Marshall to receive PBSF Legends award

Jim Marshall, the D-backs' senior advisor, Pacific Rim operations, will receive the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation's Legends in Scouting Award on Saturday night at the annual "In the Spirit of the Game" banquet in Los Angeles.

Marshall, 83, has been with Arizona since 1996. He maintains the D-backs' relations with baseball organizations in Australia, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. He helped introduce the club to Japan and Asia, a job that involved making transactions to send players to Japan and scouting players in Asia to potentially sign.

He also helped prepare the organization for the 1997 Major League Expansion Draft and assisted manager Buck Showalter from 1998-2000. Marshall has held various managerial, coaching and scouting responsibilities over the years -- including a job managing D-backs chief baseball officer Tony La Russa with Double-A Wichita in 1973.

The Legends in Scouting Award, in which nominees are selected and voted upon by the scouting community, is given annually to those who have demonstrated a strong work ethic while maintaining the high standards set by scouts before them over the course of an entire career. The banquet honors scouts, players, executives and managers, while raising money to support the foundation's mission of helping scouts in need by providing emergency resources through grants to the scouts and their families.

Marshall spent a combined nine years in the Majors, playing for five seasons and managing for four. He became the first American-born player from a Major League roster to sign with a Japanese team in 1963. He spent three years playing for the Chunichi Dragons, batting .268 with 78 home runs and 252 RBIs.