I have the best job in baseball. – Adam Hislop
From the Department of Best Jobs Ever, we present Adam Hislop.
He watches baseball games for a living.
Specifically, he’s a Major League Baseball scout in Asia, but that only begins to tell the story. He is a former engineer who quit his job in Salt Lake City seven years ago, moved to Taiwan with no job prospects and talked his way into a full-time scouting position with the Oakland A’s.
He had no real qualifications for the job. He had never coached or managed a team. He had no playing career to speak of, unless you count a year at College of Eastern Utah. But here he is, scouting baseball talent in Korea, China, Japan, Australia and of course Taiwan.
“It’s a lot of fun,” says Hislop, who’s 36. “I have the opportunity to travel and watch baseball, which is what I always wanted to do.”
He watches more than 100 games a year, but his assignments rarely take him away from home more than a few days. That’s because most of the games in Asia occur in national and international tournaments, bringing all the players to centralized locations and minimizing travel for scouts. Bullet trains and one-hour flights to the various countries in his domain mean Hislop can be home with his wife Nicole and their three children most nights. Most scouts in the U.S. are on the road continually.
“I have the best job in baseball,” says Hislop.
Hislop, who grew up in Logan, has always been drawn to stats and baseball. As a boy, he pored over stats in Baseball Weekly and Baseball America. His father, Craig, was the sports information director at Utah State, and Adam grew up studying the media guides his father produced for Aggie teams.
“Baseball was always his sport,” says Craig. “He just always had a passion for it.”
Hislop played baseball at Logan High and then looked for a college that would let him continue to play the game. Dennis Udy, who founded the Rocky Mountain School of Baseball decades ago, helped him find a spot on the roster at CEU. “Dennis really helped me and allowed a kid like me to cultivate a love for the game,” says Hislop. “I was begging for a college to let me play. I couldn’t hit; I just wanted to stay as close to the game for as long as possible.”
After a year at CEU, he served a mission for the Mormon Church in Taiwan from 1998-2000, and while he was there he connected with people through a mutual interest. If people were reluctant to talk about religion, he talked about baseball with them. At the time, the country was buzzing with news about countryman Chin-Feng Chen, who became the first Taiwanese player to sign with an MLB team (the Dodgers).
“I got a crash course in the baseball world there,” says Hislop. “I realized it was a market Major League Baseball was aware of but didn’t have the resources to tap into it.”
He completed a degree in engineering at Utah State and played on the school’s club-level baseball team. He also met Nicole online through a mutual friend. They had courted by email for seven months when she mentioned that she was LDS. Hislop returned to Taiwan during Christmas break for their first face-to-face meeting. They married in 2005.
Hislop appeared to be settled after taking an engineering job in Salt Lake City, but 2½ years later he made a bold move: He quit his job and moved his young family — his wife and one child — to Taiwan in 2007, ostensibly so they could be near his wife’s family, but there was another reason he didn’t dare tell his family: He was going to try to land a scouting job there.
“I had been reading Chinese and English news stories about players who were being signed from Asia,” he says. “I knew there weren’t many scouts there and I thought, there’s got to be a spot for me somewhere over there. There’s got to be some team that wants to get into the market.”
Hislop had always wanted to return to Taiwan anyway. During his mission he had grown to love the culture, language, food and people, and if that weren’t enough, they love baseball. “Korea, Taiwan and Japan are more of baseball countries than the U.S.,” he says.
If he lacked the experience and background of a typical scout, he did at least have two things in his favor under the circumstances: He spoke Mandarin Chinese fluently and he lived in Taiwan. Still, it was a risky move for a young husband and father to move overseas without a job lined up.
“It wouldn’t have been realistic (to try for a scouting job), if I had not been there,” he explains. “We had to pack up and move. A team is not going to hire me, untrained, and send me over there every month. That was the strategy. I knew if it didn’t work out, we’d take the opportunity to live in Asia and then come back (to Utah).”
He told his family and friends that he would try to find a job teaching English or maybe another engineering position, but as soon as he arrived in his new home of Hsinchu, he sent emails to a handful of Major League teams. Randy Johnson, the special assistant to the general manager for the Oakland A’s, responded within hours. Coincidentally, he had just flown into Taiwan to check out a free-agent pitcher. Hislop met Johnson at a hotel to discuss the job proposal and helped him navigate the city and the language. Johnson took Hislop’s proposal back to the A’s, but they decided they couldn’t hire him at that time. A couple months later, the Kansas City Royals hired Hislop as a part-time scout. A year later, the A's offered a full-time position.
“I was astounded when this happened,” says Craig. “Adam didn’t tell me he had written to Major League teams. When he got his job is when he told me about it. I was amazed — to get somebody to actually hire him. He thought out of the box to get it.”
“I didn’t have any special ability or eye for talent,” says Hislop. “I was more focused on wanting to learn. With most teams that’s enough. Scouting is mostly common sense … You need experience and see as many players as possible, and teams saw I was willing to do it."
After seven years, Hislop has gotten a feel for the challenges of the job and the nature of the game. In Taiwan and Korea kids live at the baseball field in dormitories some 300 days a year and practice six hours a day. They are banking everything on a baseball career. In Japan, Major League Baseball has a handshake agreement not to rob amateur talent, the lifeblood of the country’s pro league.
“The talent (in Asia) can be very good, but the volume is very low,” says Hislop. “In any given year, there may be anywhere from one to five amateurs signed out of Taiwan, and the same for Korea (contrast that with some of the Latin American countries, where hundreds and hundreds of players are signed each year). For some clubs that were not necessarily ‘active’ in Asia, it was very unlikely that they’d be climbing over walls to try to find scouting help over here, knowing the talent would be a slow trickle in such a competitive bidding market. In that sense, I had to be proactive. I had to give them a sense that this was something I really wanted to do, and that they’d be fully covered on the ground.”
Hislop returned to Logan this summer to visit his family, but as always he was never far from the game. He took his family to watch the Ogden Raptors and Salt Lake Bees play a few games, just for fun. “I don’t get sick of watching baseball,” he says. He still watches Major League games on TV in Taiwan, just as he did growing up.
“It works out nicely because the MLB games come on during breakfast in Taiwan,” he says. “How’s that for starting your day right?”
Doug Robinson's columns run on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Email: drob@deseretnews.com