Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation

In those first terrible days, amid all the hugs and tears, all the flowers and casseroles, the telephone rang yet again. This was not another condolence call, a relative or friend comforting Prairie Wilson after her husband, Brian, died of a heart attack at 33. This was a bank official, calling to let her know $20,000 had just shown up in the memorial fund established to support her and the three young girls her husband left behind. Brian Wilson worked as a scout for the Cincinnati Reds.

Jerry Hairston Jr. will call it a career if he wins another World Series ring this year. “If we win the World Series, I guarantee you I'm going to retire,” Hairston said. “You can't get any better than that.” Hairston, the Dodgers' 36-year-old utilityman, won a World Series with the New York Yankees in 2009. “It would be cool to say I won one with the Yankees and won one with the Dodgers,” he said. But Hairston, whose family was honored Saturday at the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation gala, will first have to come back from a hip operation that cut short his 2012 season.

Few couples have given more to professional baseball than Manny and Margarita Mota. And we're not talking simply about Manny's 20-year playing career, in which he made an All-Star team and broke the record for most pinch-hits. Nor are we talking solely about Mota's 30 seasons as a Dodgers coach, the longest tenure of any coach since the team moved to Los Angeles. If anything, that was just the start. Because the Motas have also given five of their six sons to the game, sending two to the major leagues.

He was a baseball player with a contradictory name. In a 17-year Hall of Fame career with the Cincinnati Reds, Johnny Bench almost never sat on one. Bench was a workhorse. Starting in 1967, and becoming arguably the best catcher ever, he played in 2,158 games, an average of 127 a season. That's a lot of squatting. He had his ways of communicating when enough was enough. "We were playing the Dodgers in Cincinnati one time, and the game the night before had gone on until something like 1 in the morning," Bench says.

Jerry Hairston Jr. will call it a career if he wins another World Series ring this year. “If we win the World Series, I guarantee you I'm going to retire,” Hairston said. “You can't get any better than that.” Hairston, the Dodgers' 36-year-old utilityman, won a World Series with the New York Yankees in 2009. “It would be cool to say I won one with the Yankees and won one with the Dodgers,” he said. But Hairston, whose family was honored Saturday at the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation gala, will first have to come back from a hip operation that cut short his 2012 season.

Baseball scouts, to borrow from David Mamet, are the guys behind the guys behind the guys. They log untold miles searching for young talent, signing ball players and hoping their diamonds in the rough make it to a big league diamond. But like anybody else, they can fall on hard times. That's where the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation steps up to the plate. On Jan. 10, it was a dinner plate.

He was a baseball player with a contradictory name. In a 17-year Hall of Fame career with the Cincinnati Reds, Johnny Bench almost never sat on one. Bench was a workhorse. Starting in 1967, and becoming arguably the best catcher ever, he played in 2,158 games, an average of 127 a season. That's a lot of squatting. He had his ways of communicating when enough was enough. "We were playing the Dodgers in Cincinnati one time, and the game the night before had gone on until something like 1 in the morning," Bench says.

Former agent Dennis Gilbert, who has spent the last three years working as a special assistant to Chicago White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, interviewed for the Dodger general manager job Saturday. Gilbert, a Los Angeles native and longtime Dodger follower who was part of a Jeff Smulyan-led group that failed in its bid to purchase the Dodgers last year, was recommended for the position by Reinsdorf.

Jim Palmer choked up when talking about his autistic son. Fellow Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson Jenkins paid tribute to the Philadelphia Phillies scout who signed him. Tom Lasorda showed he could still make a room full of people laugh. But Vin Scully was the undisputed star on Saturday night at the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation's annual fundraising dinner. The 1,000-plus people who packed the banquet hall at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza stood and applauded when Bud Selig introduced Scully, who received a leadership award named after the baseball commissioner.

The 15-year-old was as thin as a bat and about as smooth as sandpaper. But the scout saw something special in his hands, in his arms. So he carved an infield into a corner of the cow pasture outside his front door and hit the boy 300 grounders a day through the spring rainstorms and the oppressive summer heat.

Few couples have given more to professional baseball than Manny and Margarita Mota. And we're not talking simply about Manny's 20-year playing career, in which he made an All-Star team and broke the record for most pinch-hits. Nor are we talking solely about Mota's 30 seasons as a Dodgers coach, the longest tenure of any coach since the team moved to Los Angeles. If anything, that was just the start. Because the Motas have also given five of their six sons to the game, sending two to the major leagues.

In those first terrible days, amid all the hugs and tears, all the flowers and casseroles, the telephone rang yet again. This was not another condolence call, a relative or friend comforting Prairie Wilson after her husband, Brian, died of a heart attack at 33. This was a bank official, calling to let her know $20,000 had just shown up in the memorial fund established to support her and the three young girls her husband left behind. Brian Wilson worked as a scout for the Cincinnati Reds.

Baseball scouts, to borrow from David Mamet, are the guys behind the guys behind the guys. They log untold miles searching for young talent, signing ball players and hoping their diamonds in the rough make it to a big league diamond. But like anybody else, they can fall on hard times. That's where the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation steps up to the plate. On Jan. 10, it was a dinner plate.

In the front offices of major league clubs, the statistics-vs.-scouts debate ended long ago. No club today could imagine winning without tapping the resources of the increasingly sophisticated statistical tools available as well as the experience of scouts trained to look at a kid today and project his tomorrows. Yet that debate was very much alive in 2003, sparked by the book "Moneyball," and by author Michael Lewis' portrayal of how Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane and assistant Paul DePodesta challenged the hegemony of the scouting community.