A Scout's Report: My 70 Years in Baseball

by George Genovese, Dan Taylor

Many in baseball consider the scout to be the most important figure in any organization: It is the scout's work in the high school and college bleachers that unearths future legends. Few have achieved more--and in such grand style--than George Genovese. In a game that values numbers, Genovese's are staggering. No other scout has been responsible for more players in a single lineup, more home runs by players signed or more All-Star and World Series highlights than Genovese. Genovese's eye for talent is unmatched, his advocacy for the players he discovers is unrivaled, and the investment he makes toward their success is a difference maker. This autobiography is the story of his seven decades in baseball as a player, manager and scout.

Genres: Sports

244 pages, Paperback

First published January 31, 2015

Reviews

[Anup Sinha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best autobiography of a baseball scout I have ever read and I have read many. It’s partly to due with the fact that George Genovese was such a remarkable man but also because his life was so interesting and that both he and his co-author Dan Taylor did a great job making it organized and readable.

You get a;idea on why he was such an outstanding scout by reading his background and his years prior to scouting. George Genovese’s passion for the game and his intelligence comes through.

I was most interested in the stories behind his discovery of so many big league stars but the whole book was great.

As a former baseball scout myself, I crossed paths with Mr. Genovese and only wish I did more. He is the greatest scout of all time and there are no other scouts or people like him in the game.

[Edwin Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A SCOUT'S REPORT; MY 70 YEARS IN BASEBALL by George Genovese (with Dan Taylor) is the autobiography of George Genovese, an elite Major League Baseball scout who clearly has enjoyed his life in baseball. Genovese walks the reader through his childhood living on Staten Island with his four brothers who all played baseball all the time. George grew up and ended up playing and coaching baseball until his mid-thirties, when he reluctantly accepted his first job as a scout with the San Francisco Giants. He quickly fell in love with the challenge of the job and the joy of constantly looking for the next great baseball player. Genovese seemed to work harder when he wasn't taken seriously, and he also never seemed to mind speaking his mind. It was fascinating also to see how baseball scouting evolved from the 1960's to the present.
I love reading about baseball history and I've read quite a few books about major and minor league baseball history. This is the first book I've read from the scout's perspective and it was refreshingly different. Some of the stories Genovese tells are quite funny and enlightened and without retelling the whole book, I learned several things about how a scout works that I never knew. Genovese was very close with Branch Rickey, the great general manager who amongst other things, was the man that brought up Jackie Robinson and broke the racial barrier in major league baseball and I could tell how much Genovese cherished his memories of his time with Rickey. I particularly enjoyed the story about how Rickey supposedly tanked a season on purpose so he could draft Roberto Clemente while Rickey was with the Pittburgh Pirates.
I would give five stars to the content on the book, but unfortunately the way the book is written I only give three stars. I would love to have a drink at a bar with Genovese and hear all of these stories told to me, but within the structure of a book Genovese storytelling style was hard to read. For one thing, Genovese worked with a lot of people in baseball; players, coaches, other scouts, general managers, owners, etc and I had a tough time keeping up with all of the names. Often there would be a list of names in regard to a particular story and I would get confused which people were important to the story and which were not. I've found in others sports memoirs/autobiographies that the writer often would only reference the important people in a story by name and leave the other people nameless for less confusion. The other thing that was challenging for me, particularly toward the first half of the book, was that a paragraph would be squeezed in about that was an interesting anecdotal story, but it was clunky and distracting from the subject matter of the chapter it was squeezed into.
This book is written by a legend and his unique perspective makes an interesting baseball book that I am glad to have read and I would recommend to baseball fans, particularly those who enjoy reading about the history of baseball.
Thank you to McFarland Publishing, George Genovese & Dan Taylor and LibraryThing Early Reviewers for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

[James Swenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

I'd recommend this book to readers who enjoy both baseball history and memoirs. It's fun to see the author in the locker room, zinging Ty Cobb, or warming up on a minor-league field with Stan Musial, or scouting Bobby Bonds for Branch Rickey. One suspects that in the new Moneyball era, when everything is measurable, high-school games are videotaped and motion-captured, and no one flies under the radar, the role of scouts and the value placed on their subjective judgment will continue to diminish. Certainly, Genovese seems somewhat bitter about the way his own authority had faded by the end of his career.

I guess this is why people read memoirs: a bit of conflict; some inside dirt. In this case, it's fun to see inside the draft process, and we share Genovese's frustration as, in the 1984 draft, his Giants let his top prospects -- Mark McGwire and Greg Maddux -- get away. One gets the feeling that if management had just paid attention, the Giants would have won every game. After a while, this started to wear on me a bit. It really is somewhat startling to read that Genovese advised Kurt Russell to forget pro baseball and stick with acting, and suggested that Derryl Cousins might want to think about working as an umpire, but this book would really be improved by a few stories about "the ones that got away" -- famous players that didn't impress Genovese as high-schoolers, or recommendations that never panned out.

It comes through clearly that Genovese saw himself as an advocate and a mentor to the players he scouted -- whether first-round picks or undrafted free agents -- and as an expert whose ability was dedicated to the success of his organization. This attitude of service, together with seventy years' worth of baseball stories, make me glad I got to hear what he had to say.

[Sheila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting read of George Genovese's life in baseball. He starts as a player whose career is interrupted by WWII. Upon his return he has to overcome an injury he sustain while in the military. When his playing days are over he becomes a coach and manager then finally a scout. He spent most of his career with the Giants. Mr. Genovese had lots of stories to tell, not only of players, but ball fields and front offices.

I enjoyed this book. I learned a lot of what goes on behind the scenes that most of us never think about. I felt like I was sitting down with him and listening to his stories. He had some funny ones and some sad ones. He developed players that others had written off. His success and his methods were shown in the number of players that made the MLB. I could feel his frustrations when players were written off and the Giants would pass over his recommendations, only to see that he was correct in his assessments.

He was one of a kind--compassionate, caring, and could pick winners. This is a good read.

[Shelley Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally got this book for my husband who is a huge baseball fan. I enjoy watching an occasional game, but otherwise don't know much about it. With that said, I love this book! A Scout's Report is how baseball impacted George Genovese's life. The chapters are concise and there is just enough name dropping and action to keep the pages turning. This book made me want to go to more baseball games!