SF Giants assistant GM doesn't look good in age discrimination lawsuit

A group of former MLB scouts filed a lawsuit against MLB and all 30 teams earlier this week in Colorado District Court. The lawsuit alleges a league-wide pattern of age discrimination against older scouts. The lawsuit provides anecdotes that two prominent members of the SF Giants, vice president of pro scouting Zack Minasian and assistant general manager Jeremy Shelley, told a pair of the plaintiffs in the case.

The Giants did not respond to a request for comment from Giants Baseball Insider on the filing.

The anecdote involving Shelley is far more eyebrow-raising than the story including Minasian. Per the filing, MLB scouting veteran Rick Ragazzo reached out to Shelley about a job opening in the Giants scouting department and was told: "the Giants will probably 'go younger' or hire internally." If true, Shelley's statement would be pretty compelling evidence that the Giants were engaging in at least some level of age discrimination in their hiring process.

In the filing, Minasian is accused of telling former MLB scout Jeffrey Scholzen that he "didn't know if ownership would allow a new hire because they [the Giants] had some Older Scouts 'ready to retire' from pro scouting and didn’t know if they would be allowed to replace them or not." This claim seems less solidly supportive of an age discrimination claim since Minasian seems to be citing a budgetary restriction in this scenario provided by the plaintiffs.

Nevertheless, the Giants are far from the only team with notable executives named in the filing. Colorado Rockies vice president and assistant general manager Dan Montgomery is accused of asking Ragazzo directly about his age during a job interview.

The lawsuit brings forth a bevy of issues that have made life harder for scouts for years. The lawsuit points out that while no rule explicitly prevents teams from trying to hire away scouts from other organizations, all 30 MLB teams refuse to negotiate with a scout while they are under contract elsewhere without receiving permission from a scout's current employer.

In 2020, MLB instituted a salary offset policy, which prevents a scout who is fired from one team before their contract expires from receiving two salaries if they find another job. The lawsuit also argues that analytics has served as a mechanism for age discrimination. The filing acknowledges that "analytics have worked to some degree" but opines that the league/teams have deployed the term as a dog whistle against older scouts who have valuable baseball knowledge and skills even if they do not have a background in quantitative analysis.

Scouts, like players, exist in a labor monopsony. MLB is the only viable buyer for professional baseball labor in the United States. Thus, the league has a tremendous amount of power to dictate the market. Furthermore, the league's antitrust exemption and the exorbitant wealth of each franchise's ownership groups have only further created a power disparity.

Unlike players, however, scouts have been unable to unionize or collectively bargain at any point in MLB history. Moreover, they have always been paid far less than players and lack notoriety and celebrity. It's a lot easier for MLB to blacklist scouts trying to organize collectively than players.

Whether or not this lawsuit succeeds, it undeniably points to a radical shift in front-office staff over the past few decades. Houston Astros disgraced former general manager Jeff Luhnow and disgraced former assistant general manager Brandon Taubman most notoriously advocated massively cutting scouting staff as a cost-cutting measure.

One of the most underreported dynamics in professional sports is the relationship between top front-office executives and ownership. Executives almost always want to spend more money to improve their organizations. However, they are reliant on ownership's willingness to spend. So, executives often try to placate owners by cutting costs in areas they value less to justify investment elsewhere.

As fewer executives came from traditional scouting backgrounds, and more, like Luhnow, came from Ivy League economics departments, they prioritized expanding analytics departments to hire people with similar backgrounds to themselves. If owners wanted that spending to be offset by cuts elsewhere, scouting departments were an early choice to be slashed.

However, despite what Moneyball or Trouble With The Curve's distorted representation of scouts will tell you, there is a long history to suggest they are good at their jobs. Statistical models are absolutely a valuable tool to identify talented players, but just as scouts could miss on talent, so do quantitative analysis.

The Astros seemed to realize this after Luhnow was fired and began changing course. Now, nearly every team utilizes a more integrated mixed-method approach. Still, that "solution" does not have a frictionless impact on the labor market.

Rather, teams now seem to be building analytics departments that feature people with incredible mathematical abilities AND some level of traditional scouting knowledge alongside scouting departments that feature scouts with quantitative fluency. While many experienced scouts have developed a solid understanding of advanced statistical tools, many lack the degrees of younger applicants. Conveniently, younger applicants are going to be cheaper for teams to hire because of their limited experience and desire to get their foot in the door of the industry.

It's worth noting that two of the Giants' most exciting prospects in the organization, Casey Schmitt (Giants preseason #3 prospect) and Vaun Brown (Giants preseason #6 prospect), would have never been valued where San Francisco drafted them by a model purely looking at their college performances. Schmitt was never able to hit for power during his college career in the Mountain West, and Brown was a 23-year-old fifth-year senior at a Division II program. However, members of the SF Giants organization clearly saw both players' potential, and so far, those decisions have looked incredibly shrewd.

NOTE: The Los Angeles Dodgers re-hired longtime scout Timothy Schmidt after he filed an age discrimination lawsuit in 2021. While that case was solely centered on Schmidt rather than the broader collective/class action filings in this suit, it would seem to lend some credence to the claims in this case.