'The Extra 2%': Whiffing on Albert Pujols - 美國職棒

普神選秀時的小故事
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=6189583


There are few jobs in baseball less glamorous and more taxing than that of
the area scout. These road warriors cover wide swaths of territory in pursuit
of baseball talent. Their cars become their homes on their long, lonely
drives down drab highways, burger wrappers and soda cups strewn all over the
passenger seat. The area scout dreams of uncovering that hidden gem, the
player other teams miss who goes on to stardom. The area scout isn't the
person who makes the final decision on whether or not to draft a player. He
doesn't even have a direct line to the scouting director, much less a team's
general manager. For every player an area scout touts, a cross-checker --
itself a pretty thankless, often lonely job -- must travel to see that player
perform, then report back to his bosses. Area scouts do gain credit if the
team drafts and signs the player. But until that moment, the scout can only
hope that someone will listen to him.

Fernando Arango understood the drawbacks of his job. Arango covered five
states in his role as area scout for the Devil Rays: Arkansas, Kansas,
Missouri, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. His region was nowhere near the baseball
hotbeds of California, Florida, and Texas. But the relative lack of talent in
his area could also mean fewer eyes on some intriguing players, thus causing
a few to slip under the radar. One spring Arango drove to the tiny town of
Republic, Missouri, to catch a high school tournament. One player stood out.
This one kid, a burly third baseman, just a junior, was smacking line drives
all over the park. Arango introduced himself, and the two hit it off. Both
scout and player were students of the game, happy to talk about the finer
points long after others would tune out. Arango saw a rare mix of natural
ability and baseball intelligence in the third baseman. He got the player's
contact information and promised to keep in touch.

The following year, Arango's prospect accelerated his education. A strong
student with an affinity for math, he earned all his high school credits by
January 1999, then transferred to Maple Woods Community College in Kansas
City. Arango went back to see the young man play. This time there would be no
covert operation. Several major league scouts and representatives, including
former Kansas City Royals manager John Wathan, also showed up to see various
players. The high school third baseman, now playing as an oversized
shortstop, launched two long home runs over the fence in left-center, into a
thicket of trees.

"The ball sounded like a cannon went off," Arango recalled. "It wasn't even
fair for him to use an aluminum bat."

No way we'll get this guy, Arango thought to himself. Still, when he met with
his cross-checker, Stan Meek, as well as scouting director Dan Jennings,
Arango filed a glowing report on the player. Meek had gone to see the young
man in action, but wasn't nearly as impressed as Arango.

"He was this paunchy, thick-bodied kid," Jennings recalled. "Stan said to me,
'I saw this kid strike out two or three times, I don't know what position
he'd play, I can't do anything with him. I can't write him up.' "

Undaunted, Arango told his bosses, "All I want to say about this guy is that
someday he'll hit 40 home runs in the big leagues." Jennings wasn't ready to
dismiss Arango's report or his ranking of the top prospect in Arango's
five-state area. So he sent in R.J. Harrison, a national cross-checker (who
would take over, years later, as scouting director). Harrison's verdict: "I
can't do anything with this guy."

Even after two emphatically negative reports, Jennings wanted to give
Arango's find one last shot. The Devil Rays invited him to a pre-draft
workout. No other team extended an invite. Not even the Royals, who played
twenty minutes away.

Arango met his young protégé over Grand Slam breakfasts at a Denny's. The
more they talked, the more Arango loved the smarts and grounded approach that
went with the kid's talent. A huge contingent was waiting when Arango arrived
at Tropicana Field. Jennings and Meek were there, along with fifteen other
talent evaluators, Chuck LaMar, even Vince Naimoli. They watched a big group
of draft hopefuls take their turns. Finally, the Missouri kid got his chance.

What happened next depends on who's telling the story. Arango claims his
prospect looked like Lou Gehrig. Jennings saw no such thing.

Arango observed a 60-yard dash in 7.1 seconds, a good time for a player that
size. The Devil Rays tried him at his college position of shortstop, where
Arango says he handled an array of sharply hit grounders and showed good
instincts for a big man. Jennings looked at the player's body, then suggested
maybe he should catch. He'd never caught before and was worried he'd make a
bad impression. Arango told him to relax, put on the equipment, and humor
everyone for a few minutes. His first throw to second base came in a flash:
1.89 seconds. That time was phenomenal for a high school catcher and solid
for a college catcher; several big league catchers show similar times. Only
this player had never caught at any level. Then he got in the batter's box
and started roping line drives all over the park. Growing up, his dad had
taught him to hit the ball with authority to right-center. Do that
consistently, his father told him, and he could one day hit .300 in the big
leagues. Jennings wasn't impressed. "Where's the power?" he muttered. Arango
got the message. "They'd like you to hit it a little farther," he told his
pupil. On the very next pitch, the kid crushed the ball off the top of the
left-field foul pole. Arango smiled. He was going to get his man. Jennings
said he and the other scouts in attendance -- all except Arango -- remained
concerned about the kid's thick build. They also focused on the negatives
rather than the positives as Arango and Jennings both fell into a bit of
confirmation bias. Jennings didn't like the player going down on one knee
more than once to field grounders at short. He was also concerned about the
player's performance at catcher: messy footwork and iffy throwing mechanics,
despite a few good throws. At bat, he worried about the player's approach
more than the results. "He's sitting very deep on his back leg, uppercut
swing, back shoulder dipping pretty good," Jennings said.

"We go back upstairs, and I pose the question to the room," Jennings
recounted. " 'This kid Fernando's got on his list, you see anything different
today than what we've seen before?' Nope, no one saw anything. We left the
workout with the same identical issues that caused us not to have him high on
our board."

When draft day arrived, Arango waited. And waited. The Devil Rays weren't
going to take his guy in the first round, he knew. But after the third,
fourth, and fifth rounds passed, with the kid still undrafted, he started to
wonder if his prediction of forty-home-run seasons had simply been forgotten.
The D-Rays weren't the only team passing. On and on the draft went, and still
no news. There were a bunch of reasons for the snub. The Devil Rays went
after Florida players aggressively, giving them preference over other
prospects -- and Florida-raised veteran free agents priority over non-
Floridians -- in a constant quest for local identity and support. It was a
shortsighted practice that never paid tangible dividends and often hurt the
team. They still worried about the player's build, as Jennings had earlier,
and wondered what position he would play. This was especially odd, since the
player didn't get much chance to try out at third base, his natural position,
or first, where Arango thought he could also fare well. Many skeptics also
wondered about his age: he was born in the Dominican Republic, didn't move to
the United States until high school, and always looked old for the age he was
supposed to be. Meanwhile, the player's agent was new to the gig, and that
uncertainty raised fears that just signing the guy could become dicey, even
in the later rounds. Besides, the Devil Rays had their targeted names up on
the draft board, and the draft was flying by. Jennings wasn't ignoring
Arango's projection per se. There was just so much other stuff going on that
they didn't give it much thought. By the time you get past the tenth round,
most players have no shot of ever sniffing the big leagues, let alone
becoming productive regulars, let alone becoming the kind of superstar Arango
envisioned. No big deal.

With the first pick of the thirteenth round, the Devil Rays selected Jason
Pruett, a left-handed pitcher out of a Texas community college. Seventeen
picks later, the Cardinals threw their own dart. With the 402nd overall pick
in the 1999 draft, St. Louis grabbed the player Arango had wanted all along.
A pudgy kid from Missouri named Albert Pujols.

Arango was crushed. He quit his job and went to work at a sports agency. It
didn't take long for the Devil Rays to realize their mistake. The player who
once carried the weight of his abuela's rice and beans carved his body into
granite. Pujols crushed the ball the minute he got to the minor leagues. He
continued to mash in spring training of 2001, impressing St. Louis brass so
profoundly that the Cardinals tossed him into their opening day lineup,
despite Pujols having played only three games above A-ball to that point. He
hit .329 that year with 37 homers, a .403 on-base percentage, and a .610
slugging percentage, one of the greatest performances by any rookie in major
league history.

Arango never forgot his initial scouting report, and neither did Pujols. Late
in Pujols's third season, he reached 39 home runs.

Arango called Pujols with a message: he and his wife had a bottle of
champagne chilling that they would open as soon as Pujols cracked number 40.
The next day Pujols called back. Arango already knew what he was going to say.

"I got forty," Albert Pujols told one of the few scouts who had believed in
him, "and forty-one too. You can go ahead and call the Devil Rays now."

To be fair, twenty-eight other teams missed on Pujols too. But the D-Rays'
whiff on the greatest player of the past decade epitomized the team's early
struggles in building a productive farm system. Tampa Bay would eventually
become known as a scouting and player development powerhouse, one built
partly on high draft picks, but also on a smarter approach than the
competition. That reputation would take a while to bloom, though. Before
that, the D-Rays were a team that struggled to build the talent pipeline it
needed to win at the major league level. Those failures were the results of
poor choices, cheapskate spending habits, and in the case of the
thirteenth-round pick turned future Hall of Famer, plain old bad luck. That
and failing to listen to baseball's equivalent of a foot soldier -- the
overworked, underpaid, underappreciated area scout.

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