This is the portion of the summer when scouts across Major League Baseball return to their roots, switching from studying other big-league teams for potential trades to scouring through each others' systems. They're untucking their Hawaiian shirts, radar guns and binoculars in tow, and laying eyes on as many prospects as possible, often riding a single system all the way up from Class A to the bigs.
I ran into one such scout this week, a man I've known and trusted for many years, and he'd just completed such all the way up the Pirates' system for his American League employer.