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Alexander: Former baseball scouts’ age discrimination suit was inevitable

June 27, 2023

When 17 former baseball scouts filed a class action lawsuit against Major League Baseball in U.S. District Court in Denver last week, claiming age discrimination and charging that older scouts were not only pushed out but were subsequently blacklisted … well, it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

Rick Ingalls said nearly two years ago that this was coming.

Ingalls, 71, a Long Beach resident who scouted for the Angels, Chicago White Sox, Toronto Blue Jays, Seattle Mariners and Cincinnati Reds before he was let go by the Reds in 2018, talked to me then about how, among other things, analytics and technology had become a far higher priority in baseball front offices than the eye test and instincts and assessment of character that were at the heart of traditional scouting.

The sport has retrenched from a player development standpoint, with the reduction of the draft from 60-some rounds to 20 and the pruning of the minor leagues. And as the old ways were left behind, many veteran scouts – like Ingalls – were shoved aside as well.

“All the years I’ve been in this business, and I’ve been in it a long time, and I saw guys (get let go) and they just went away,” Ingalls said in a phone conversation Monday. “There was never, ‘Hey, wait a second. What happened here? Why? Why?’ So I always remembered that, and I thought when it finally happened to me, I said, you know what? I’m not the guy. I’m not going away.

“… We have a lot of guys (who were let go) that absolutely are in dire straits because they’re 50, middle-50s, you know. Where are you going to get another job when you work 25 or 30 years in one industry? Guys are driving Uber to pay for insurance. Guys have lost their houses. … They (the clubs) devastated a lot of lives here for whatever their reasoning is.”

And so here we are. The 17 individuals (including Ingalls) named as plaintiffs in the initial filing averaged 29 years in scouting, and even that average is deceptive. Paul Runge, a former Atlanta Braves player and not the former umpire, was just a scout for three years but had spent decades as a minor league coach, field coordinator and manager. Most of the men on that list had scouting tenures of between 25 and 39 years. The youngest is 55.

So what happens when you give your life to something and then find out it has no more use for you?

“These are employees that have sacrificed their lives for this, who have been in this game their whole life,” said Rick Ragazzo, 63, a scout for the San Francisco Giants, Dodgers and Braves during his 35-year career, in a video disseminated by Kilgore & Kilgore LLC, the Dallas law firm handling the scouts’ case.

“We played, we coached, we scouted. Some of us were in the front office making decisions. That track record should mean something, but I guess it doesn’t. I don’t know if we were allowed to, or if I was allowed to, adapt and become part of the new system, or if it was just something they thought I wasn’t able to do.”

Ted Lekas, 67 and a scout for multiple clubs for 34 years, told the Boston Globe that when he was released by Atlanta last October he was told the rationalization was that “the Braves’ payroll in 2023 was going to be so big, that they needed all the money they could get to finance the salary for the big leaguers.” And he said on a Kilgore & Kilgore video he’d earlier been told on “three different occasions” that he’d be back in 2023.

For what it’s worth, the Braves – part of a publicly traded company – reported income of $588 million in 2022, between the ballclub and the Battery development surrounding Truist Park. Their current 40-man payroll for luxury tax purposes, $242,219,167, is around $28 million higher than it was last year.

All that, and they can’t find a way to keep a scout that might make $100,000 a year?

Lekas also talked in his video about how there’d never been any established criteria for evaluating scouts, and “if you ever ask why you’re let go, the answer is, ‘We’re going in a different direction.’” That has happened a lot; he estimated that since 2015, at least 75 to 100 older scouts have been let go, and maybe 5% found work elsewhere in baseball.

And while there are 17 names in this suit right now, the suit estimates that more than 100 older scouts are part of the affected class. Ingalls said Monday the initial estimate of scouts who might join the suit was anywhere from 50 to 100, and “within a two- or three-day period, we got 20 more guys already.”

The suit alleges that MLB and its clubs, acting in concert, “engaged not only in systematically bringing about the separation from Clubs of Older Scouts to build a workforce of Younger Scouts, but in denying re-employment of Older Scouts by Clubs … based on a false stereotype that Older Scouts lacked the ability to use analytics and engage in video scouting with the same acumen as Younger Scouts.” It claims that the pattern “constitutes unlawful age discrimination” under the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act as well as state anti-discrimination statutes.

MLB’s response to the lawsuit last week was a terse statement: “We do not comment on pending litigation. However, we look forward to refuting these claims in court.”

The prediction here? There will be a settlement, and you can likely use as a measuring stick the $185 million that MLB will pay minor league players to settle a suit alleging violations of federal minimum wage laws, though that disbursement to some 24,000 players has been held up because of an appeal over the percentage to be paid in legal fees.

“Part of me wants a lot of this stuff exposed, but the other part of me wants to get (unemployed scouts) the money as quickly as possible because they need it,” Ingalls said. “They lost salaries. They lost time on their pensions. You know, there’s a lot that went down the tubes. It was gone.

“These are baseball guys that had their baseball identities taken away. And you’re just supposed to go away and say, oh, okay, you know, career’s over? Because of what? Why is your career over when you can still work?”

Why, indeed?

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