Edith Houghton is largely recognized as the first female scout in MLB to fly solo. That is, to work totally on her own and not in partnership with another scout.

Houghton had been a child prodigy at 10 years of age when she became the regular starting shortstop of the Philadelphia Bobbies – a team of young women in their teens and early twenties. The team, in the heyday of women’s baseball in the 1920’s, competed in the Bloomer Girls League the forerunner of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

Houghton traveled with the Bobbies on a two-month barnstorming tour of Japan, shortly after which she signed with the New York Bloomer Girls, the top women’s team of the day. She played for the New York team for six years and later toured with a Boston-based women’s team, the Hollywood Girls, which played against semiprofessional men’s teams. The popularity of women’s baseball waned with the advent of radio in the 1930’s, as men’s professional baseball games became broadcasting staples.

In 1946 Houghton walked into the offices of the Philadelphia Phillies, armed with a scrapbook of clippings from her playing days, and emerged as one of professional baseball’s first female scouts.

Many credit Houghton as being baseball’s first female scout but she was actually the second.
(Photo courtesy of National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)

Houghton’s tenure with the Phillies lasted for five years until she was called back into the services during the Korean War. She was not to return to baseball as she remained in the military until 1964. During her time as a scout Houghton signed 15 players, although none of them made it to MLB. She died on her birthday on February 2, 2013 at the age of 101.

Frank Marcos, former senior director of the Major League Baseball’s scouting bureau, said that in addition to being one of the first female scouts in baseball, Houghton was apparently also the last.

“We have been talking about this all day, making calls to clubs all over the country,” Marcos said in an interview following Houghton’s death. “And we know of no other part-time or full-time women scouts in baseball since then. Would I like to change that? Darn right.”

Although female scouts have been around for nearly a century, they received little recognition until Clint Eastwood’s popular 2012 film Trouble With the Curve – co-staring Amy Adams as aging baseball scout Gus Lobel’s (Eastwood’s) daughter Mickey.
(Photo credit – Keith Bernstein)

Edith Houghton was not the first female scout on record but was the first to work strictly on her own. Bessie Largent, 21 years before Houghton became a scout, was the first female MLB scout on record and indeed was a scout in every sense of the word. She did work with her husband Roy and they were acknowledged as a team but also as equal partners with their own set of skills. Each was paid as full-time professional scout.

The Sporting News said in 1933 that the Largents have “the eyes and judgment of a man; the cleverness and intuition of a woman.” According to the Dallas Morning News the White Sox regarded them as a tandem, paid them accordingly, with checks monthly, the year round.

Roy Largent was hired as a full-time scout for the White Sox in 1925 while Bessie began her scouting career more so as her husband’s secretary. He had lost much of his hearing so his wife became his ears often writing notes on paper for him to read.

However,she quickly grew into the scouting role and handled the communication with players, managers, minor league club owners and the White Sox front office. It wasn’t long before newspapers were recording that “Mrs. Largent is just as much a scout as Roy.”

Published accounts provide an idea of the work ethic of the Largents during their scouting years. Over a period of fourteen years they traveled 840,000 miles and attended 2,800 games in search of prospects. They saw as many as four games a day and between 200 and 250 games in a season.

The Largent tandem did not always see eye-to-eye on prospects but maybe that was by design. The Washington Post reported in 1932 that Roy had discovered outfielder Carl Reynolds of Southwestern University but was not able to get him to sign a contract. Bessie was involved in a subsequent meeting and Reynolds signed. He finished his MLB career with a .302 batting average.

Undoubtedly their greatest find was shortstop Luke Appling. The Chicago Daily Tribune credits Bessie Largent with the signing. She thought so highly of Appling’s major league possibilities that she telephoned the Chicago office to sign him, although the price was considered rather high at the time. Appling went on to hit .310 in his twenty-year career. He was inducted in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1964.

Although there are no known photographs of Bessie Largent, she is acknowledged in Baseball-Reference.com. Bessie Largent, MLB’s first female scout, died on September 26, 1958 at age 76.

Up until 2016, Frank Marcos’ desire to have female scouts pounding the beat for MLB teams had not come to fruition for the past 65 years. Then it happened in December of 2015.

The Seattle Mariners announced the hiring of six new area scouts. Amanda Hopkins, the daughter of long-time scout Ron Hopkins, was among the new scouts hired by the Mariners.

Hopkins, 22 at the time of her hiring, was a former softball standout at Central Washington University and had been working as an intern in the Mariners front office for the past three summers as well as at workouts at Safeco Field.

Amanda Hopkins
(Photo courtesy of CWU)

Along with her love of the game she has been around baseball all of her life and has the bloodlines to pursue a career in MLB. Her father is presently an assistant to Neal Huntington, the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. He had served with the Texas Rangers as Director of Scouting from 2004 to 2009 thus blazing a trail for his daughter to follow. Her brother, Ross, was a 40th round selection of the Cincinnati Reds back in 2007 and has spent several seasons in the minor leagues.

Last fall Hopkins attended the Scout Development Program which is is a 12-day course designed to teach the basics of baseball scouting run by the Major League Scouting Bureau. Mariners scouting director Tom McNamara made the call to her telling her she had been nominated for the Scouting Development Program.

“We sent her to scout school and she ranked pretty high in the class,” McNamara told MLB.com’s Greg Jones. “When I called to tell her we’d nominated her for scout school, she was in tears on the phone, literally in tears. It was kind of chilling. It meant a lot to her.

“I’ve actually been to a couple games with her where we started talking about players,” McNamara continued. “And I was sitting there thinking, ‘man, she has a really good feel and breaks down a player like a veteran scout.’ The more I spent time with her, the more I kept saying, ‘maybe pushing her into the office isn’t a good idea.’ She really wants to scout. She has it in her blood, she has good instincts and feel for scouting.”

Hopkins will begin as Seattle’s Four Corners scout, which means she will be responsible for scouting amateur players in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.

Amanda Hopkins is now continuing to blaze the trail started by Bessie Largent and Edith Houghton 65 years earlier.