It would take several columns to list the many achievements of this month’s feature, Bill Clark.
For 36 years, Clark was a professional baseball scout for the Pirates, Reds, Padres, and Braves among other teams. He was the International Scouting Director when the Braves signed major leaguers such as Andruw Jones and Rafael Furcal, and he almost put Albert Pujols in an Atlanta Braves uniform.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A resident of Columbia, Missouri, for 45 years, Clark spent 40 years as an official at the high school and college levels in 12 sports. He is a member of the National Halls of Fame for powerlifting and weightlifting, as well as the national and international lifting Halls of Fame. According to one bio, he holds more than 110 lifting records for lifters 55-over. He has also has a degree in journalism.
Although now retired from scouting, Clark has not retired from life. Currently he teaches two classes in the University of Missouri’s lifetime learning program for people 50 and over, coordinates programs for an issues and answer session called Forum at the Unitarian Church, is chairman of the local Democratic Party, owns and operates a gym, does nine issues a year of a weightlifting journal, and is a regular columnist in the Columbia Daily Tribune. He is also on the boards of several organizations and is deeply involved with writing about local theater.
The first chairman of SABR’s Scouts Research Committee, SABR has been an important part of Clark’s life since he joined in 1985. "SABR is very, very close to my heart," said Clark. We are thrilled to pay a small homage to him in this SABR Nine.
You have a lot of interests, what got you started in baseball, and who impacted you the most?
Necessity to feed a family I guess. Like all kids in ‘40s, I started out wanting to be a major league baseball player. I went to a three-day Cardinal try-out camp and I got cut after the first day. I was sixteen at the time. That told me I wasn’t going to play in the big-leagues. But I was playing American Legion baseball…wasn’t bad…and thought, "I’d like to do something else in baseball." So I became an umpire. In my first game, I was behind the plate of a Kansas City Monarchs game. Buck O’Neil was at first base and Gene Baker was at shortstop. Gene used to say, "Yeah I remember that kid, he was the worst umpire I ever saw."
I went to George Barr’s umpire school in January of 1950, which made me probably the youngest guy, even today, to have graduated from a professional umpire school. I did okay and the president of the Georgia-Florida League told me "Kid, when you get out of the service, we’ll get together." I wound up in the army for three years and continued to umpire wherever I was, even in Korea. After the service, I went to the University of Missouri to seek a degree in journalism, and in 1956, I got the urge to go back into pro baseball. I got a contract in the Central Mexican League and lasted about a month. By that time I was essentially starving to death, so I quit, came home to be with my wife, and later in the summer caught on in the Nebraska State League. But even that wasn’t going to work, and we had a child. I had umpired everything in this part of the world: college ball, high school ball, semi-pro, legion, you name it. So Dick Keeley, a scout at that time for the Milwaukee Braves, took me to lunch and said, "You see all these players, here’s my phone number; call me collect when you see a player." So I became his bird dog, and for six years or so for every Christmas or so, I’d get a brand new fifty dollar bill. Of course, fifty dollars was a good fortune in those days.
In 1962, the urge to be in pro ball got strong again, and I went back to umpire school …the Al Summers’ school (Harry Wendelstedt was a classmate). I headed out to Class-B Pioneer League and it came to be the first of the month, I had $96 to my name, owed $126 in rent in Columbia, Missouri, and my wife was running out of food money. Of course you know where you go at that point—quit and come home. I was thirty years old, and I figured that’s the end of my baseball career. So I caught on in Columbia in the recreational department using my journalism degree, and returned to work with the newspaper and continued to umpire. Well, it didn’t take very long until the same thing happened…a guy in Pittsburgh put me on as a bird dog and in about three years I became a part-time scout. In late 1967 Pittsburgh had a shake-up, and I was offered the job of full-time scouting supervisor in the Midwest. So my wife and I talked about it, and we made the decision to go into professional baseball. That’s how I got started.
Do you think weight training has had an effect on player development?
There’s no question in my mind that when strength becomes a factor, weights are the best way to get there. In years gone by, guys worked off-season. They had to have other jobs to survive, even the big-leaguers, and there was a lot of physical work done. So guys lived harder, they did a lot more physical labor, and they maintained strength pretty good. Well today, our society is essentially soft. We live in an air-conditioned home, drive an air-conditioned car and very few people, particularly professional athletes, would even consider hard physical labor. So they turn to the gym to strengthen the muscle mass…core strengthening…, and they’ve done a pretty good job of it. Weights will take you from point A to point B pretty good without steroids. Properly handled, and not overdone, and not emphasizing the upper part of the body, the weight training has had a lot to do with the power that we see in the game today. Unfortunately, they try to get advantage by even getting stronger…and you know how they do that. But weight training has been a very valuable asset.
Why is it important that scouts be allowed to collective bargain?
In a scout’s contract there is a clause which essentially makes that contract a ten-day salary agreement between the club and the employee. He has no guarantee of more than ten days. It’s unilateral. He can’t quit and go some place else, but he can be fired in ten days. That is indicative of the treatment scouts have always had…and it’s indicative of the treatment players had until the early sixties. There’s a definite parallel. When the players tried to organize, at first there was huge fear, because owners just got rid of players. You know, if you’re the union-organizer back then, you’re out of baseball. So, it was hard to pull these people together. And you couldn’t do it in secret. Somebody had to be up front. We tried and tried and tried. Actually, I tried to sow the seeds in people’s minds in 1983 and not get fired at the time.
Things at Cincinnati Reds under Marge Schott did not go well. Little by little, you’d hear people would lose their jobs. And somebody would come in, a new scouting director would come aboard…and he wanted to bring over his people. General managers wanted to bring in their people. Scouts and minor league people were absolute chattel. They would just use them and cast them aside. They would bring in a friend, or what have you…pay back a debt by hiring somebody. And this went on and on…and it really bothered me that a person who was a family man, maybe thirty-five years old with three kids, looking down the road a few years to put these kids in college, and did a great job, spent 250 nights a year on the road for the ball club, would get a call one day that said, "Aww…well you know we’re going in a different direction so, see-ya." That would be it. You put all that together and you say, "Hey, this is one of the most unfair things in labor in the United States." There’s no respect. If they had respect for somebody then they would guarantee their contract. They’ve done a thing now, where they’ve put an addendum in the contract. There’s a particular clause that says, "Will not be used unless…" It lists like five different things. One is, "If you’ve been convicted of a felony." Another is if you essentially steal from the ball club. You get down to the last one, and it says, "Or any action deemed detrimental to the organization." Well you define that one. They still have you. They’re still just saying, "This is a guaranteed contract," for one year, three years or whatever for this salary, but they make you sign that addendum. I showed the contract to the National Labor Relations Board and they said, "Are you kidding? Nobody should ever even consider signing this contract." I wrote an article for an international investment magazine, in which I talked about retirement. How you handle retirement after you’ve been active. I said that I have great memories of baseball, I made many friendships. I only have one regret, that I was not able to protect the future of the scouting profession. I would’ve loved to have been fired; then maybe we could have put the scouts organization together.
Who was great to work for?
Bob Howsam, Roland Hemond and Peter O’Malley are the three people, who, far beyond all major league executives, took care of their scouts. And later, Pat Gillick was the same way. They took care of anything unionization would give you, and those guys gave it to you in advance.
Do you think the use of sabermetrics to analyze major league players is harmful to the scouting profession?
Oh I think so. But I think it’s also cyclic. The Kansas City Royals are a great example. They had a staff of probably fifteen, eighteen, twenty scouts. Excellent staff. They had brought the Royals up to snuff. They were one of the better organizations in Major League Baseball. But somebody convinced Kauffman at some point that they could save money if they joined a scouting bureau and kept their five or six best scouts. And then just follow the scouting bureau across the country. They did that and immediately the farm system collapsed. I’d have to go back and look at notes, but I think I’m correct in this…they signed one player in five or six years that they followed the scouting bureau. They signed [basically] only one player in those years who was a major league regular. They looked around and said, "Man, the cupboard is bare." So they put a staff back together and in the first year they signed Marc Gubizca and Bret Saberhagen, which wasn’t a bad pair to start off with. Of course, they went to the World Series real quick after that. So I thought that was a beautiful example. The cycle takes its turn. I think we’re seeing that sabermetrics and Moneyball were great, you can prove everything with statistics to a point. There are three kinds of lies: Big lies, little lies and statistics. Oakland has had success, but only half of that success came from Moneyball and the sabermetrics thing. And L.A. with their sabermetric GM didn’t do what you would call run anybody out the ballpark this year. Pat Gillick said, "I’m sort of the guy in-between. He said, "I believe in some figures, but I still believe eighty percent of my scouts and twenty percent in stats." I think, probably, that summarizes reality. Albert Pujols didn’t get signed because of stats…it wouldn’t have worked. He had an average high school senior year to the point where he didn’t even get drafted. And he was drafted in the fourteenth round out of junior college. Stats didn’t take him very far.
In your opinion, is it harder to scout a high schooler or college kid? Position player or Pitcher?
Yes to all the above. I think this a problem. Major league scouts who have seen big-leaguers everyday…if he comes in to see a college kid, he’s probably going to be a pretty good scout on that guy. Because that college kid is closer to the big leagues and projection is not necessarily a part of it [the decision]. It would be like looking at a strong minor-leaguer in some place. Now, when he goes to see a high school kid…here’s a kid seventeen years old, six foot three, weighs a hundred and sixty pounds, he’s got a loose body and strong shoulders, and he’s going to mature. Many times, that big-league scout who’s great in his field, will miss’em in high school because he can’t play in the big-leagues today. He hasn’t projected a player for the past twenty years of his career as a scout to look at that kid and see him five years from now. But the guy who deals with the high school kid on a regular basis will find that he is probably just as easy, or maybe even easier, to scout than a college player. If a scout has the ability and the willingness to project, I don’t think it makes a difference what the position is. Every player is the same to me. Maybe if that scout was a major league infielder or a major league pitcher he might see that guy better than the rest of us might. I always thought I was a better catcher scout. For some reason I could take a look at a catcher for a couple of innings and go on down the road and not miss on it. Other people would look at a catcher for five games and still couldn’t figure out whether he was a prospect or not.
Do you scout a player in Beijing the same way you would in Ohio?
Yeah, essentially you do. But you do look at the general picture more…the experience level. As far as the ability goes, no…if you see projection in a player. I like to use the example of Andruw Jones. When we saw him at fifteen, he was like 5’10" and weighed hundred and fifty-five, sixty-five pounds. And you could project him, but no one knew he would grow into what he is now and leads MLB in home runs. But you knew he was going to be better than he was. And if you’d seen the same guy in the United States you’d said he might have ranked higher in the United States. But then you go back, and see that Andruw Jones hadn’t played that much baseball. And if he grew like he did and refined the projectable tools that he had. And better coaching and more at bats…you didn’t know what he was going to be today but you knew he was going to be better. I guess essentially I didn’t scout guys any different one place than the other.
You were a sportswriter in Columbia, Missouri, during the early days of racial integration. Did that experience influence you as a baseball scout?
I think so. I really think so. For years, I had no problem relating to people of non-Caucasian, non-English, speaking heritage. I’ve never had any problems with that. That comes through really quickly in negotiations and so forth. Because if you can move freely in the other man’s environment and not feel like you’re above them, then you can sit and talk pretty easily. I used to go to Chicago a lot, I spent about twenty-five years in the Chicago area and I never had any problems down in the inner-city. Other scouts would get pushed around and told to leave the parks and so forth. But I never had any problems. It didn’t take long for many people to understand the old fat fellow is here. He may have contracts. Baseball may have opened the door, sure. But the relationship we had as human beings was one on one. I used to turn my hat backwards and sit with the boys…and we didn’t have any problems.
Don’t. And I’ve told several people that. Until you have your future in your own hands, don’t. Don’t be caught up miasma of glory that goes with being a big-league scout. It’s nice to sit in a ball park and say, "I’m a major league scout." But then you come home to find out that you don’t have a job and your family now is in jeopardy. So be very careful of involvement. Some scouts get caught up in the glory and the glamour sitting in that big-league ballpark. Flashing a radar gun. I’d say, "Hey guys, weigh the future in more than one direction. Don’t put all your eggs in baseball’s basket without a guarantee."
