The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  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.

  The rain was letting up, but a fresh wind was buffeting the trees beyond the outfield fence. Scarborough wiped the inside of our foggy windshield with his handkerchief. “Golly Pete,” he said. “If I was young Mr. Brandenburg, I’d be a little nervous right now, waiting all this time. There’s more pressure than you can hardly imagine on a young player in a situation like this. Usually, there aren’t too many folks in the stands at a high-school game, and he can see those scouts all si
tting there, with their little hats on. Come on, rain—just quit, now.”

  The rain did stop, and half an hour later we were sitting on some damp bright-yellow aluminum bleacher seats, and the stands had suddenly filled up with spectators: high-school kids, most of them, in jeans and overalls and emblazoned T-shirts and floppy far-out hats and shiny rain jackets and big boots—high-school kids anywhere. Everyone was clapping for the game to begin. Directly in front of me, an older man wearing a camouflage-spotted hunting cap turned around and said, “If Brandenburg wasn’t pitching, I’d be off fishin’ right now.” Then the players for the visiting team—North Hardin High, from Radcliff, Kentucky—ran out on the wet field, wearing electric-blue shirts and white pants (the teams had drawn for the home-team last-up privilege, and the visitors had won), and the game began at last—not much of a game, at that, because the Elizabethtown Panthers (gold shirts with a gigantic purple ventral “E” and striped white pants) immediately batted around, scoring five runs, thanks in part to a bases-loaded single by Tim Brandenburg. Ray watched all this with considerable impatience, casting glances from time to time at the low, hurrying clouds just above us. The teams changed sides, and Brandenburg sauntered very slowly out to the mound. Some of the girls in the stands called “Tim! Tim! Tim!” in unison. Brandenburg had curly hair and a Roman nose; he didn’t look heavily muscled, but he had the sloping shoulders and long arms of a pitcher. I could not remember how long it had been since I had seen a ballplayer who looked so young. Throwing left-handed, and pitching, for some reason, with no windup at all, he ran up a full count on the first batter and then struck him out with a sharp-breaking curve.

  “Look at that,” Ray murmured in a puzzled way. “Why is he pitching like that, I wonder. Why doesn’t he wind up? It’s like he’s playing catch out there.… Well, I see he’s bowlegged—there aren’t many real athletes who aren’t, they tell me.”

  Brandenburg struck out the second batter and retired the third on an easy grounder.

  “Yes, that’s a pretty good curveball,” Ray said to me. “It has a good, tight spin on it. I think if he’d push off the mound he’d get more action on it. But it’s hard to see a guy with his build getting much faster. He can pitch in the minors, that’s for sure.”

  Elizabethtown kept scoring runs, and Tim Brandenburg kept dismissing the enemy batters without effort, and after three innings the score had gone to 8–0. Nick Kamzic climbed up the stands and squeezed in next to Ray, and after Brandenburg surrendered a single—the first hit of the day for North Hardin—he said, “He seems to have more drive when he pitches off the stretch. He drops down and pushes off better.”

  “Yes, but he may have trouble holding men on,” Ray said. “I mean, the way he rocks back instead of coming straight on down. But that’s correctable.”

  Brandenburg gave up a foul and then rubbed up the new ball with great deliberation. He looked around at the crowd in rather imperious fashion.

  “Hey, now!” Ray said, grinning. “He’s a showman. He’s a candidate for New York. I’ll tell you, if I had an eight-run lead and it looked like rain, I’d be firin’ that ball. But this kid has a pretty good arm. You want to make him throw harder, but you can’t. His best stuff is up out of the strike zone. When he comes down with it, he loses velocity. If he could get some mustard on it, on top of his breaking stuff, he’d be in pretty good shape. I think it’s that no windup. You want to teach a kid like this to drive that lead shoulder toward the catcher’s mitt. That makes the ball come in low, and we have a low strike zone now.”

  All this was perfectly evident to me as soon as Ray pointed it out. I had the curious feeling that I was listening to a brilliant English instructor explicating some famous novel or play. I thought I had known some of the passages by heart—known them almost too well—but now I began to hear different rhythms and truths. An old text had become fresh and exciting again.

  “This kid is pretty advanced in most areas,” Ray went on, “but you always look for places where a boy can be improved.” He paused, and then, almost to himself, he murmured, “You always want them to be better.”

  The game ended—it was a seven-inning affair—with Elizabethtown on top by 9–0, and some of the young people in the stands ran out on the field and stood around Tim Brandenburg in a happy circle. He had given up two hits and struck out seventeen batters. I had begun to play scout, of course, and had become hard to please, and it was not until Scarborough and I were in our car and on the way back to Louisville that it came to me that Tim Brandenburg was almost surely the best high-school pitcher I had ever seen.

  I asked Ray what he thought, and he remained silent for some time. “I’m thinking what I’ll write on my report,” he said at last. “Overall, the boy has a chance to pitch. He’s not an outstanding prospect, but he has a good opportunity. Off what I saw today, I’d say he might go in the fourth or fifth round of the draft. If you had to, you might take him in the third round. He looks sort of like the kind of pitcher that tops out at about the AA level, because of his lack of velocity. That curve is a good one, but he might have to develop another pitch—a slip pitch or something—if he’s going to make it to the majors. In the end, it will probably depend on his intelligence and how much he wants to make it to the top.”

  I asked Scarborough what was meant by the word “signability,” which I had seen on the Bureau’s report, and he pointed out that although each club had exclusive rights to a player it acquired in the draft, it still had to negotiate financial terms with that player. If they couldn’t agree, the player would once more become a free agent and might be drafted all over again—usually in a redraw that forms part of another draft each year, in January—by a different club, or even by the same club. “If you think a boy is worth fifteen thousand dollars and he and his parents and his coach think he’s worth fifty, that’s a signability problem,” Scarborough said. “More players than you’d think don’t get signed—especially the high-school kids, because they can always choose to go off to college instead. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can sign half of them. Your main effort is always to sign your top five or six draft picks. It seems unusual, but a good college player is always more signable than a high-school boy, because he has no place else to go after he graduates. He’s got to come to you. One real headache for us is the salary levels for these young players while they’re beginning to work their way up through minor-league ball. Down in Class A or lower, they can get only five hundred a month in their first year, and up to seven hundred in Double A. And the per-diem is strictly hamburger money. I think we lose a lot of prospects right there.

  “Of course, signing a player you want real bad is absolutely different from what it was back before the clubs pushed through the draft system, about ten or twelve years ago, after they’d all spent so much money on those bonus babies. If this was back then, and we wanted this boy, I’d have made it a point to get to know his parents on this trip, so that when the time came we might get in there ahead of the other clubs. That used to be about the liveliest part of it all, especially with a really and truly top prospect, and it was downright enjoyable sometimes what you had to do.”

  Scarborough grinned and slapped the steering wheel with one hand. “I’ll never forget signing a fellow named Cotton Clayton, way back in the early sixties,” he said. “He was an outfielder, and he could do it all. He was a valuable piece of property. Harry Dalton wanted him, and Lee MacPhail, who was our GM at Baltimore then—he wanted him. I made an appointment to see Clayton down in his hometown of Henderson, North Carolina, and I checked into the local motel. You had to make an appointment, because just about every other club was anxious to get him, too, but especially the Cardinals. I made damn sure to get him to come up to my motel room, and I swore to myself he’d never get out until I’d signed him. I also made sure that Harry and Lee, up in Baltimore, were ready on the other end of the phone. This was in the bonus days, you understand, and I had about fifty thousand dollars at my disposal, but when C
layton came in and sat down I just didn’t know how to get around to the subject at hand.”

  Ray laughed delightedly. “Well, sir, we talked about rabbits and about farming and about basketball—everything but money. He was one tough bargainer. When we finally got to it, we began around twenty-five thousand, and every time he’d tilt the pot a little I’d shake my head and say, ‘Well, let me talk to Harry,’ and I’d go off and make a telephone call. We talked and talked, and we got awful tired in that room, and finally he said, ‘Well, I can’t take one penny less than fifty thousand.’ I pulled back—sort of recoiled—and said, ‘You just knocked me out of the box,’ but I said that we needed a left-hand-hitting outfielder so bad that I’d make one last call to Lee MacPhail and see if I could talk him into it. I said, ‘If I can somehow do that, will you sign for ten thousand a year for five years, with a starting salary of a thousand dollars a month, and will you sign before you leave this room?’

  “Well, he squirmed and squirmed, because, of course, he’d promised the Cardinals and some of the other scouts he’d never sign anything without talking to them first. But he finally said yes, and I called Lee, and Lee whispered ‘Sign him!’ and I pulled out the contract—which I’d had ready all along, of course—and he signed, and I shook his hand and checked out of the motel and went home. And do you know that the next man who checked into that exact room that day was Eddie Lyons, of the Cardinals? He wanted Clayton just as bad as we did, only he’d stopped off on the way to sign a third baseman down there he’d liked. He got my room, but I’d got his outfielder!”

  I couldn’t remember having heard of Cotton Clayton in big-league ball, and I asked Ray what had happened to him.