This rambling, unfocused book is a love letter to the baseball scouts of the 20th century and the game they helped build. Using nine different scouts from different eras as a starting point, the book takes off from there and looks at players famous and not and how they helped shape baseball from the early 1900s into the 21st century.

You won't read this book for its brilliant prose or its focus on any particular person or theme. The author introduces a scout, and then takes off from there, giving their influences in the game and how they got their start, then how they got into scouting, and from there branches out into their scouting finds and their careers, flitting from one place to another much how a hummingbird flits from flower to flower. It's a sampler of baseball history, really.

The book does not focus much on the ins and outs of scouting, and despite the title does not look at how scouting has changed in today's world of travel teams and video. This is a look at the past, and how things used to be done. This is nostalgia, a look at a time gone by and how things were back then. This is about the Yankees and Cardinals of yesteryear, about the plethora of minor leagues in the 1950s, and how things used to be.

I noticed several factual errors in the text, and some repetitiveness in the writing, things which are not usually seen in books from University of Nebraska Press books which usually sport better editing. This book could have done with a good fact-checking pass, without harming the narrative. I downgrade the book a bit because of those flaws.

Still, if you buy this book, you buy it more for the trip down memory lane, or to learn about a piece of baseball's past. It is fun and enjoyable for those things. That is what books like this are for.