SF Giants among teams accused of age discrimination in scouts' lawsuit
The San Francisco Giants told a now-63-year-old scout that the team would “probably ‘go younger’ or hire internally,” according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District in Denver. The suit, the existence of which was reported by the Los Angeles Times, comes from a collective of former professional baseball scouts alleging age discrimination by MLB and all 30 of its teams.
The suit claims that teams, among other things:
- “Blacklisted” scouts in their 50s and 60s.
- Used the pandemic and the rise of analytics as “an ongoing pretext for coordinated and systematic discrimination based on age.”
- Coordinated to restrict scouts from moving freely among teams and jobs.
Mitch Abeita is one of the lawyers representing the scouts.
“The overall financial position of Major League Baseball, from a revenue standpoint, is a multibillion dollar corporation and conglomerate of corporations,” Abeita told SFGATE in an interview. “It’s interesting that there was a mass exodus of particular individuals, like scouts, and then a refusal not to bring them back after the pandemic subsided.”
The Giants are named in two specific allegations. In August 2020, the suit alleges, Giants VP of professional scouting Zack Minasian told 55-year-old scout Jeffrey Scholzen that the team had a group of scouts who were “ready to retire” and that he wasn’t sure whether ownership would replace them. (Minasian is the brother of Angels GM Perry Minasian.)
The more damning allegation comes from later that year. The suit recounts a conversation between Rick Ragazzo, now 63, and the Giants’ Jeremy Shelley, the team’s senior VP and assistant GM, when the team was looking for a scout. “Shelley stated that the Giants will probably ‘go younger’ or hire internally,” the suit says.
Ragazzo was a scout for the Giants from 1990 to 2007 before joining the Dodgers as vice president of pro scouting/player personnel. His last job was as a major league scout for the Atlanta Braves before that team “dissolved the department” and “blamed it on COVID,” Ragazzo told the LA Times.
The Oakland A’s were also named in the suit, but only as an organization that failed to hire plaintiffs after contact with them.
The Giants and MLB did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Source: SFGATE
