Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (44 page)

The twenty-four big-league clubs are rivals in a narrow and intensely competitive business arena, and until very recently the proudest emblems of their independence were probably their enormous scouting staffs. The 1974 edition of the
Baseball Blue Book,
which is the business directory of the game, listed the names and clubs of 659 scouts—or 59 more than the total number of players carried on major-league rosters. A few of these were part-timers, or “bird dogs” (who are paid a fee only when a player they have spotted is signed to a contract), but each club was carrying somewhere between twenty and thirty full-time scouts, whose rather modest salaries and rather sizable travel expenses added up to a very considerable item on the corporate books. In 1965, Branch Rickey estimated that the scouting expenses of the twenty clubs of that time came to at least five million dollars, and if the figure is extended by a decade of inflation and the addition of four expansion teams, the bottom-line scouting figure must have reached at least seven and a half million dollars. This is a high price even for top-level corporate intelligence, and, reluctantly but inevitably, the owners voted in 1974 to establish a centralized scouting force. This body, the Major League Scouting Bureau, which is now in its second year of a three-year initial contract, deploys a total of sixty-nine scouts, who work under the direction of Jim Wilson, the former general manager of the Milwaukee Brewers. Operating out of Newport Beach, California, it issues computerized scouting reports on every free-agent prospect in high-school and college ball; the reports, which are brought up to date at intervals as fresh scouting data come in, are sent to all the clubs that subscribe to the service. Conformity is not a distinguishing characteristic of baseball owners, and so far six clubs—the Dodgers, Mets, Phillies, Cardinals, Giants, and Padres—have stubbornly passed up the Bureau and are going along with their old costly but independent intelligence apparatuses. The world-champion Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox are subscribers but have so far also retained their full private rosters of scouts. Most of the other clubs have cut back extensively on their scouting staffs. (Charles Finley’s pinchpenny Oakland A’s got along with four non-Bureau scouts last year.) The Angels, who listed twenty-two scouts before the advent of the Bureau, now carry fifteen, of whom six (including Ray Scarborough) are full-timers. Most of his springtime travels, Ray told me, were for the purpose of “cross-checking”—that is, evaluating an apparently thorough but anonymous MLSB report on free-agent players, whose qualifications had also gone out to seventeen rival clubs. We were on our way to cross-check Tim Brandenburg.

“It’s changed now, because I don’t know who wrote the report we have on Brandenburg,” Scarborough said. “The Bureau scouts came from the different clubs, and they’re experienced men, but in the old days you always knew the man in your organization who had written a report, and you knew if he was conservative or the other way, so you could make a pretty good evaluation. There was an intimacy to it that made for group confidence and good decisions. It’s different now, and cross-checking is more important than ever, especially with the high-rated prospects, so you try to get as many people as possible in your organization to see them. As you know, in the annual June draft of free agents the club that finished last the year before gets to pick first, and the club that finished next to last picks second. That’s the way it goes until six or seven hundred names are disposed of—sometimes even more. We pick sixth next month. But the real talent in free agents never runs very deep—some baseball people think it drops way off after the first seven or eight names—and you just can’t make a mistake in your two top choices, because then you have to wait till next year. Those first two or three draft picks we make next month have to be
right,
and that means that the scouts who have seen them need thorough judgment. If you see a good-looking high-school player who isn’t throwing well or running well on the day you happen to be there, you have to find out why. You don’t want a kid knocked out of your thinking for one bad day. But if there’s something wrong, if you have some kind of doubt, you’d better go back and check that doubt.

“I think almost anybody can recognize the tools. You or me or the popcorn man can see if a boy is throwing hard or making pretty good contact at the plate. The hard part about free-agent scouting is being able to project. What will this pitcher be like in five years? Will he throw faster? Will he have a better curve? You check his build, and let’s say you see narrow shoulders and heavy legs. Will he develop, or will that condition prevail? Jim Kaat was a frail, skinny kid, but he grew with his ability and became a huge man. In the end, I think, size is much less important with a pitcher than a good, loose arm and that good body action. You see a Nolan Ryan, and he’s jumping at you off that mound. With a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old pitcher, you hope for a good fastball rather than a first-rate curve, because the curve can be taught but the fastball may never come. Even then you can’t be sure. Tom Seaver had an indifferent fastball when he was young, and now look at him! Projecting a youngster isn’t easy. What you really want to know about him is how much
stomach
does he have. If you could cut a boy open and look at his heart and guts, and then go home with him and see what kind of preparations he makes for a game, why then … then …” Scarborough laughed and shook his head. “Then my job would be a whole lot easier.”

Scarborough, who was driving, was wearing a plaid sports jacket, a navy-blue polo shirt, yellow twill pants, and black alligator shoes. I had entertained some fears that considerations of security might make him cautious in talking to me about his profession, but for the most part he sounded like any good traveling man talking about the special demands of his territory and the splendors of his line.

I asked him to tell me about some of the top prospects he had scouted so far this year.

“Well, let’s see,” he said, sitting up a little straighter at the wheel. “There’s a boy in Springfield, Ohio, named Glass—Timothy Glass, a catcher. He goes about two hundred and fifteen pounds. Runs real well—gets to first in about four-two. A good, strong arm and good hands. He hits with power, but he uppercuts and swings through a lot of pitches. He wears contact lenses, and there has to be some question about his eyesight. But he’s almost a complete player. I think he’ll be gone by the time it comes around to us, and we’re only number six. Then, we’ve checked a pitcher named Richard Whaley, from Jacksonville, North Carolina. I’ve seen him four times already, and I like what I’ve seen. He’s a left-hander, six-two, sort of lean and willowy, with an excellent rotation on his curve. And there’s another pitcher down in Hialeah High School—Hialeah, Florida, that is. He’s a big right-hander named Ben Grassbeck or Gribseck—something like that [the name is Grzybek]. He goes about six-six, and he can throw
hard.
He broke his foot a few weeks ago, and that might cost him a lot of money.”

I said to Scarborough that it seemed to me he had already covered a good deal of ground in this young baseball season.

“Well, I have to see about fifty free agents in the spring,” he said. “Fifty boys who can play a little. I’m flying more than I used to, so maybe it’s a little less tiring. Up to a couple of years ago, I was doing about twenty-five or thirty thousand miles a year. Just the week before last I drove up to Baltimore, then to Richmond and Norfolk, and then back up to Trenton, New Jersey. About seventeen hundred miles. It takes a lot out of you, and sometimes it can be sort of a lonesome job. Once in a while, I take my wife with me, if it’s a local trip—to Tidewater or someplace like that. We get these Bureau scouting reports so late that you’ve got to jump if you want to catch a boy. If he’s not in a tourney or a playoff or something, you might miss him altogether.”

As Scarborough was saying this, it came to me that he had meant twenty-five or thirty thousand miles
by automobile
—miles he had put in at the wheel in search of one summer’s young ballplayers. I looked out my window for a while at some Kentucky farms and silos and tried to imagine this. Then I asked Ray which players among the current major-leaguers he had scouted or signed.

“People always ask that,” he said. “The truth is, what with the draft, almost nobody in scouting can take that kind of credit anymore.”

“What about bird dogs?” I asked.

Ray laughed and said, “Well, it’s supposed to be sort of crude to call them that now. A few years back, they suddenly all became ‘commission scouts.’ I guess there are still a few of them left. They’re simply the most dedicated men—the best baseball fans—in the whole game. They do what they do out of love for the game. They don’t make any money at it—probably they lose money, even after they’ve picked up that little commission for a boy who gets signed. They can be high-school coaches, newspaper reporters, schoolteachers—anybody. A friend of mine named Mack Arnette was just about your perfect commission scout. He was the sales manager at Station WWNC, in Asheville. He had good judgment, and I had complete confidence in him. We signed quite a few of his boys. I don’t know how active he is now.

“The bird dogs were part of a whole network of contacts that each territorial scout put together, and the moment they sent him word about some good-looking boy, he’d hustle right out and take a look himself, and then tell his regional supervisor about him. The territorial scout is what this business is all about. If the club signed up somebody he’d seen, he could always think, ‘That’s
my
player.’ A lot of them have gone out of business since the Bureau, and it’s a real shame.

“Well, as I was saying, it’s a group sort of thing now, and, of course, it’s just luck if your club gets to draft a particular player you’re after—even some kid you’ve been downright enthusiastic about. The only players in the majors right now who I’ve had anything to do with came up in the Baltimore organization, because there hasn’t been time yet for the Angels’ draft choices I’ve seen to make it up to the top. With Baltimore, I saw Paul Mitchell, that young pitcher who just went to Oakland in the Jackson trade. He’s a real live one—a regular bulldog. And there’s Don Hood, who’s with the Indians now. And that big kid who’s doing all that good work with the Orioles now—I think he’s even leading the league in earned-run average.…” He paused and frowned. “Seems like I can’t remember
anybody’s
name some days,” he murmured. “Garland! Wayne Garland, of course. Listen, I first saw him in Connie Mack ball, over in Jackson, Tennessee. He was just about to pitch, and he was drinking a Pepsi and eating the biggest hot dog you ever saw, but he pitched a good game that night. A big right-hander, and he could really hump up and throw that ball. Harry Dalton and Dee Phillips came and had a look at him, and when we got him in the draft we gave him what he wanted. I think he got about thirty thousand. You’ve got to sign those good ones when you can—there aren’t enough good arms available.

“I’ll tell you a funny thing. The finest left-handed pitcher I ever scouted in a high school is with the Angels right now—Frank Tanana. But I didn’t have a single thing to do with his being with us, because I was scouting for Baltimore then, and we didn’t get him. He was pitching in a high-school league in Detroit where they only gave you three balls and two strikes, and those batters were
mesmerized!
He had stuff and poise, and an outstanding change of pace, and his attitude was just about perfect. He really knew how to pitch.”

Ray bent forward and peered up at the sky, which had become gray and threatening. “Now, don’t tell me,” he said. “Yes, it’s going to rain, sure as the devil. Do you know, that’s the number-one occupational hazard of this profession. You have to wait over a day, and that means you often miss another game and another prospect. It’s a real problem.”

Ray Scarborough is a cheerful man, and even the spattering of the first few raindrops on our windshield didn’t make him gloomy for long. “At least it’s easier to get to a boy than it sometimes was in the old days,” he said. “Back in 1959 or 1960, when I was just starting, I found a pitcher named James Barrier, who lived way up on top of a mountain in Jonas Ridge, North Carolina. I had to walk the last couple of miles up. He lived in a little old house with his parents and a whole lot of brothers and sisters, and he walked I don’t know how many miles to school every day. I saw him pitch a game on a field where it looked like they hadn’t mowed the outfield for weeks, and they had a ground rule that a ball lost in the tall grass behind the outfielders was a double, but if you lost it in front of you it was a homer, because you should have kept your eye on it. That’s the truth. We signed him and gave him a bonus so he could go to Appalachian State Teachers College, and he went on and won about fifteen games one year with Newton-Conover, in the Western Carolina League. He never made it into Class A ball, and he quit after about four years, but I imagine he was always a kind of an example to a lot of kids he played with. The last I heard of him, he’d got a Ph.D. from Clemson and was head of biology at Baptist College, down in Charleston, South Carolina. I always thought that was one of the best signings I ever made.”

We came to Elizabethtown and found the high school, but it was still raining lightly when we pulled into the parking lot next to the wet green ballfield, and it had begun to look like a wasted journey. There was nobody in sight but a little group of middle-aged men in golf caps and assorted rain gear who were standing together and glumly looking up at the sky—more baseball scouts, it turned out. They greeted Ray warmly, and he introduced them to me: Floyd Baker, of the Twins; Ray Holton, of the Scouting Bureau; Joe Bowen, the director of scouting for the Reds; and Nick Kamzic, who is one of the Angels’ supervisors of scouting. All of them had come to see Tim Brandenburg. Kamzic and Scarborough moved a few steps away from the others and compared notes on their recent travels and discoveries (Kamzic was optimistic about Steve Trout, a young left-handed pitcher from South Holland, Illinois, who is the son of the old Tiger hurler Dizzy Trout), but soon the rain began to come down harder, and we all ran for shelter. Back in our car, Ray opened a briefcase and handed me his copy of the Bureau’s scouting report on Brandenburg—a single mimeographed sheet, with Brandenburg’s vital statistics printed out in drab computeresque capitals, and then two parallel columns of figures under the headings
“PRES”
and
“FUT.”
On the left-hand side of the page, there was a rating key with figures ranging from eight
(“OUTSTANDING”)
down to two
(“POOR”),
and then a column of categories marked
“FASTBALL,” “CURVE,” “CONTROL,” “CHANGE OF PACE,”
and (bracketed together)
“SLIDER, KNUCKLEBALL, OTHER,”
followed by
“POISE,” “BB INSTINCTS,” “AGGRESSIVENESS.”
Brandenburg’s
“PRES”
ratings were all fours and fives, except for a zero in the bracketed entry; in the
“FUT”
column the ratings had all gone up to five, and his curveball had become a six
(“ABOVE AVE.”).
Down at the bottom of the page I read:
“AVE. MAJOR LEAGUE CURVEBALL AT THIS TIME & CAN THROW IT FOR A STRIKE WHEN HE WANTS TO. GOOD FIELDER. HAS FULL ARM ACTION. FOLLOWS THROUGH GOOD & USES BODY TO ITS FULLEST. ONLY WEAKNESS I CAN SEE IS BELOW-AVE. MAJOR LEAGUE FASTBALL. HOWEVER, I DO PROJECT A MAJOR LEAGUE FASTBALL IN FUTURE.”
Then, under
“SUMMATION & SIGNABILITY,”
I saw
“HAS THE TOOLS TO BECOME A GOOD MAJOR LEAGUE PITCHER.… MUST ALSO COMBAT COLLEGE OFFERS.”
The report depressed me; I felt as if I had accidentally glanced into a brightly lit window across the street and then had secretly begun to watch the activities of a stranger there.