Author Description

Bill Lajoie just had it. When it came to drafting ballplayers and building a World Series club, few in baseball history can match his extraordinary success. The lessons of Lajoie's illustrious career and the brilliance of his philosophy are put to print in Character is Not a Statistic. After a playing career that fell achingly short of the major leagues, Lajoie returned to Detroit to become a teacher in the mid-1960s. But his unyielding passion for baseball and desire to atone for a broken dream pulled him back to the game as a scout. From there, he'd go on to build World Series Championships from scratch by finding players who possessed the very character he lacked as a young athlete. Starting as an area scout for the Cincinnati Reds in 1965, Lajoie later moved up the ladder with the Detroit Tigers and was the architect and general manager of their 1984 World Series crowning. Lajoie would then be instrumental as an assistant GM for two more franchises who dominated their decades with championships and titles; the 1990s Atlanta Braves and the 2000s Boston Red Sox. Perhaps no one alive has scouted more baseball over the last 50 years or has better stories to tell about finding the greats. Though the modern era has seen the depersonalization of scouting via statistics and radar gun readings, Lajoie was immensely successful through five decades by emphasizing what a player had inside him. His belief in a player's humanity and character persists to this day. This book is not only a biography, but a collection of great baseball stories and a manual for the next generation of fans and scouts alike. Lajoie tackles such controversial issues as the Moneyball movement, the importance of a strong manager, scouting for makeup, making trades, preventing pitching injuries, running a farm system, and ranking both the best general managers and scouting directors of the modern era.