Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (46 page)

Eastern Michigan is a rising power in college baseball, and the trim diamond and attractive little roofed grandstand that Ray Scarborough and I found in Ypsilanti that day were much more inviting than a lot of spring-training ball parks I could recall. We were there for a Mid-American Conference doubleheader between the Eastern Michigan Hurons and the Falcons, from Bowling Green State University, in Ohio. The home team was just finishing infield practice under a cloudy sky, and the Huron squad members, in white uniforms with green lettering, were ranged along the third-base line, where they gave some noisy cheers for each of their starting infielders as he whipped his last peg in to the catcher and trotted off the field. Football stuff. Ray Scarborough greeted some scouting friends and then sat down with a California colleague, Al Hollingsworth, who is also a special-assignment scout for the Angels, operating out of Texas. Hollingsworth has thick white hair, blue eyes, and a tanned, classic old-ballplayer’s face, with crinkly lines around the eyes and mouth. If you were casting for the part of a veteran scout in a baseball movie, you would pick Al Hollingsworth.

“Hey, I hear we won last night!” he said to Ray. “Somebody told me. It was about 7–5.”

Scarborough had been complaining that morning that it was often impossible on the road to pick up the results of Angels games from the West Coast, and he brightened at the news. (Angels victories had been rare in recent weeks; in fact, the club was dead last in the American League West.) “That’s more like it,” he said. “Who pitched?”

“All I heard was Alvarez hit a home run,” Hollingsworth said. He told Ray he had just flown in from Denison, Texas, where he had seen a young pitcher named Darwin the day before. “He’s about twenty years old, and he’s comin’ on,” he said. “He threw about eighty-six, eighty-seven on the speed gun. He got ripped pretty good yesterday, though. He reminds you a little of a Granger or a Perzanowski. His arm’s way over here, and his ball don’t tail.”

“I hear there’s a catcher on this Bowling Green team,” Ray said. “I don’t recall his name, though.”

“You got anything on a kid named Brown, in Indiana?” Hollingsworth said. “All I have on him is a phone number.”

And then the game began, and we all began to watch Bob Owchinko, who had brought us there. The Bureau scouting report on him had rated him a premium choice, with an above-average fastball, a curveball with a tight spin, a screwball, and a loose overhead arm action. He was a tall, solidly built left-hander, and he was using a full windup, with a high-kicking delivery and a long stride. He was hiding the ball well between pitches. He fanned the first two Bowling Green hitters, gave up a single to the catcher (whose name, it turned out, was Larry Owen), walked a batter, and then got the side out with another strikeout.

“A nice big boy,” Ray murmured. “He’s got heavy legs and sort of a big tail, but that never hurt Lolich, did it? Pitchers can get away with that better than others. I like the way this boy comes at the batter.”

The stands were filling up, and Ray kept getting up to exchange greetings with more scouts as they took seats around us, in a companionable cluster directly behind home plate—Dick Teed and Brandy Davis, of the Phillies; Pat Gillick and Dave Yoakum, of the Yankees; Howie Haak (a famous name in scouting), of the Pirates; Syd Thrift, of the A’s; Joe Bowen, of the Reds, who had been with us the day before in Elizabethtown. (If you were writing a baseball movie or a baseball novel, you would give your scouts names like these.) The scouts sat back quietly, some with their arms folded or a knee cocked up, and watched the field with motionless intensity. They looked like businessmen at a staff conference. Nobody seemed to be taking any notes.

I remarked that Owchinko appeared to be a good drawing card, and Ray said, “In the old days, you’d have had a
drove
of scouts at a game like this. They tell me the Bureau tries to discourage their men from being too close with any of the rest of us, because they’re supposed to represent their clubs impartially, but I can’t see how that’s going to work. You just can’t keep friendship out of scouting, because so many of these fellows have been buddies for years. A lot of us have played with each other or against each other, and we go back a long way together. It’s a fraternity.”

The teams changed sides, and the home-plate umpire—a short, dark-haired man, whose black suit was already stained with sweat and dust—walked back to the stands with his mask in one hand and chatted with the scouts. He poked a forefinger through the wire of the foul screen and gravely shook fingers with Ray Scarborough.

“That’s Tom Ravashiere,” Ray said after the umpire had gone back to work. “He was a good ump in the International League for years and years. He’s out of baseball now, but I guess he still does games like this. He lives around here someplace.”

Both the teams on the field looked well trained and extremely combative, and the young players made up for their occasional mistakes with some eye-popping plays. At one point, Owchinko hustled off the mound, snatched up an attempted sacrifice bunt, and whirled and threw the Falcon base runner out at second with a fiery peg. In the bottom of the same inning—the fourth—a Bowling Green outfielder made a diving, sliding catch on his belly in short center field, and then Owen, the catcher, threw out a base runner trying to steal second—threw him out a mile. The Falcon pitcher, whose name was Kip Young, was not quite in Owchinko’s class, but he was putting up a battle, throwing a lot of low curves and showing good control. In the fifth, an Eastern Michigan threat was extinguished when the Bowling Green shortstop speared a line drive on his knees and converted it into a lightning double play at second, thus preserving the scoreless, eventful tie. Ray and the other scouts shook their heads and exchanged little smiles, enjoying it. The clouds had begun to break up, and the green of the outfield grass had turned light and glistening. Good game.

Owchinko had been striking out enemy batters in considerable numbers, but now, in the sixth, he seemed to lose his concentration, walking the first two men. Then there was an error behind him on an easy double-play grounder, and a moment later a Bowling Green outfielder named Jeff Groth whacked a long drive over the left-field fence for a grand-slam home run. Silence in the stands—a very brief silence, it turned out, for in the home half the Eastern Michigan hitters came alive, with a walk, a ground-rule double, and a two-run single, and then, after a couple of mistakes by the visitors, a culminating three-run homer to center by the Eastern Michigan right fielder, Thorn Boutin. The whole Huron team came out to the third-base foul line to welcome him home, and the student fans around us screeched ecstatically. Owchinko walked the leadoff man in the top of the seventh and seemed to be struggling (“Come
on,
Chink!” the fans pleaded), but the tying run died at second, and the Hurons had won it, 5–4.

“I don’t know if he got tired, or what, but his velocity wasn’t good at the end,” Ray said. “I’d like to have seen if he could get two strikes on a man and then break off the curveball. When he gave up that homer, he’d got in the position of trying to throw strikes past the batter, instead of trying to get the man out. He threw that pitch sort of easy—a mistake pitch. But that’s normal. I try never to notice if a pitcher gives up a hit. It’s his motion I’m watching. Same thing with a hitter—I don’t care if he hits, as long as he’s making contact and swings well. But this was a good performance by Owchinko. You could make a few mechanical changes with his delivery. Being sort of big-assed, he stops his right leg sometimes, so his body can’t open up, and he has to throw from over
here.
But he’s got a chance to make a pretty good pitcher. I think this boy might go in the first round. I’d love for us to get him along about the second round, but he won’t be around that long.”

Most of the scouts had disappeared, but we waited for the second game of the doubleheader, because Ray wanted to have a look at the next Eastern Michigan pitcher—a junior named Bob Welch. During the interval, I wandered out beyond the left-field stands and found Bob Owchinko lying on his stomach on the grass, with a towel around his neck. His face was red and he was streaming perspiration. I asked him if he had noticed the scouts behind home during the game.

“Yeah, I saw them there, staring me in the face,” he said. “They don’t bother me—I know what they’re here for.”

“Do you care about which club will draft you next month?” I said.

“I’ve been waiting for a career in major-league ball since I was eleven, and now it’s here,” he said. “It’s about time. I don’t care where I go, but I do like hot weather.”

The second game began, and after Bob Welch had thrown about six pitches Ray Scarborough exclaimed, “There’s a good-looking body! He’s almost got these boys overmatched already.”

Welch, a right-hander, looked even taller and stronger than Bob Owchinko, and he threw with a kind of explosive elegance. There was something commanding about him.

“See out there?” Ray said. “See him cocking his wrist like that behind his back? That can strain your elbow. It could hurt him. He’s cutting the ball a little—turning his hand—which takes off some velocity. If he did it a little more, it would be a slider. I wish he’d turn loose—he’s got a real good arm.”

Welch fired two fastballs, fanning the batter.

“There!”
Ray said. “I like that! He comes off that mound like he means business.” He stood up, smiling with pleasure. “I believe I’ll be making a trip back here a year from now. Maybe we better go quick, before I get dissatisfied with the whole 1976 draft.”

Ray Scarborough and I parted in Detroit that evening. I went home to New York, and he flew to Madison, Wisconsin, where he planned to watch a prospect from the University of Michigan in a game the next day. What he met there, however, was rain. Early in June, Ray went out to Anaheim and, in company with Harry Dalton and Walter Shannon (the Angels’ director of scouting) and Nick Kamzic and Al Hollingsworth and nine other Angel scouts and executives, participated in four days of intensive discussions and appraisals of all the high-school and college free agents that they had scouted and cross-checked and talked about. The draft, which came on June 8, was conducted in the baseball commissioner’s office, in New York, over an open telephone hookup to all twenty-four clubs. The Houston Astros, with first pick, chose a much admired left-handed pitching star from Arizona State University named Floyd Bannister. The Angels’ first choice, on the sixth pick, was a power-hitting outfielder named Kenny Landreaux, also from Arizona State. Tim Brandenburg went to the Kansas City Royals in the second round—the forty-second player in the country to be drafted. The Angels did not bid on him. As for Bob Owchinko, he went to the San Diego Padres on the fifth pick in the first round. A little later in June, at the National Collegiate Athletic Association championships in Omaha, the Eastern Michigan ball team went all the way into the finals before losing to the University of Arizona. On the way, they upset the favorites, Arizona State, thanks to a seven-hitter thrown by Owchinko.

I thought about Ray Scarborough while the draft was going on, and later I looked up the names of some of the players he had scouted. Timothy Glass, the catcher from Springfield, Ohio, went to the Indians in the first round. Ben Grzybek, the pitcher from Hialeah, was the first-round choice of the Royals—thus becoming a potential future teammate of Brandenburg’s. Richard Whaley, the willowy left-hander from Jacksonville, North Carolina, had developed a sore arm late in the spring, which probably dropped him in the draft; he was picked by the Phillies in the third round—No. 65 nationally. None of the free agents Ray had talked to me about with such enthusiasm went to the Angels. Larry Owen, the Bowling Green catcher we had seen in Ypsilanti, was chosen by the Angels in the eighteenth round. Seven hundred and eighty-six players were drafted in all, most of whom would perform only briefly in professional ball, if at all.

I caught up with Ray Scarborough again on the evening of July 5, in another baseball setting: we were part of a crowd of 60,942 spectators at a holiday game between the Phillies and the Dodgers, in Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium. Scarborough was there in a different scouting capacity—evaluating players on both clubs (but especially the Phillies) as potential material for postseason trades with the Angels. This process, which is known as professional scouting, goes on through the middle and latter stages of the regular season and eventually produces scouting reports for Harry Dalton on all major-league players and a considerable number of Class AAA minor-league players as well. (Another kind of scouting—team scouting—collects tactical information about enemy hitters and pitchers to help a club prepare for an upcoming season or series; team scouting before the autumn playoffs and the World Series produces the crucial “book” on the opposition.) Ray looked younger and more rested than he had during our trip in May, and he told me that he had been taking it easy since the draft, putting in a lot of time working in his vegetable garden at home in Mount Olive. He had also caught up on his own business interests, which include real estate, a small tobacco farm, a bank directorship, and a share in a musical-instrument-and-records business.

I asked him how he felt about the Angels’ draft, and he said, “Well, you always want to be associated with your club’s top man, of course. I did see Bob Ferris, who we picked in the second round, and a fellow named Porter we took a little farther down, but otherwise we didn’t get any of the boys I’d checked. The only fruits of your work are the boys who end up with your own organization, and the luck of the draft can sure knock you down. You work like hell all year, and then … Sure, I felt bad—I felt
punctured
—but on the other hand, when I listened to what our people had to say about Ken Landreaux at our meeting in Anaheim, I had confidence that he was a better first choice for us than Glass or Owchinko or the others I’d seen. Next year, it might be the other way around. You know, a scout can go for years and years and never get in on a top pick. You take Mace Brown, of the Red Sox. Mace is a real fine scout, and he went for I don’t know how many years without much luck, and I remember once he said, ‘All this work for nothing,’ or something like that. But he hung on, and then he came up with Jim Rice, who was a first-round pick, and then he had a great kid named Otis Foster last year.”