Bo Osborne: baseball scout of a vanishing breed
There is a table in the media dining room at Turner Field that looks like any other table, except this table is more like that neighborhood tree house where secrets are kept.
This one time, you are invited to sit at the table, which is like getting invited into the inner sanctum and it can be illuminating.
“Look at the guy who takes the big, full swing. He is slow out of the box because of that full swing. But watch him get from first to third. Much faster. Don’t underestimate his speed.”
“Look at [Brian] McCann and how much quicker he is coming out of there throwing to second base. He must have worked on it in the offseason. He’s harder to run on.”
Many look, but don’t see. Larry “Bo” Osborne, who has been in baseball for 57 years, just shrugs because he sees that full swing or that quicker release.
Osborne, 74, is an advance scout for the San Francisco Giants and his job is to pick up on this and this and that, write it down and fax it to the Giants for manager Bruce Bochy to put it to use.
"Garrett Anderson, who played left field for the Braves in 2009, was an anxious hitter. He hit balls out in front of the plate and was susceptible to off-speed pitches."
"Chipper Jones is one of the best at looking for a particular pitch in a particular part of the plate. Some hitters guess. Jones doesn’t guess."
And what of McCann and his quicker response to the base stealer?
Down on the field before a Braves game, Glenn Hubbard, the Braves first base coach, nods his head and says that is absolutely correct. McCann is quicker to second because he did not just vacation in the offseason.
The visitor sits and listens and learns because the privileged information keeps flowing. Sometimes, near the trade deadline in July, the rope ladder to the tree house is pulled up because that is a sensitive time of the season.
Osborne has a pile of scouting reports from when he worked as an amateur scout for the Giants. He was a national cross-checker of high school and college players, which means he trailed behind the area scouts and regional scouts to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to their evaluations.
Sixteen years ago, Osborne settled in as the Giants’ advance scout and became a regular at Braves home games. He keeps charts of tendencies of managers and holes in a hitter’s swing.
Will the Giants managers call and say thanks for a kernel of information that helped decide a game?
“No,” Osborne said. “They have a job to do. I have a job to do. We leave it at that.”
Osborne’s baseball career will end in the town where it started; he first played ball at West Fulton High School (Class of 1953). Osborne slugged a home run at Ponce de Leon Park, the Atlanta Crackers Field, when he was a junior in high school. He was drafted by the Tigers and played six years in the bigs.
Osborne is part of a vanishing breed. According to Bruce Benedict, the former Braves catcher and current advance scout for the Cardinals, just 15 or 16 of the 30 major league teams have advance scouts. Those who don’t have advance men use video and computer systems and track tendencies through statistics.
Benedict shakes his head from side to side in dismay. Can the video machine hear the whispers at the ballpark about the player with the sore wrist who can’t get through an inside fastball?
“You need the scout on the ground because the stats don’t tell you how the guy goes to his left or his right, how he charges the ball, how well he plays when he is in a slump,” Benedict said. “Stats don’t talk to the radio guys or the TV guys, stats don’t talk to other scouts that are at the game.
“Stats don’t talk about little injuries that might affect the guy.”
Can the stats tell you who’s hot and who’s not? Perhaps. But suppose a player has made eight outs in 12 at-bats. Will the stats tell you he hit the ball on the barrel six of those at-bats and the ball was just caught? Can the stats tell you who to bunt the ball to in a tough spot and who wants to take the easy out or make a play on the lead runner?
It gets tricky for the advance scout. Suppose you spot the hitter’s weak spot. That’s great, but what if you don’t have a pitcher who can effectively exploit it?
“The hardest thing is to try and see what’s on your staff and try and apply it to his weakness,” Benedict said. “Sometimes that doesn’t add up very well. You got to find another way. That’s what you have to find out during a particular game, whether your staff can pitch to their hitter’s particular weakness.”
Frank Wren, the general manager of the Braves, said whether a club has an advance scout is more up to the manager’s needs and wants. The Braves subscribe to some scouting services, such as Inside Edge and Baseball Information Systems, but they also use the talents of advance scout Bobby Wine.
“To some managers, they want feet-on-the-ground type of information the series prior to us playing a team, so they get the latest and greatest with somebody in the park,” Wren said. “With others, they are satisfied with getting the video and having it broken down and analyzed.”
