“From Michigan to Florida, Illinois to Texas, Georgia to Puerto Rico we started interviewing scouts and documenting their stories,” Gilmore said. “We are proud to capture a slice of this uniquely American profession-- a profession now under threat from biometrics, analytics and the big business that rules the game.”
An acme film project in both of their careers, “Fielding Dreams: A Celebration of Baseball Scouts” features dozens of interviews with some of the scouting legends of the game, including five scouts who helped build the 2023 World Series Champion Texas Rangers and is narrated by former MLB pitcher Jerry Blevins. The “Fielding Dreams” debut is set for the Grandstand Theater of Cooperstown New York’s Baseball Hall of Fame on Jan. 18, 2024, sure to be a premiere in a league of its own.
“I had no idea the life of a scout,” Gilmore said in a recent interview on the MLB Network’s talk show Hot Stove. “I’m no expert on baseball or baseball statistics, but whenever you make a documentary film, you sort of get a master’s degree in that one area.”
Through the process of this film, Gilmore and Halcomb came to understand that “scouts are the unsung heroes of America’s pastime, the men and women with the instincts and intuition to find the ballplayers of tomorrow.”
He may not have been an expert on baseball before filming began during the late summer of 2019, but Gilmore did have an opportune source to get his foot in the door of this unsung profession. His cousin, Brian Williams, is a professional baseball scout for the Texas Rangers.
In fact, Gilmore’s inspiration to begin filming for “Fielding Dreams,” came from time spent listening to his cousin’s “amazing” scouting stories. He joked about it at first, when he was regaled with Williams’ stories at family gatherings, but this playful idea soon turned to reality. He said he wasn’t sure where it was going or how long he would be filming, suspecting initially it would be only about a year.
Jim Gilmore holding a clapperboard
“That's how ‘Fielding Dreams’ was born,” Gilmore said. “Little did my producing partner Tracy Halcomb and I know that COVID would turn the world of baseball upside down, and our one-year project would expand to four.”
With the pandemic, the “whole documentary began to shift.” He said they began to document scouts having to do a lot of things virtually. In their laundry list of recruiting responsibilities, scouts do things like building player IDs, observing game time, tracking stats, and home visits.
Despite most of the world taking their work to home offices, one element of scouting did not change during the pandemic: their “crazy schedules.”
“I would tag along wherever I could,” Gilmore said about the, sometimes cross-country, road trips these scouts would take in the span of just a few weeks.
“The more I found out about scouts, their lifestyle, and the work they do, I realized what an integral role they have in crafting the players of today,” he said.
Gilmore said this became a passion project for him over its four-year production. By the end of it, he was invested in telling these stories.
“It’s about such a great group of people. They do everything to build the game of baseball, and it’s been an honor to profile their stories,” he said in a recent morning show interview alongside scout Ken Madeja on a local Detroit FOX affiliate station.
In the end, Gilmore said he was glad the film took four years to film. He joked it's because the Rangers weren’t doing too great during their 2021 and 2022 seasons.
“A great ending to my film would be if you guys went all the way and won the series,” Gilmore teased his cousin at one point before the film was complete.
The Rangers’ 2023 World Series win was a delightful surprise, but Gilmore said the film’s premiere in the Hall of Fame is the real happy ending.
“Especially because, who’s not in the Hall of Fame? Scouts!”
