Toomey is a scout, one of two national crosscheckers for the Montreal Expos. He was the first scout hired by the Expos after their re-organization this spring; for a while, he was their only scout. To prepare for the draft, he left his home in Maryland at the end of February and spent all but four days on the road the next three months. He went to 45 states, missing only Hawaii, Alaska, Wyoming and the Dakotas. He saw thousands of players and wrote reports on 120 of them. He saw roughly 150 games. Sometimes he saw three games in the same day.

	“	When I got hired, we had no equipment, so the first thing I did was go to a Wal-Mart and bought a TV and VCR so I could watch the (scouting) bureau tapes. Then I started traveling. ... There were a lot of 4 a.m. wakeup calls. ... There were no days off. ... But I love the game, like all scouts do. ”
		— Mike Toomey, Expos scout

He is a scout. His story speaks for scouts everywhere: they are invaluable and work harder than anyone in baseball, yet they are the least appreciated members of a major-league organization. He is a symbol of the commitment made by the Expos, led by general manager Omar Minaya, scouting director Dana Brown, director of pro scouting Lee MacPhail IV and Paul Tinnell, the Expos' other national crosschecker. The Expos may be a lame duck franchise, but they attacked this draft as if it was their first in club history.

"We're the Montreal Expos, we should be called the Montreal Thumbtacks," MacPhail said, referring to the marking of locations of players, scouts, etc. "And Tooms. Tooms is insane."

"When I got hired, we had no equipment, so the first thing I did was go to a Wal Mart and bought a TV and VCR so I could watch the (scouting) bureau tapes," said Toomey. "Then I started traveling. There were almost all one-way flights, so I got checked at security points every time. Sometimes, I'd see a player during the day, then another at night. I'd have four or five flights some days. I went with the mini-bag approach: two shirts, two pants, I washed them every night. I'm going to write a book about Bed & Breakfast places, I'll make a million dollars.

"There were a lot of 4 a.m. wakeup calls. You have to coordinate your schedule because a lot of the top pitchers you need to see were pitching on the same day. It's hard to sleep when you have three or four flight reservations the next day, and you don't know where you're going depending on the weather. The Weather Channel plays a very important part in this job. I can't tell you how many times I woke up at 2 a.m. and wondered 'what town am I in?' And since the security people at the airport took away my alarm clock -- they thought it was a bomb -- I had to rely on wake-up calls. You just can't count on wake-up calls.

"I rented a lot of cars. I got some interesting directions. I stopped one place and asked where this town was, the man said 'it's a couple hours down the road.' Four hours later, I was still driving. I was in Baton Rouge, and I stopped for directions. I asked this woman. She said 'take a right at the big road, then take a left at the Piggly Wiggly -- she raised her right hand, not her left -- then take a left at the barbeque pit. You'll see the smoke from the field. They weren't exactly MapQuest directions. I was hoping for something a little more helpful.

	“	People were really surprised out there about the presence the Expos had in this draft. We weren't just out there muddying the waters. ”
		— Toomey

"There were no days off. I did get home for a day, here and there. I went to the health club because the only exercise I got on the road was running through an airport jumping over luggage, like O.J. Simpson. When I got home, I'd pay my bills, get a haircut and make sure the phone was still working.

"Once, I got back to Dulles Airport (in Washington D.C.), and I couldn't remember if I'd parked in the purple lot, the green lot or the gold lot. I finally found my car after an hour and a half of searching: the left rear tire was flat. So even when I went home, it wasn't worth it.

"But I love the game, like all scouts do. It takes passion and patience to do this job. I went to see a shortstop, and he didn't get a groundball all day. How do you grade him out? That's why you have to look at the kid starting from the time he walks off the bus. What's his body language? His demeanor? What's the look in his eye? Does he have a good face? What does he do with runners on second and third, with the game on the line? Is he confident? If he isn't, he'll never survive in pro ball. But, I survived this trip. I even got a compliment from a waitress in Ozark, Alabama. She said, 'Anyone told you that you have purdy eyes.'"

The Expos did very well in the draft. They got many of the players they wanted.

"So we're in the draft meeting," Toomey said, "and we're all tired, so I decided to have some fun. I put a skeleton on the screen about a player: 6-6, 240, throws 93 with a plus curveball and a plus changeup. And I'm yelling 'How did we miss this guy?' Lee MacPhail -- he's the best -- was going crazy. 'Who is he? Where is he?' he yelled. I said, 'His name is Warpinski.' Lee yelled, 'How do you spell that, Wa or Wr?' As it turned out, it was the scouting report for the Orioles No. 1 pick, Adam Loewen. I just made up a new name.

"It was fun. The whole trip was fun, but it was a lot of work. All scouts do this. We don't do it for the money. I'm on my 22nd one-year contract. There should be a union for scouts. We should get a commitment, but that's not how it works.

"People on the road ask me all the time, 'Is this a full-time job?' If they spent one week with me, they'd be crawling back to their desk jobs. You run into guys who aren't scouts, they run camps and clinics, and they have a five-mile radius, but they all think they're scouts. It is a great feeling when you sign a guy. It's a terrible feeling when you don't. I worked out one kid, I threw to him and he lost all the balls, that's how far he hit them. We were all ready to take him, and the team before us did. When his name was announced, I could feel all the air let out of my system. I was crushed.

"But we got a lot of guys. People were really surprised out there about the presence the Expos had in this draft. We weren't just out there muddying the waters. And here is it, the last day of the draft, and I'm sitting in Olympic Stadium, looking out at the field. A black cat ran across the field. And there's this pidgeon, here on the ledge, that hasn't moved for the last 10 minutes, it is looking right at me. Black cats and clay pidgeons. Sounds like an album.

"I think it's a sign that it's time for me to go home."

Tim Kurkjian is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine and a regular contributor to Baseball Tonight. E-mail tim.kurkjian@espnmag.com.