The Art of Scouting delves into the secretive world of hockey prospecting, a world more akin to Cold War-era spying than a casual day in the stands. Scouts decide whether a player has the talent to make the final step to the NHL-or not-but what they do and how they do it are a mystery to most fans. Shane Malloy is one of the first media personalities to be welcomed into the world of scouting and brings to hockey fans an enlightening and fascinating narrative that explains the culture, history, science and art of hockey scouting. Malloy's unique experience-combined with interviews featuring scouts, coaches and hockey executives- will give readers a true understanding and appreciation for what scouts do and how they do it, what it really takes to make it to the NHL, and how to watch the game like a scout. Praise for The Art of Scouting: "If you love hockey but wonder how teams are built and what goes into scouting, then this book is a gem." — Kelly Hrudey, Hockey Night in Canada Analyst "The work that Shane has done is based on knowledge and diligence. We have great respect for this project as it has tremendous substance to it. An excellent source of information." —Doug Wilson, Executive Vice President and General Manager, San Jose Sharks "If you have ever been at a hockey game and seen the scouts in the corner and wondered what they do, how they do it and why they do it, The Art of Scouting by Shane Malloy will take you inside their world." —Bob McKenzie, TSN Hockey Insider "For anyone fascinated by player evaluation and what goes into it, this is a must-read. Interesting perspectives and a good cast of characters. Thought-provoking and entertaining." —Peter Loubardias, Hockey Broadcaster,Rogers Sportsnet "The Art of Scouting provides readers with a behind-the-scenes view of the sport's lifeblood...scouting and the people that do it...A great read for any hockey fan." —Brad Treliving, Vice President and Assistant General Manager, Phoenix Coyotes

The heart and soul of Kansas City's major league baseball franchise is a 5-foot 6 and impeccably dressed man you probably haven't heard of. You don't know the Royals history and successes until you know him. His name is Art Stewart and he helped bring Bo Jackson to the Royals on a hunch. He fell in love with baseball when he snuck into his attic and found his late father's baseball gloves, and his seven decades on the wild ride of major league baseball make him a living, breathing, storytelling personification of America's pastime. From George Brett to Frank White, Bret Saberhagen to Bo Jackson, Carlos Beltran to Eric Hosmer, the Royals' history is Art's history. Art just tells it better than anyone else.

The Art of Scouting delves into the secretive world of hockey prospecting, a world more akin to Cold War-era spying than a casual day in the stands. These are the people who decide whether someone has the talent to make the final step to the NHL—or not, and the future success of their organizations depends heavily on their skill. Wary of outsiders, these scouts keep tight-lipped about what they know and spread misinformation to their rivals. Shane Malloy, who has been covering hockey prospects, scouting, and player development for the past decade, is the first media personality to be welcomed into this world and brings to hockey fans an enlightening and fascinating narrative about the culture, history, science and art of hockey scouting. Through expert interviews and Malloy's unique experience, readers will gain a true understanding and appreciation for what scouts do and how they do it, what it really takes to make it to the NHL, and how to watch the game like a scout.

"Considered the bible of scouting techniques" according to the Los Angeles Times, Football Scouting Methods explains the basic scouting strategies and insights of author Steve Belichick. He was widely viewed as the ablest football scout of his time and coached at the U.S. Naval Academy for 33 years; his son is New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, a three-time Super Bowl winner. When Steve Belichick died in November 2005, the New York Times headline cited him as "Coach Who Wrote the Book on Scouting," and quoted Houston Texans General Manager Charley Casserly calling Football Scouting Methods "the best book on scouting he had ever read." Joe Bellino, Navy's Heisman Trophy winner in 1960, told the Times that Steve Belichick "was a genius. On Monday nights, he would give us his scouting reports, and even though we were playing powerhouses, I always felt we were prepared because he found a way for us to win." In recent years Football Scouting Methods has been one of the top ten most sought out-of-print books; used copies have been quite scarce. This reissue edition makes the original 1962 text available once again in exact facsimile. The book covers how to scout opponents, recognize defenses, analyze offenses, discover "tip-offs" that reveal the opponent's plays, compose a useful report, self-scout, and conduct postgame analysis. "Steve Belichick taught many younger men how to scout and how to watch film and how to prepare their teams for the next week's game," David Halberstam noted in the Washington Post, and his best student was his own son Bill Belichick, "one of whose greatest skills as a coach to this day remains his ability to analyze other teams, figuring out both their strengths and their vulnerabilities, and shrewdly deciding how to take away from them that which they most want to do." When CBS asked Bill Belichick to name his favorite book, he replied "Well, I've got to go with my dad's. Football Scouting Methods. I'd have to go with that."

“One of this continent’s master craftsmen of sporting prose” (Sports Illustrated) and three-time National Magazine Award-winner Gare Joyce goes undercover to learn the secrets of NHL scouts. Veteran sports writer Gare Joyce realizes a long-held secret ambition as he spends a full season embedded as a hockey scout. Joyce’s year on the hockey beat is a steep learning curve for him; NHL scouts spend each season gathering information on players fighting it out to break into the world of professional hockey. They watch hundreds of games, speak to scores of players, parents, team-mates and other scouts, amassing profiles on all the top contenders. It’s a form of risk assessment–is this young hopeful deserving of a multi-million dollar contract?–and it can be a tough and thankless task. Scouts are ground into the game, picking up nuances of play that even the most committed fan would miss, but they are looking at more than just how well a kid can play. And come the final draft, only a tiny percentage of their full year’s work might matter. Examining the amount of information gathered on the under-eighteen hopefuls, the scrutiny to which they are subjected, and the differences between the rigour of American and Canadian junior teams, Joyce opens a window on the life and methods of an NHL scout and penetrates the mysterious world of scouting as no one has before.

Depictions of the Boy Scouts in paintings by Norman Rockwell, 1913-1976, and by Joseph Csatari, 1977-2009.

"...an engaging and enlightening account from which we all can benefit."—The Wall Street Journal A better way to combat knee-jerk biases and make smarter decisions, from Julia Galef, the acclaimed expert on rational decision-making. When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a "soldier" mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe—and shoot down those we don't. But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a "scout" mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout's goal isn't to defend one side over the other. It's to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what's actually true. In The Scout Mindset, Galef shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn't that they're smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It's a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world—which anyone can learn. With fascinating examples ranging from how to survive being stranded in the middle of the ocean, to how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence, to how superforecasters outperform CIA operatives, to Reddit threads and modern partisan politics, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.

An in-depth look at the intersection of judgment and statistics in baseball Scouting and scoring are considered fundamentally different ways of ascertaining value in baseball. Scouting seems to rely on experience and intuition, scoring on performance metrics and statistics. In Scouting and Scoring, Christopher Phillips rejects these simplistic divisions. He shows how both scouts and scorers rely on numbers, bureaucracy, trust, and human labor to make sound judgments about the value of baseball players. Tracing baseball’s story from the nineteenth century to today, Phillips explains that the sport was one of the earliest fields to introduce numerical analysis, and new methods of data collection were supposed to enable teams to replace scouting with scoring. But that’s not how things turned out. From the invention of official scorers and Statcast to the creation of the Major League Scouting Bureau, Scouting and Scoring reveals the inextricable connections between human expertise and data science, and offers an entirely fresh understanding of baseball.