Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (45 page)

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 sitting 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 Clayton 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.

“Cotton Clayton ended up playing in the International League for about four or five years,” he said. “He had some bad breaks along the way—that’s the way it is sometimes—and he never did get to the majors. Now he has a tire business down in Henderson—along with the farm that I bought with that fifty thousand.”

The next morning, Ray Scarborough and I caught an early flight to Detroit, where we would pick up another car and drive to Ypsilanti to scout a highly celebrated pitching prospect named Bob Owchinko, who played for Eastern Michigan University. During the flight, I asked Ray if he could remember when he himself had first been scouted. He told me he had grown up on a small farm in Mount Gilead, in central North Carolina. He was the fourth of six brothers (there was one sister), and all the Scarboroughs loved to play ball. Work on the farm was long and hard, but their father made a little diamond out behind the house, and there was time for some family baseball there in the evenings. Sometimes Ray and his next-older brother, Steve, would walk five miles in to town to play in a pickup game. Eventually, Ray was given an athletic scholarship to Rutherford Junior College, in the Carolina Piedmont section, where another brother, Bill, was doing some coaching.

In the summer when Ray turned seventeen, a shiny black Cadillac rolled up to the Scarborough farm one day, and a man wearing a suit and tie stepped out. “It was a Cardinal scout named Pat Crawford,” Ray said, “and he’d come to look me over. He was a real Dapper Dan, and I was
impressed.
‘Can you th’ow for me?’ he asked, and I said yes, sir. But there wasn’t anybody else at home right then, so we didn’t know who I could throw
to.
I offered to throw to him, but he declined. Well, finally he pointed to a red clay bank off across the road and said, ‘Son, how would you like to th’ow into that bank?’ We paced off the distance and he took a white handkerchief out of his pocket and stuck it up in place on that bank with a little rock. Then he got some baseballs out of the trunk of the Cadillac, and I threw for about ten minutes at his old hanky. He must have liked what he saw, because he invited me to a Cardinals tryout camp in Charlotte. Mr. Rickey was there, and some others, and they picked three of us out of about a hundred or more, so I knew they thought I could play. But they only offered me sixty dollars a month, so I decided I wasn’t ready to go into baseball yet.”

Ray wanted to continue with college after his two years at Rutherford, but he knew he had to earn his way. He hoped to pick up some cash by playing in the semipro Coastal Plain League but was told that he was too small. “I only weighed about a hundred and twenty-eight, which wasn’t big enough even for mumblety-peg,” he said to me. “I finally hooked on with a town team in Aberdeen, North Carolina, in the Sand Hill League. We played ball two days and picked peaches the rest of the time. I got twelve dollars and fifty cents a week for playin’ and pickin’. No bonus, no Social Security.”

He stayed out of school that winter and worked as a carhop in a drive-in, but he had begun to grow, and the next spring—the spring of 1938—he was given a tryout with a team in Hickory, North Carolina, in the Carolina League.

“That was an outlaw league,” Ray said. “You know—outside of regular organized baseball. It was just a string of teams from little cities like Concord and Gastonia and Kannapolis. Strictly semipro, but there were a lot of players I’d heard of—Art Shires and Packy Rogers and Prince Henry Oana—and we all got paid. Well, I won myself a job and, do you know, I actually pitched the opening game of the season for the Hickory Rebels, against Lenoir. I was just a squirt with a curve and a fastball, but I thought I was the biggest dog in town.”

Ray’s route to the big time was not quite arrowlike. Pitching with the Rebels won him an athletic scholarship to Wake Forest, and there he began to receive some attention from big-league scouts—famous men like Gene McCann, of the Yankees, and Paul Florence, of the Reds. He was treated to a special courtesy trip to Philadelphia, where he visited Shibe Park and shook hands with Connie Mack. Money and celebrity seemed to be in the offing, but Scarborough injured his arm while pitching in the fifth game of his senior year at Wake Forest, and the scouts suddenly disappeared. He took his degree and taught high school for a year, at Tabor City, North Carolina, while he waited for his arm to come around, and then signed on with Chattanooga, in the Class A Southern League, for a fifteen-hundred-dollar bonus—a fraction of the sum the scouts had been talking about before his injury. He was sent down to Selma, Alabama, in Class B, and there, at last, he began to win. He broke the league strikeout record there, came back to Chattanooga, and joined the Washington Senators in June 1942, just a month before his twenty-fifth birthday. “I’d finally made it off the farm,” Ray said. He pitched in the majors until 1953.