Old Girl Crashes Old Boys Network -- Dorothy FOX, 70, Quietly Plies Trade As Scout

Quietly operating within baseball's old-boys' network is an old girl.

Her name is Dorothy Fox, and she has been scouting baseball talent for the past two decades. She is, irrefutably, an anomaly - the only female scout on a big-league payroll.

Now 70, Dorothy is employed by the Milwaukee Brewers. She was part of California's scouting staff before joining the Brewers and, before that, Baltimore's.

If you haven't heard of Dorothy, you're by no means alone. She has deliberately kept a low profile. It's all part of how she has managed to blend in with the boys.

She hasn't upset any egos by attempting to steal any thunder. She leaves the headlines to the Epy Guerreros of the baseball world. All she does is her job - and she does it in the Triple A ballparks of Western New York just about every night.

"I guess you could say that I'm married to the game," Dorothy says. "I never got married to a man, so I guess the game is my spouse."

Dorothy lives in Rochester, but if the Rochester team isn't playing on a given night, she drives to Syracuse to see the Toronto Blue Jays' Triple A team. Or she'll visit Buffalo. She even makes frequent trips to Scranton, Pa.

"It started out as a hobby," she says, "but it's become life-consuming."

Over the years, Dorothy has compiled a file that contains in-depth scouting reports on more than 8,200 players.

"I'll have a card on any player you care to name," she says, "and they're detailed. A lot of people in my profession would give their right arms for my file."

Scouts with other organizations turn to Fox for advice from time to time. It wasn't always this way, though.

"When people in baseball first found out about Dorothy, they'd laugh and ridicule us," says Harry Dalton, the Brewers' senior vice-president and the man who personally hired Dorothy when he was with the Orioles and Angels.

"After a while, though, it stopped happening. It was clear that Dorothy was very good. She sizes up players well. She knows a player's strengths and weaknesses. She's extremely good at what she does, and her peers know it."

Dorothy was the target of some cruel shots along the way.

"When I first started doing this," she says, "other scouts used to give me a terribly hard time. They used to mislead me deliberately. They'd tell me to my face that broads have no business being involved as a scout. They said broads couldn't understand the game well enough. They'd laugh in my face. It was tough.

"There were a couple of other women scouts over the years and they couldn't take it. They didn't last very long before quitting.

"But I always did my own thing. I made my own evaluations and my own judgments. I used my own stopwatches. I rely on my own memory and my own opinions."