The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  I asked him if he had ever played much baseball.

  “Sure I did,” he said. “I grew up in Houghton, South Dakota—my dad had five quarters there, about eight hundred acres—but I went to high school in Hecla, South Dakota, which was on down the line. I batted cleanup on the team there for two years. I hit .400-and-something my junior year, and .666 all year when I was a senior. I played in a regional tournament then, and I remember a fellow called Al Face struck me out four times in one game. That was when I knew I wasn’t a real ballplayer. I still hear from Al Face. Once a year, he sells me a calf. He sent me a picture that somebody took of us back then, and I was wearing striped overalls. You know, by the time I was ten years old I could guess the weight of a steer right within a few pounds.”

  He stood up and called out to Bobby Winkles, the Giants’ third-base coach, “Hey, Bobby, how come you’re chewin’ and spittin’ out there? What kind of example is that for my young players, hey?” He laughed uproariously, and Winkles waved and smiled.

  I was about to ask Bud Herseth what he thought about the reserve clause and player salaries and the lockout and Marvin Miller, but then I decided not to. He was having too much fun. Instead, I asked him how many of the Giants’ games he hoped to see at Candlestick Park this year.

  “The good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise,” he said, “all of them.”

  Two weeks later, with the season under way, I took a subway up to the Bronx for the Yankees’ home opener. It was a big day, because it marked the reopening of Yankee Stadium—a homecoming for the famous team to the famous old park, which had been rebuilt by the City of New York over the past two years. The new place looked fine. The overhanging roof around the top deck was gone, and the old thick supporting columns and girders had disappeared, giving us a new, clean triple sweep of bright-blue seats from right field all the way around to left. The whole place was blue and white, and it sparkled. There were three new banks of escalators, and a new, tree-lined promenade outside the first-base side of the Stadium, where a street used to be. The playing field had been lowered and its outlines altered a little, but most of that enormous green pasture in left was there, so you knew it was still the Stadium, all right. There were some big new scoreboards out behind the bleachers, with a white scrim on top in the shape of the lacy coppery-green top-deck façade of the old park. The wall of scoreboards cut off our view of the elevated-station platform and the nearby apartment-house roofs, where in the old days you could always spot a few neighborhood fans watching from a great distance. The new Stadium is cut off from the city around it, and nobody can watch baseball casually there anymore.

  There were 54,010 of us there for the opener. Three bands played, and the sun shone, and a lot of celebrities—Joe Louis, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Mrs. Lou Gehrig and Mrs. Babe Ruth, and some others—were introduced, and then the Yankees played the Twins and beat them, 11–4, coming back from a four-run deficit. The Yankees have a sprightly, quick-running team this year, with a marvelous-looking new young second baseman named Willie Randolph, and they may be in the thick of things all summer long in their tough division. There was a lot of hopeful noise at the Stadium that first afternoon—a terrific amount of cheering—but the truth is I didn’t have much fun. I don’t know what to make of the new Yankee Stadium. It cost the city a hundred million dollars to rebuild and finance, and the city can’t pay its bills, can’t pay for new schools or hospitals, can’t pay its teachers, can’t keep its streets or its neighborhoods up; the South Bronx, where Yankee Stadium stands, is a disaster area. These are the realities and insolubles that we all know so well, and maybe they are the things that make us give so much attention to sports in the first place—why we need these long diversions at the ball park. I don’t think we should use sports as a hiding place, but I have always been willing to try to carry the two conflicting realities in my head at the same time—poor cities and rich sports, a lot of unnoticed kids playing in burned-out playgrounds, and a few men playing before great crowds in a new sports palace. As the paradox deepens, however, it begins to seem as if we are trying to make the irony disappear—that we are hoping to rub out one side of the equation by vastly increasing the other. By spending more and more millions of dollars on sports, we may be trying to tell ourselves that sports matter almost more than anything else simply because we do spend so much money on them. The name for this is addiction. I’ll probably get used to the Stadium in time, but on the first afternoon all I could think of was the quiet, slow afternoons I had just spent in Bradenton and Winter Haven and Scottsdale and Phoenix, and the games I had seen there. Those games seemed like elegies now. It was strange to be sitting in Yankee Stadium, where I had grown up watching baseball, and no longer feeling at home there. I don’t know what to think, because it may be that the money and the size of sport have grown too big for me after all.

  Scout

  — July 1976

  BASEBALL HAS SO ALTERED in recent years that many of the classic prototypes of the game seem on the point of disappearing altogether. The rookie pitcher called up to the parent club in midseason does not arrive with cinders in his hair and a straw suitcase in his freckled paw but strolls into the carpeted, air-conditioned big-league clubhouse with a calfskin flight bag over his shoulder (and a Kurt Vonnegut paperback in the bag), where he is greeted by some teammates who played college ball with him or against him a year or two earlier in southern California. Over in the corner, the club’s famous slugger, having just prolonged his slump by going 0 for 5 in a nationally televised game, now abandons his attempt to find surcease in transcendental meditation and suddenly seizes his hair-dryer and bashes it to smithereens against the wall. The manager, dressing in his office, asks a writer about the commotion, smiles and shakes his head, then slaps a little cologne on his ungrizzled cheeks and steps into his fawn leisure suit. His telephone rings: the general manager wants him to stop by upstairs for a minute to hear about the latest meeting with the personal agent of the angry (and still unsigned) famous slugger. If these contemporary patterns are startling, it is probably only because they contrast so vividly with the images of baseball’s dramatis personae that most of us memorized in our youth. Over the years, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes willingly, I have gradually given up my boyhood impressions of baseball stars, and of baseball veterans and owners and writers, until only one old portrait remains. In this scene, a man sits alone on a splintery plank bleacher seat, with a foot cocked up on the row in front of him and his chin resting on one hand as he gazes intently at some young ballplayers in action on a bumpy, weed-strewn country ballfield. He sits motionless in the hot sunshine, with a shapeless canvas hat cocked over his eyes. At last, responding to something on the field not perceptible to the rest of us, he takes out a little notebook and writes a few words in it, and then replaces it in his windbreaker pocket. The players steal a glance at the lone stranger as they come in from the field at the end of a half inning; the managers pretend to ignore him. Nobody knows his name, but everybody recognizes him, for he is a figure of profound, almost occult knowledge, with a great power over the future. He is a baseball scout.

  I have often noticed scouts at spring-training games, where they appear in numbers and always seem to roost together, and now and then I have spotted one at a big-league park, but I never tried to penetrate their arcane company. This spring, it occurred to me that these brooding, silent birds might constitute another threatened species, and I decided to attempt some field studies. Several baseball friends advised me to look up Ray Scarborough, who is a regional and special-assignment scout for the California Angels. Scarborough, I was told, was a veteran field man, with a high reputation for his baseball knowledge and his exceptional independence of judgment. He had been a member of the outstanding scouting staff put together by Harry Dalton, who was responsible in great part for assembling the formidable Baltimore teams that dominated the American League in the late nineteen sixties and early seventies. Dalton had moved along to the Angels i
n 1971 to take the pivotal general manager’s position, and soon thereafter he sent for Ray Scarborough and five other stalwarts of his Baltimore G-2. Early in May, I reached Scarborough by telephone at his home in Mount Olive, North Carolina, and proposed myself as a traveling companion on his next safari. Scarborough, who talks in an attractive Tarheel legato, responded with such alacrity and friendliness that it occurred to me for the first time that the life of a baseball scout might be a lonely one. He told me that I had caught him in a rare moment at home during the busiest part of his year—the weeks just prior to organized baseball’s annual June talent draft—during which he was scouting free agents: high-school and college players who appeared promising and were about to graduate or otherwise surrender their amateur athletic status. He was leaving soon to look over a young pitching prospect in Kentucky and another in Michigan, and he invited me to come scouting with him.

  Two days later, as I waited by the gate in the Louisville airport where Ray Scarborough’s inbound morning flight had been announced, I began to wonder how I would recognize him. I remembered him as a big, hardworking, right-handed curveball pitcher with the Washington Senators—and later the Red Sox and the Yankees—but that had been a good twenty-five years back. I needn’t have worried. Scarborough is a heavy, energetic, deep-chested man, with an exuberant nose (his baseball contemporaries called him Horn), curly black hair, and a sunburst smile, and the moment I spotted him among the arriving passengers my baseball unconscious offered up some instant corroboration: a younger Ray Scarborough, in baggy old-fashioned baseball pants, wheeling and firing on the mound; Scarborough in an old-style, low-crowned baseball cap emblazoned with a big “W,” staring out at me in black-and-white from some ancient sports page. We greeted each other and retrieved his bags, and in a few minutes we were in our rented wheels, rolling south through some lovely, soft-green Kentucky hill country, and Scarborough had made me feel that we were already old friends. He told me that we were headed for Elizabethtown, some forty miles away, to see a young pitcher named Tim Brandenburg, a lefty who would be starting that afternoon for his Elizabethtown High School team in a state district tournament game. I asked Ray how he had heard about Brandenburg (I had in mind a whispered midnight telephone call from a back-country baseball sleuth, or a scribbled note from some old teammate of Scarborough’s now buried in the boonies), and then I learned that scouting, like everything else in baseball, is undergoing some revolutionary changes.

  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 tr
aveling 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.”