Tom McNamara is a proud, hard-working baseball scout.
But McNamara, the Seattle Mariners’ director of amateur scouting, isn’t too proud to tell a tale or two about the predicaments a guy — himself — gets into during life on the road.
Here’s one he told on himself this week:
“I
had been at a game at Cumberland University in Tennessee and it was after I’d spent about two weeks on the road. I had a lot of things on my mind,” McNamara said. “I had just walked out of a convenience store and, well, I’d forgot that the rental car I had yesterday wasn’t the car I had that day.
“I walked right up to the car and opened the door. That’s when I noticed this woman in the car.”
It was her car … which looked just like the one McNamara had driven the previous day.
“She really jumped,” he said.
Then there was the day McNamara returned to his office at Safeco Field to find three boxes of items that Halle Larson, the Mariners’ scouting department administrator, had placed on his desk.
“She said, ‘Here’s the Bose headset you forgot on the plane in Charlottesville. And here’s the jacket you left on a plane. And here’s the datebook you left on another plane,'” McNamara said, thankful to get those items back. “There’s a lot of good people out there to send those things back.”
Every scout from every organization could tell similar stories. When you spend more time in hotels as you do your own bed, things happen.
Longtime scout Gary Hughes, inducted into the Professional Scouts Hall of Fame in 2009, was working for the Yankees in 1983 when he had a trip booked to Korea. One day before he was scheduled to leave, Korean Airlines flight 007 — the same flight he was to take the following day — was shot down by a Soviet fighter.
According to a story in the Newark Star Ledger, Hughes called his boss with the Yankees, Murray Cook, and asked what he should do.
“Go ahead,” Cook told Hughes, according to the Star Ledger story. “They’ll never shoot down a plane two days in a row.”
Hey, whatever it takes to discover a future big-league star.
Scouts span the globe, they travel the country, they’re in my back yard and yours. They might see parts of four or five games in a day, or sometimes just watch a kid in pregame drills before moving on to see the next name on the list.
They can look at a scrawny high school kid’s body and know if the size of his butt will catch up with the broadness of his shoulders. They watch more than what a kid does on the field.
“Sometimes you go hang around, watch a kid get off a bus, see how he interacts with his teammates and coaches,” Houston Astros scout Rusty Pendergrass told the Houston Chronicle in 2008.
On a Friday afternoon in April, he might venture over to Chestnut Hill, Mass., in order to watch a highly regarded left-handed pitcher for the visiting team. And that same night, he and his general manager might sit together at Fenway Park and talk about that good-looking lefty.
That’s what McNamara and Mariners GM Jack Zduriencik did about six weeks ago. That pitcher, University of Virginia left-hander Danny Hultzen, retired 22 of the 24 Boston College hitters he faced, allowing one hit and a walk with eight strikeouts in seven innings.
Last Monday, back in the draft war room at Safeco Field, the Mariners made Hultzen their first-round draft pick, the second overall selection. It was the culmination of a process that went back years, not weeks. McNamara and Mariners scouts had been watching Hultzen since he was in high school.
The Mariners didn’t make up their mind on Hultzen merely on the fastball/slider/changeup combination that makes many believe he’ll reach the major leagues sooner than later.
Intangibles are important — how a kid deals with his teammates and coaches, and especially how he handles adversity. On April 8, McNamara got a great sense of that.
Hultzen was scheduled to pitch in Virginia’s game at Georgia Tech, a battle of top ACC teams.
“It was a nice night and I was all pumped up,” McNamara said. “(Hultzen) had already thrown in the bullpen and was ready to go, and then the left-field lights went out.”
The game, originally scheduled for 7 p.m., didn’t start until 9:21. Unfazed, Hultzen loosened up again and held Georgia Tech to seven hits and one earned run in eight innings, striking out 12.
“He went out there and pitched a heck of a game like it was no big deal,” McNamara said. “Sometimes you want to watch a pitcher when things don’t go right. We (scouts) wouldn’t be there if he didn’t have talent, but a lot of times you want to see how a guy handles failure.”
That’s why a scout hits the road and stays on the road. It’s why he must watch a player, then watch him again and again.
And it’s why there were a lot of smiles on Monday when the Mariners, in a move that surprised many experts who expected them to draft highly regarded third baseman Anthony Rendon of Rice, selected Hultzen with the second overall pick.
“A lot of people ask how I do what I do for a living,” McNamara said. “But when you see a good pitcher like this guy, the long drives are easy.”
Read Kirby Arnold’s blog on the Mariners at www.heraldnet.com/marinersblog and follow his Twitter updates at @kirbyarnold.
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