Brian Reid likes to joke with his wife that he gets paid for his opinion. “Sometimes that doesn’t go over so well,” he admits.
In baseball, though, his opinion carries weight. Reid is an amateur area scout for the New York Mets. From his home in Gilbert, Arizona, he covers the Four Corners states and Las Vegas, watching high school and college players and deciding who might be worth a draft pick. He has been doing it for 25 years, first with the Detroit Tigers and now with the Mets.
“I watch other people’s kids play baseball,” he said, “and they pay me to do it.”
The Part You Can’t Measure
Anyone can spot the obvious physical skills, what scouts call “tools.” Watch a game, and you’ll notice who runs fastest, who throws hardest, and whose swing sounds different. Scouts grade each tool on a 20-to-80 scale, with 50 as major league average. Every team has access to the same statistics and, increasingly, the same data.
What separates good scouts, Reid says, is everything else. “The times I’ve been right and the times I’ve been wrong have been more based on the human,” he told host Tarek Saab. “The character, the makeup, the drive, the aptitude.”
“I get paid for my opinion. Sometimes that doesn’t go over so well.”
– Brian ReiD
He learned that the hard way. Early in his career, he watched an undersized infielder at Arizona State. Coach Pat Murphy kept telling him the kid was the best player on the team. Reid was young and thought scouting was mostly about tools, so he didn’t give the player enough credit. The player was Dustin Pedroia, who went on to become an MVP and a World Series champion.
He just didn’t give the player enough credit. “He had that motor, that drive, that attitude of ‘I’m going to beat you at all costs,’” Reid said. “I whiffed.”
Reading the Dugout
Since then, Reid spends as much time studying people as swings. He talks to coaches and parents, and he jokes that girlfriends “give up the good stuff.” He weighs every source. A club coach who sees a player one weekend a month knows less than the high school coach who is also his gym teacher.
Most of all, he watches. He watches how a player walks back to the dugout after a strikeout. “Nothing more humbling,” he said. He watches whether the player celebrates his teammates and picks up the one who just made an error. He wants to know what a player does between the end of one game and the start of the next.
The players he values most are the ones who come back from an at-bat and tell the dugout what the pitcher is throwing. During a brief stint in the corporate world, Reid noticed he gravitated toward coworkers who acted the same way. “I don’t have to push him down to make myself look better,” he said.
Tarek, who has built a business largely by hiring people from outside the precious metals industry, saw the connection right away. The qualities Reid scouts for, a sense of urgency, teamwork, and the willingness to run hard on every play, are the same ones employers look for. And both check social media. Reid likes seeing a player cheer on a friend’s success. He also notices the posts at 2 a.m.
Moneyball and the Crystal Ball
Most people’s idea of scouting comes from Moneyball, the film about Oakland’s data-driven roster building. Reid loves it, and his father knew the real Billy Beane. But as a baseball purist, he notes what the movie skipped: an MVP-candidate shortstop and a strong pitching rotation. In his view, analytics are best at filling the last pieces of a roster, not building the foundation.
“Just chase the passion.”
– Brian Reid
The data has changed his job anyway. Prospects are ranked online by age 12. Players post their own highlight videos. Reid now has years of information on a player instead of a 30-minute meeting. Still, the core of the job hasn’t changed. He has to look at a 16-year-old and picture him at 26, on TV, helping win a championship. “A lot of times it’s rubbing a crystal ball,” he said.
Chasing the Passion
Reid’s own path wasn’t a straight line. After college, his mother asked what he loved. Baseball and movies, he said. Since baseball was over, she told him to try movies. He moved to Los Angeles, taught himself filmmaking with a former teammate, and made the horror film Silo Killer in the Arizona desert on his own credit card. It earned enough for a sequel. Then his father, a 52-year-old baseball veteran, suggested he might be good at scouting.
This year, at the draft, Reid received a lifetime pass from the Commissioner of Baseball for 25 years of service. He is the third member of his family to earn one.
His advice to young players is the same lesson that runs through his career: chase the passion. Most won’t reach the majors. But a player who gives everything, gets humbled, and gets back up “becomes extremely employable,” Reid said. “That guy becomes an outstanding husband, and he becomes an incredible father.”
Watch Brian Reid explain how scouts find the next generation of major leaguers on Episode 53 of Y’all Street.
