Cast members

Usage examples of players.

A few years earlier, professional baseball players had been granted free agency by a court of law, and, after about two seconds of foot-shuffling, baseball owners put prices on players that defied the old commonsensical notions of what a baseball player should be paid.

The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball.

As a freshman in high school he was brought up by his coach, over the angry objections of the older players, to pitch the last varsity game of the season.

Word was that the Mets had winnowed their short list to two players, Billy and a Los Angeles high school player named Darryl Strawberry.

The scouts adored high school players, and they especially adored high school pitchers.

Paul would be able to say less than a year later, Saarloos is one of only two players from the 2001 draft pitching in the big leagues.

The treatment of amateur players is the most glaring of the many violations of free market principles in Major League Baseball.

One was age: with rare exceptions the new scouting directors toss all high school players immediately onto the dumping ground, leaving the younger scouts who spent their days following them wondering why they bothered.

The second group, maybe four hundred players, they parse further by position.

But before they do, they turn their attention from eliminating players to selecting them.

Billy takes the names of the players the old scouts have fallen in love with, and picks apart their flaws.

Erik Kubota, scouting director, holds a ranked list of all the amateur baseball players in the country.

There were fifteen hundred draft-eligible players in North America alone that he would rather own than this misshapen catcher.

You could project college players with greater certainty than you could project high school players.

But a century later the statistic was still being used, unaided by any other, when anyone with eyes could see that balls hit at big league players were a trivial detail in a bigger picture.