THE SCOUT

Kline’s last trip home to the Phoenix suburbs had been . . . well, wait. When was that? “Couple weeks ago, I guess,” he said. Unimportant, really. What mattered was the first baseman from Kentucky and the four at-bats Kline just saw. What mattered was the bed at the Atlanta Airport Marriott Gateway, a 5:15 a.m. alarm, a tram through the darkness to the terminal and Delta 1543 to Greensboro, N.C. What mattered was the next day, the next ballpark, the right-hander from the University of Maryland and the reliever from the University of Virginia that waited there.
“The hardest part of this job is getting to the job,” Kline said. “Once I’m at the ballpark, I’m kind of at peace.”

Kline wore jeans, a Columbia PFG fishing shirt, an Under Armour baseball hat, reading glasses when he made notes, wraparound shades when he didn’t. “Total slob,” he said. Only his title is fancy: Washington Nationals Assistant General Manager and Vice President of Scouting Operations.

Cross all that out. He’s a scout. During this time, in late May, there are no more important people in the Nationals’ organization — not Stephen Strasburg, not Bryce Harper — than Kline and the 17 full-time scouts, plus two part-timers, he oversees. The Nationals played that night in Pittsburgh, earning their millions. The amateur draft was two weeks off, so Kline drove east into the night, searching for more players.

During the season, major leaguers live baseball day-to-day, and each evening can bring with it exhilaration — a rally-killing strikeout, a walk-off hit, a victory, with everyone lining up to high-five in front of 30,000 or 40,000 in the stands and hundreds of thousands more on their couches.

Scouts live that same grind in the shadows. The exhilaration is subtle and would scarcely be recognized by people outside their insular world. No one knows about all the trips to Weather.com, wondering if a high schooler’s game is going to be rained out, if itineraries must be juggled midstream to make sure no day passes without seeing a game. No one knows about arriving at a college campus on a Friday with the singular goal of seeing the closer then waiting all weekend before the manager finally decides to use him on Sunday. No one knows about the time Kline was with the Arizona Diamondbacks on a one-year contract, fighting for his job. He rented a hotel room in Texas for a month, drove to see players all over the state, then headed up Interstate 55 toward the Arkansas-Tennessee border.

There, a tractor-trailer truck rear-ended his Crown Victoria, the company car. He dusted himself off, tied the trunk shut with a shoelace and got it to a shop. He rented another car, and kept driving. Days later, the phone rang. It was his boss, Mike Rizzo, then the scouting director in Arizona, now the Nationals’ general manager.

“Where are you?” Rizzo asked.

“Kent, Ohio,” Kline said.

“What the hell are you doing in Kent, Ohio?” Rizzo said.

Well, there was this right-hander, you see, a kid named Dirk Hayhurst, who played for Kent State. And he has a teammate, too. We probably should see him.

“Get your [butt] home right now,” Rizzo ordered.

Kline hardly realized it, but he’d been gone for almost two months. Most scouts have a story like that. Kline has 1.2 million Marriott points. He once called Southwest wondering whether he had enough miles to buy his daughter a roundtrip ticket; the agent told him he had enough miles for 35 roundtrips. The profession does not marry ideally with self-preservation, nor does it marry ideally with, well, marriage.

“I missed a lot,” Kline said, thinking of his 24-year-old son and 21-year-old daughter. “A lot.”

And yet: “People spend their whole life trying to find the one thing you love doing. I’ve found it. I don’t need to do that.”

He is 52, long divorced, and in January quit chewing tobacco after 30 years. Almost immediately, he added 20 pounds to his 6-foot-4 frame. He can flip through his iPhone to show a grandfatherly allotment of photos of his grandson, nearly 3, smiling broadly at each one. His next trip home would come on Saturday morning, to be there for his daughter’s birthday.
But before then, there were still 60 miles of interstate to cover in darkness, still another flight to catch. Other scouts from other clubs would see the right-hander from Maryland, the reliever from Virginia. Kline had to get there, too.

“It’s a lot like the territorial salesman, where you have an area that you control,” Rizzo said. “You run it. You need to know every in and out of that area — every high school coach, every college coach, every player and every player’s family. You have to be a self-starting type of guy, and you have to be willing to spend a lot of time alone. And then you pack your car up for about a month at a time, and you just drive.”

The area scouts, in industry lingo, raise a flag to get the cross-checkers in to see players, a process that takes all spring. But when Kline pulled his rental car into the parking lot outside NewBridge Bank Park in Greensboro for the ACCtournament, he thought he knew who he wanted to see: Maryland right-hander Jake Stinnett and Virginia closer Nick Howard, whose teams would face each other in the day’s first game.

Kline met Gonzales in the concourse behind home plate. He bought a 32-ounce soda. “I got to go home so I can get some new clothes,” Gonzales said, and they went over notes from the games Gonzales had seen the day before.

When Stinnett took the mound, a couple dozen radar guns rose in the seats behind the plate. Kline doesn’t carry one, because he can always find someone to help him out. He poached Stinnett’s first fastball off another scout: 94 mph.

He pulled out a small notebook from his pocket. Since he began his travels in February, Kline had written reports on more than 150 players, all of whom he believed could play in the majors. Going back generations, scouts have graded on a 20-to-80 scale, with 50 being an average for a major leaguer. Pitchers will be graded on their delivery and specific pitches, with notes about whether they throw easily or with maximum effort. (The former is preferable.) Hitters are graded on the five basic tools: hitting for average, hitting for power, defense, arm and speed.

Kline never rates anyone as an 80, unless it’s on pure speed, like former Nationals minor leaguer Billy Burns, who has since been traded to Oakland. He rarely hands out a 70, with the arm of current Nationals infielder Danny Espinosa an exception.

“If I put a 60 on a tool, I’m saying he’s going to be above average,” Kline said. “If he exceeds those expectations, great.”

By the seventh inning, Maryland held a lead over Virginia, and the scouts’ chances of seeing Howard were dwindling. Kline peeked at the radar gun a couple rows up after another Stinnett fastball: 89. He was tiring. Two innings later, Maryland’s closer struck out a Virginia hitter for the final out of a 7-6 victory. Howard never made it off the bench.

“Oh well,” Kline said. “There’s always tomorrow.”

Duke and Georgia Tech played next. The Blue Devils don’t traditionally provide many players for the draft, and the Yellow Jackets endured a bit of a down year. Dozens of scouts left the stadium, maybe catching a break before Miami played Clemson in a sexier matchup at night. Kline grabbed a cheeseburger from the concession stand (a “30” of a burger on the scouting scale, he said) and he and Gonzales took seats behind the plate. Who knew what they might see?

“Rizz is always on us,” Kline said. “ ‘There are big leaguers out there. You can find a big leaguer in the 30th round. Go do it.’ ”

By 6 p.m., he wore his reading glasses over his shades, checking his phone and his notes. And in front of him, a Duke pitcher named Drew Van Orden stifled Georgia Tech, taking a 6-0 lead into the bottom of the ninth. “Finish it up, big boy,” Kline said. When Van Orden did, allowing five hits without a walk while striking out eight, Kline and Gonzales had added something to their file they didn’t have when the day began — a senior right-hander with slightly above-average major league stuff, working his way up their draft board.
“Learned something today,” Kline said.

Nats get their man in draft

The Nationals’ war room sits on the field level of Nationals Park, down a concrete corridor from the Presidents Club and around a bend from the home clubhouse, a converted conference room that normally hosts pre- and postgame news conferences for the manager. At 8:30 p.m. on June 5, nearly two dozen Nationals staffers sat behind eight tables. The only sound came from one of the three televisions, all of which carried the first round of Major League Baseball’s 2014 draft.

Kline and Rizzo sat at the front table, their backs facing the room. On the wall in front of them hung two whiteboards, each carefully constructed. On the left were the Nationals’ top 100 players, ranked in order, each with his own magnetic card. On the right, a breakdown by position — right-handers in order, left-handers in order, infielders in order, etc.

Kline wore a purple dress shirt and tie, and the jacket from the only suit he owns hung on the back of his chair. Folded in his wallet was a single sheet of paper from the desk at the Courtyard by Marriott/Navy Yard. Kline, Gonzales, Zona, Baca and Costello had all been holed up there for more than a week, walking from the hotel to the war room, from the war room to the hotel, and back again (though Baca left town before the draft to attend his son’s high school graduation).

Three days before the draft, Kline scratched two names on that sheet of paper and tucked it away. He always did something like this, a test of how well he knew the draft. The Nationals picked 18th in the first round.
“In your mind,” Kline said, “you know who you’re going to take.”

When Kline and the other scouts arrived in Washington on May 28, each had his own draft board in mind. But they had to build a single list, one that would serve as their unwavering guide not just through the first round, but through 40 rounds over three days. Because of that, Rizzo delivers a message before they even walk into the room: “Leave your ego at the door, and have a thick skin.” Stick up for the players you believe in, but be prepared to hear pushback, and more.

“I’ve had guys go nose-to-nose, and we’ve had punches thrown,” Rizzo said. “All that stuff happens.”

But by the time the draft began, at 7 p.m., the arguments had petered out. “Your board is your board,” Kline said, and they would follow it. The entire front office filled the room — Doug Harris and Mark Scialabba from player development in one corner, assistant general manager Bryan Minniti and director of baseball operations Adam Cromie at another back table, Gonzales alongside Harolyn Cardozo, Rizzo’s take-care-of-everybody special assistant. When Arizona picked at No. 16, there was nothing above a whisper. The only thing that separated the Nationals from their pick — the pick Kline and his staff had worked a year to make — was the Kansas City Royals. The TV screen showed an image of Art Stewart, a longtime scout with the Royals who represented the club in New York, where the draft was held.

“Whaddya got, Art?” Rizzo said, standing up. Kline peered over his reading glasses. And then the room filled with the voice of Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball. Selig announced the Royals would take lefty Brandon Finnegan of Texas Christian University, then said, “The Washington Nationals have the next pick, and they are now on the clock.” Before he finished the sentence, Rizzo was walking to a phone across the room, calling New York with his pick.

“He doesn’t sleep much, and he thinks of nothing else until the third day of the draft,” Rizzo said earlier, “and then he’ll collapse.”

Kline eventually got up and fist-bumped Rizzo before shaking hands around the room. “Congratulations,” Harris said. Cardozo, who overlooks neither a person nor a detail, began tossing ice cream sandwiches to scouts and front office members, a junior-high-style celebration. And Kline reached into his wallet for that piece of paper from the Courtyard.

The first name read “Freeland,” left-hander Kyle from the University of Evansville who had gone eighth overall to the Colorado Rockies. The second name: “Fedde.”

“I knew he was going to fall to us,” Kline said.

Howard, the Virginia closer, went with the next pick to Cincinnati. Reed, a first-round talent in Kline’s mind, fell — but not far enough for the Nationals, because Houston took him with the first pick of the second round. The next day, in the fifth round, with the 154th pick in the draft, the Nationals took a right-hander from Duke named Drew Van Orden.

And on Sunday, Kline flew home to Phoenix. He watched a movie on the way and said he’d decompress for a week. He was kidding himself.

“I won’t be able to,” he said. “I get too stir-crazy.”

So the plan was to see the Nationals’ minor-league affiliates, evaluate his own work from previous drafts. Then an endless list of games, the Cape Cod League and the Area Code Games and more. The 2015 draft was almost exactly a year off. The work, though, begins anew, because there’s another flight to be boarded, another car to be rented, another player to be seen. Always.