Baseball Talent Search : Scouts: The Boys of Spring

Tom Ferguson had ignored Eddie Stanky’s advice--”Kid, never let ‘em get you out of the majors, even if you have to be an usher.” So now, 57 and far from the bright lights of the big leagues, Fergie was speeding south through the late-afternoon dusk in pursuit of someone else’s dream, his miniature poodle and constant companion Albert asleep on the back seat.

He reached for a cigar, had second thoughts, and stuck a piece of gum in his mouth instead. Swinging his white Chevy off Interstate 5, Ferguson checked his watch as he pulled into the Smith Field parking lot, ready for work. It was 5:30 p.m., still 90 minutes to game time. The admission gate was padlocked, the stands were empty and everything was quiet except for the hollow echo of baseballs hitting an aluminium bat with rhythmic regularity.

‘I Wanna See Batting Practice’

“Hey,” he called to a custodian in a Boston accent as thick as Irish stew, “when you gonna let us in? I wanna see batting practice.”

Ferguson was the first in the gate, carrying a fold-up padded seat and a stopwatch. Then came Ray Boone, 65, a former major league infielder, who set up his picnic chair behind the screen, to the right of home plate. Then Dick Wiensek, whose business card says: “An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise.”

And then came the men with radar guns, until finally, just before the first pitch of the San Diego State-Washington State game, a dozen men--each a harbinger of potential fame and fortune--had taken their places among a handful of fans in the wooden stands.

Although they labor for modest salaries in the shadows of obscurity, these major league baseball scouts are the unheralded handicappers on which pennants are built, and across California, Texas and Florida, scores of them are on the prowl these early days of spring, scouring high school and college fields for raw talent to supply an industry that offers its 624 performers an average annual salary in excess of $400,000.

Burned Out on Travel

Ferguson, who quit the vice presidency of the Milwaukee Brewers in 1982 because he had burned out on the majors’ excessive travel, now scouts Los Angeles and Orange counties for the Philadelphia Phillies and still remembers “the first kid I signed.”

“I go into his home and all the family’s there. The father’s a high school principal. They’re all lovely, educated people. The grandfather’s sitting there too, and he’s maybe 85 or 86, a real fan, and I’m thinking: ‘What a thrill this must be for him.’

“That was the first time I really realized what I’d been doing. Here I’m taking a young man and giving him an opportunity to play professional baseball , and maybe if I hadn’t seen something in him, and nobody else had either, he would have gone on to some other career. It gave me goose bumps. So that’s what you’re looking for out here: treasures in the rough, not finished products.”

Southern California, with its mild climate and large population, is the nation’s baseball treasure chest, producing more major league players than any other region. And while the north remains gripped by winter, scouts from around the country shuttle like traveling salesmen in and out of the Santa Anna Inn in Santa Ana. Its manager, John Fitzpatrick, former traveling secretary of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Oakland A’s, still observes baseball’s fraternal code--you take care of your own--and offers scouts a generous discount on their rooms.

The games these travel-worn men scout from noon until well into the night are the ones often reported only in agate on the newspapers’ back sport pages. Like race track handicappers, they look for speed and strength and winning instincts, study past performances, the quality of competition and work habits. But unlike handicappers, success is measured not only by today’s event but also by what happens in four or five years. Scouts estimate that of the 1,200 young men drafted from last June’s player pool, no more than one in eight will eventually make it to the majors.

Ray Boone of the Boston Red Sox travels to tournaments in his mobile home, towing a sports car. His son, catcher Bob Boone, played on the 1980 World Series champion Philadelphia Phillies, joining the California Angels in 1982. His grandson is a college prospect.

‘Just Showing Up’

“I’ll tell you what it takes to be a successful scout,” Boone said. “Number one: It takes just going to work, just showing up at the games, being here for batting practice. If you go to enough games, it doesn’t take long to get the hang of it.

“If you guess right more than you guess wrong, then you’re a success, and if you’re not a success, you’re fired ‘cause you’re spending the other guy’s (the owner’s) money, right, Boonie?” said Dick Wiensek, the Detroit Tigers Western scouting supervisor. Of the players Wiensek has signed over a 35-year career, 128 have made it to the majors.

“The average fan can probably tell you who the best player is out there tonight,” Wiensek went on, “but he doesn’t know who’s going to be the best player three years from now. That’s where our professional guess comes in. Now, take the kid up at the plate: He can throw, but he can’t hit a lick. Course, I went to Omaha in the ‘60s to scout Don Kessinger, and I said the same thing about him, and he played in the majors for 16 years.”

The scouts’ eyes never leave the field as they talk. They don’t write down anything more than a scribbled note on their score cards. “Did you see that kid dog it down to first?” muttered one of them. “An NP (no prospect) if I ever saw one.” They seldom refer to players by name--”kid” fits everyone in baseball, regardless of his age--and to a man, they’d rather go to hell than reveal to another team’s scout which player they have come to bird-dog.

‘A Judgment Call’

By June, the scouts’ reports have enabled the 26 major league teams to rank hundreds of high school and college players according to their perceived ability and potential. “It’s strictly a judgment call,” said Bill Livesey, who lives in Florida and is one of about 25 scouts for the New York Yankees. “Like rating a good-looking woman, your eight may be my six.”

From the rating, the teams choose the players they want to sign in the annual draft, with the World Series winner picking last and the worst team first. There are substantial bonuses only for draft choices in the early rounds; the others who sign usually get nothing more than a contract in the low minors for about $700 a month.

It was pushing 11 p.m. by the time Ferguson, heading north for home on Interstate 5, pulled into a restaurant for a dinner of split pea soup. He had abandoned the gum and was smoking his cigar. Albert, who is blind, had fallen sleep again. Like others whose livelihood is the past-time of youth, the summer game is no less magical than life itself to Ferguson, and after a thoughtful puff, he said: “You know, in 40 years, I don’t think I ever met a bad guy in baseball.”

The son of a policeman in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Ferguson started in baseball as a teen-ager, shining shoes in the visitors’ clubhouse at Fenway Park in 1945. He saw combat in the Korean War, then worked his way up through the Milwaukee Braves organization and later accepted an offer from Gene Autry’s Los Angeles Angels in 1960, even though his father gave him hell for going to work “for a movie actor in California, of all damn places.”

‘Just Like It Was My Own’

When Autry asked him what kind of a traveling secretary he thought he’d make, Ferguson replied: “Gene, I’m going to spend your money just like it was my own.” They got along wonderfully.

Ferguson returned to Milwaukee in 1970 and quit drinking two years later. “That’s the dark side of baseball,” he said. “You drink when you win and you drink when you lose.” When he called his wife, Petey, (“a lovely little Irish girl”) after the Brewers’ loss in the 1982 World Series to tell her he had finally quit the majors, she said: “Great, we’ll do even better in our new life.” Ferguson spent the next season as a senior-citizen beach bum in Cape Cod, Mass., before joining the Phillies in 1984 in a job that puts him in his own bed every night.

“The magic had left me,” he said. “When Cleveland looks like New York and New York looks like Cleveland and the lunches in every press box taste the same, you know you’ve run out of gas. All those hotel suites with apples and booze were nice, but you get to thinking--thinking about your wife putting up with you during all those traveling years, about the kids, and you realize that fancy stuff doesn’t mean nothing. I had a great life but I knew there had to be a little bit more.”

So, finishing his pea soup, Ferguson motored north, toward Petey and home in Santa Ana. One of his prospects performed well last season in Utica--”Hey, I’m not 0-for-0”--and he had a full day tomorrow with three games to scout, and there wasn’t a morning that he didn’t leave his house excited, knowing that another Mickey Mantle or Eddie Mathews might be waiting, undiscovered, in some little ballpark, just over the next hill.