Baseball’s Last Great Scout: The Life of Hugh Alexander by Dan Austin (review)

As a baseball fan, I just finished watching the 2014 World Series. I also just finished reading Baseball’s Last Great Scout: The Life of Hugh Alexander. I found both to be quite enjoyable. Since the OHR does not need a review of the seven-game Fall Classic, which someone will (probably has, actually) give the overused moniker, “an instant classic,” the rest of the review will focus on the book.

Hugh Alexander grew up in rural Oklahoma and played one season (really about one month) in the major leagues for the Cleveland Indians. A freak accident during his off-season employment took one of his hands and his playing career. That team’s lead scout, Cy Slapnicka, took “Hughie” from his postsurgery doldrums and taught him how to be a major-league baseball scout. Alexander then spent the next six decades finding, observing, assessing, and landing talented ballplayers for the Indians, the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Chicago Cubs.

Dan Austin interviewed Alexander at length, as well as a few of those who knew him; he added documentation from other primary source material to craft Last Great Scout. Austin broke the book into twenty-six short chapters with a section in the middle containing nearly twenty images, including copies of Alexander’s notes taken at a game about each player’s possible future success. There was no index or bibliography, although in the acknowledgments, Austin mentioned some of those noninterview sources.

The book’s strength, which undoubtedly came from the Austin/Alexander oral history, is Austin’s description of how Alexander’s childhood and adolescence trained him to be a major league ballplayer and then a scout: Alexander learned skills on the field through playing a variety of sports, not just baseball, with others, and, on top of that, his father taught him people skills, which he cultivated and then used when he transitioned from a player to a scout. Alexander’s upbringing also gave him plenty of time to interact with adults, sometimes in pool halls, which allowed him to evaluate people in sometimes heated settings. Alexander’s family left no substantial family records—at least as far as one can ascertain from this book—so Austin’s interviews helped fill in the blanks.

In addition to all of the above, Hughie also offered readers many backroom tales about player evaluations, signings, and trades; while he kept his cards close to his chest when talking with scouts during his career, he seemingly held little back in his interviews with Austin. Some of his other interesting anecdotes include: applying the idea that getting to know a prospective player’s mother would never hurt; signing Hall of Famer Don Sutton; trading minor league prospects for major league talent to help the 1980s Phillies eventually win the World Series. These stories offer a glimpse into baseball from the World War II era through the late 1980s. All of this and more will keep readers engaged.

Those interested in reading Last Great Scout will find, on occasion, the grumblings of an older gentleman reflecting on the (read, superior) past: Alexander, for example, showed no love for the rise of baseball analytics. As with most people who argue against advanced metrics, Hughie seemed unable to understand that statistics and the “eye test” need not be mutually exclusive. Also, as with most books of this type—written as much for a popular audience as an academic one—Baseball’s Last Great Scout lacks the historical methodology that Austin used in interviewing Hughie. Having said that, though, I respect the fact that Austin not only conducted interviews with Alexander but also donated them to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

I strongly recommend this book to those interested (at any level or knowledge base) in sports history or twentieth-century Americana. I do hope that the museum will make the Austin/Alexander interview available online...