He Finds Second Chance Hard to Come By : Baseball Player Bobby Smith Spurns One Offer, Doesn’t Get Another

Bobby Smith vividly remembers a June afternoon in 1980, when he waited for professional baseball to come calling. He remembers, too, the dismay he felt at discovering that--as far as the the big leagues were concerned--his number was no longer in service.

All of the sudden, Bobby Smith the ballplayer didn’t exist. Strange. Just a couple of weeks earlier, he had completed a senior season at Cal State Fullerton that he felt sure would guarantee him a high place in the draft and a generous signing bonus. He hit .371, third-highest among Titans, scored 61 runs, drove in 38 and stole 55 bases. All of this despite spending most of the season as Fullerton’s No. 9 hitter.

The statistics, coupled with the kind of speed that forces most major league scouts to double-check their stop watches, were all the reasons Smith needed to begin wondering what minor league destination baseball had in store for him. Fresno or Fort Lauderdale? West Palm Beach or Waterloo? But Draft Day came . . . and passed, and Smith was not provided with answers. Only glaring questions: What happened? Where did he go wrong? How could he have been overlooked?

“I remember there was a bunch of us out hitting in the cages at Cal State Fullerton,” Smith said. “Word would come out, ‘So-and-so went in this round, this guy went in that round.’ And I just didn’t hear anything.

“I was just thinking, ‘There’s got to be some mistake here.’ You hear some of the names being drafted and you figure you’ve got to be at least in the same class as some of those guys.”

Smith’s call never came. The Kansas City Royals and New York Yankees later made offers to pick up his plane fare and give him a chance to hook on as a free agent, but he rejected both. Stubborn pride.

So now, a little more than five years later, Smith is living a life far removed from professional baseball. Instead of being a member of baseball’s players’ union, Smith is a teamster. Instead of stealing bases and collecting hits for a living, he pasteurizes ice cream at a food processing plant in Buena Park.

It sounds like a sad story, but Smith assures us that it isn’t. At 27, he’s settled into a life style he enjoys. He likes his job. The pay is good, he says, the hours to his liking, and you just can’t beat those union benefits. He’s happy living in Huntington Beach, happy to be a bachelor, happy to enjoy some of life’s simple pleasures.

“All things considered, life is great,” he said. “No problems.”

But what about the opportunity he never got, the chance at baseball’s brass ring? Smith says he’s not bitter.

“I know people who are still trying to make it,” he said. “I know people who--every year--drive to Florida and try to hook on somewhere. It’s still just about their whole life. You look at some of those people and think, ‘Twenty-eight years old and still trying to sign with someone.’ Bad odds . . . bad odds. You really have to believe in yourself because nobody else does.

“I took some psychology classes in college, some of them related to sports. I kept those books, and they helped a lot. I realized what was going to happen; the spring training depression. I knew it was coming, and it did. I knew it would go away, and it did. I still get flashes, though. There are some people that I just don’t like because they’re there and I’m not.”

Who’s to blame? This is where it gets complicated. Some say it is Smith himself. Some say he simply got lost in the shuffle. Some suggest that Smith was blacklisted, that he paid the ultimate price for a mistake he admits he made after a storybook sophomore season at Orange Coast College.

Smith came to Orange Coast from Fountain Valley High School in 1977, the same year Mike Mayne became the Pirates’ coach. He left in 1978 as the most valuable player of the South Coast Conference. He hit .439, still atop the all-time Orange Coast list for single-season batting average, and stole 41 bases in 32 games. His career record of 64 stolen bases still stands. Smith had arrived as a pro prospect. “It was like I could do no wrong,” he said.

The 1978 edition of the Orange Coast Press Guide proclaimed: “No one has ever doubted this speedster’s awesome potential.” Mike Mayne certainly didn’t.

“I thought the guy had a legitimate chance to play in the big leagues, I really did,” he said. “He not only had good speed, he had good baseball speed. He knew when to run.

“He’s the fastest guy I’ve ever coached, without a doubt. And I’ve coached some guys who could run. But Bobby Smith was in a class by himself.”

The Pittsburgh Pirates thought enough of Smith’s potential to make him their third-round draft choice. Then came the mistake that would eventually change the course of Smith’s life. Joe Brown, then a scout for the Pirates and now the club’s general manager, offered Smith a $10,000 signing bonus. Smith turned it down. Rather impolitely, in fact.

“I get really stubborn sometimes,” Smith said. “They had wined me and dined me. They took me to a Dodger game and we sat in the press box. I had a really good time. Then they came up with this $10,000 offer and I got upset. I just thought $10,000 didn’t seem like very much to me. I was insulted and stubborn. Immature, too.”

Though it was seven years and several prospects ago, Brown still recalls his dealings with Smith.

“I went to talk to him and the money that I offered him was obviously not to his liking,” he said. “He acted like I had insulted him and indicated that I was trying to make a name for myself by signing him. I informed him that, at that stage of my career, I was only interested in signing good players for the Pirates.

“I put what I felt was a fair offer before him. He got up and left the room. I ended up talking with his mother and father. They were very pleasant people. I think they were a little embarrassed that he left like he did.”

The decision was made, the damage, unknowingly, done. Smith would take his chances in college baseball, and hope for a better offer the next time he was drafted.

Smith was hardly an instant success at Cal State Fullerton. In 1979, the year the Titans won their first national championship, Smith failed to crack the starting lineup and had a disappointing season as a reserve. “I was just terrible,” he said. “It was just a loss of confidence. You have to be pretty cocky on the field to be good in sports. My junior year, I just lost that confidence. I started off bad and got worse.”

But the confidence returned in 1980, and so did the impressive statistics: a .371 batting average with 55 stolen bases in 66 games. Not bad production for a No. 9 hitter. Fullerton Coach Augie Garrido called him a “really gifted player.” Smith, confident that he had re-established himself in the eyes of major league scouts, looked forward to the draft and his second chance to become a professional.

New York Mets’ scout Dean Jongewaard remembers Smith as a good prospect, one with an abundance of the quality many scouts look for first: speed.

“Sometimes that’s enough, sometimes it isn’t, depending on what the needs of the clubs are at the time,” Jongewaard said. “But speed is a two-way tool. You use it both offensively and defensively. There are a lot of clubs that just aren’t interested in players without it, unless a kid’s a big bopper.”

So why was Smith, who gave scouts 55 reasons to believe he had above-average speed, neglected in the draft?

“He had a good opportunity to play pro ball out of Orange Coast, but he turned it down as an insufficient offer,” Jongewaard said. “He decided to go on to Fullerton and it just didn’t work out for him. Unfortunately, that chance that comes around one time doesn’t always come around again.”

Said Garrido: “They just didn’t come back to him. It’s unusual for a player of his ability to not get an opportunity.”

Smith believes his chances weren’t exactly enhanced by playing on a team that Garrido called “one of the best we’ve ever had in terms of physical ability.” It was too easy to get lost in the shuffle of talent, he argued, especially when you hit ninth.

“Someone in Augie’s position has to sell his players to a certain extent,” Smith said. “And he can’t sell everyone. Somebody’s going to get left out.”

Sources familiar with the situation suggest that there’s more to it than that. The scouting fraternity has a powerful grapevine, and the word was apparently out on Smith. There would be no second chance at a signing bonus.

Brown admitted that scouts may have shied away from Smith after The Refusal of ‘78, but said it was not a case of blacklisting.

“Word gets around,” he said. “It was obvious that we had drafted him and he turned us down. But I didn’t go around telling everybody that he got up and walked out. What goes on in a negotiation is nobody’s business but my own. It had no effect on his future because no one knew what happened but me.

“It’s just too bad. I think he genuinely wanted to play baseball and he genuinely thought we were trying to take advantage of him.”

Smith said he’ll never know for sure what kept the scouts away on Draft Day, 1980. Five years after the fact, he’s more concerned with enjoying life. “I’ve found out I’m a helluva slo-pitch softball shortstop,” he said smiling.

“Living well is the best revenge. If nothing else, I hope Joe Brown reads this and realizes that he didn’t ruin my life. Some of those people--scouts and coaches--they feel like they have that power. They feel like they have some control over your destiny . . . an ‘I-can-make-you-or-break-you’ type thing.

“Well, they didn’t make me, but they didn’t break me, either.”