenbock's books have tons of typos and grammar issues too, but at least his substance is good.
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22 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
If you are a Braves fan, get it. If not, maybe not., July 3, 2005
Scout's Honor seems like it was written as an argument against Moneyball by Michael Lewis. Moneyball focuses on the Oakland A's and how their GM, Billy Beane, focuses on stats when evaluating players and relies little on scouts. In doing so, Beane mainly takes college players rather than high school players, because the statistics for college players do mean something due to the strong competition, and the greater sample sizes. Seemingly on the flip side, the Atlanta Braves, an organization just as successful, or even more successful than the A's (at least in the past 15 years), use scouts extensively and focus on high school players. The A's love college pitchers and hate high school pitchers when it comes to drafting them. The Braves love high school pitchers and avoid college pitchers (they focus their scouting in the Georgia and southeast region). It's amazing that two different winning organizations can attack the same problem in such different ways. Moneyball was a great book on how the braintrust of the A's think and how they go about their evaluation. Scout's Honor is an attempt to do the same for the Braves and their scouts.
On the backcover of Scout's Honor is written: "In this fascinating and insightful look into what criteria major and minor league baseball scouts use to determine talent, Scout's Honor shines a bright light on the job done by `old-school' scouts and their killer instincts." That sounds like a great subject, and I really wanted to read about how scouts go about their job, how they evaluate players, especially those still in high school. I have not read any books detailing exactly what the scouts are looking for - is it something they can't explain to the layman like me? It turns out what Atlanta scouts are looking for in a high school player is their `makeup'. Unfortunately, Shanks he never defines exactly what that means, nor does he explain exactly how a scout determines if someone has good or bad makeup. So the reader is still left wondering exactly how the scouts do their job.
The strength of this book is the great detail and descriptions that Shanks goes into on the Braves organization, especially the people in the player personnel department and the minor league players. Fans of the Braves will love this book since there is so much good information on their players.
It is tough to rate this book, because different people will appreciate the book differently. For Braves fans, I'd rate it a 5, and definitely recommend it. For sabremetric fans and believers of moneyball, I'd rate it a 1 and avoid it - it will only make you angry reading it. In this aspect, its much like a political book designed to show the appreciation of one party while attacking the other party. Although I think many of the moneyball ideas are valid (and I think Shanks mis-characterizes some of them in his last chapter), the fact the Braves have been so successful means they are doing something right, and this book does reflect some of those ideas. I went into reading this book with an open mind, hoping that I would learn about exactly what scouts do. But I was disappointed that Shanks doesn't explain this in more detail. If he had, I would have rated it higher.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
How do the Braves do it? Only vague answers here., December 12, 2005
This was a really good idea for a book, but it just doesn't deliver. Aside from the general annoyance of the cheap publishing and frequent typos, this book has no real structure or overarching argument ... if you read the last couple chapters you get more out of it than if you waste your time reading the whole thing. It's basically a mixture of biographies of everyone in the Braves organization and the author paraphrasing the words of others indiscriminately.
I am a huge admirer of the Braves organization and their genius, so I was disappointed to not glean very much info about their magic in this book. Every once in a while there is a real gem about the Braves' philosophies, but just reading the life story of Steve Avery teaches me nothing. The book gets pretty repetitive with this and much of it is skippable.
The Braves are an excellent foil to "Moneyball." This book certainly isn't.
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