The Buck Reports
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — That’s a beautiful dateline, isn’t it? Cooperstown. I’m here to do a bunch of fun research for my upcoming book, WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL. And this time I brought my wife, Margo — it’s her first visit to this magically quaint (or quaintly magical) place. She’s loving it.
As I’ve said before, baseball was not actually invented in Cooperstown.
But it should have been.
I’ve got to save the best stuff for the book, of course, but I did want to share one incredible find I made. I was looking through the fairly sparse file of an incredible Negro leagues player named Smokey Joe Williams — who was No. 62 in the Baseball 100 — and lamenting again how little we know about some of the greatest players in the history of the game.
And then I came across the oddest piece of paper. It was a scouting report page. It showed that Williams had both an overhand and three-quarter delivery. It rated his fastball as an 8 (highest it can go), his curveball as a 7 and his poise as an 8.
Here’s what it said:
“Great arm — an imposing sight on the mound. Great shoulders. Lean waist and hips. Could throw the ball by any hitter and he knew it. Great hard curveball. Changed speeds on all pitches. In the class with Walter Johnson. Very desirable.”
I stared at this report for a long time — what was this? I knew it wasn’t a scouting report from Williams’ time because he was not the only one on the page — Hilton Smith was also there, and Smith pitched many years after Williams.
I kept looking at the handwriting — words in all caps, a bit of shake in the writing, as if the author was putting extra pressure on the pen, an architectural feel to it all — and I thought to myself: Holy cow, this is a Buck O’Neil scouting report.
So I went to Cassidy Lent, the wonderful librarian at the Hall, and she explained that yes, this was a Buck scouting report. Here’s the story: In the 1990s — I’m going to guess 1993 or 1994 — the Hall of Fame came to Buck and asked him to do scouting reports on Negro leaguers he thought belonged in the Hall of Fame. And he did 11 of them.
All 11 are now in the Hall of Fame — well, 12 if you count the author, Buck himself.
And going through these reports felt like, yes, talking with Buck again.
I think we could all use a little more of that — a little more of Buck — in this particular moment. So here you go: The Buck scouting reports (with Buck’s ratings and comments for each player).*
*You will notice how he ended each report with “Very desirable.” That was the scout in Buck — he was, as much as anything — a pure baseball scout.
Hitters
Willard Brown
(Centerfielder. All-field hitter, 8 power, 4.1 speed to first base)
Soft hands and quick feet. Got the good jump on fly balls. Could close the gaps right and left, outstanding defensively. Home run power to all fields. The ability to steal 50 bases per season. Very desirable.
Biz Mackey
(Catcher. Pull hitter, 8 arm strength and 8 arm accuracy, top-level makeup)
Cat-quick defensively. Good hands. Strong arm with quick release. Could really control a pitching staff. Quick bat with pull power. Good baserunner from first to third or first to home. Very desirable.
Louis Santop
(Catcher)
Didn’t see this player but old timers rated him along with Gibson and Mackey.
Turkey Stearnes
(Right fielder. Pull hitter. 4.0 running time to first. 8 power and 8 fielding)
Outstanding athlete. Could have excelled in any sport. Quick enough to play centerfield. Great arm relegated him to rightfield (at end of career). Great pull hitter. Hit it high and far. Very desirable.
Willie Wells
(Shortstop. 8 baserunner and 8 fielder, top-level makeup)
Most intelligent player I’ve ever played against. Great eyesight. Picked up ball off bat and rotation on ball from pitcher’s hand. Excellent bat control. Line-drive hitter to all fields. Soft, quick hands. Made all the plays. Very desirable.
Pitchers
Andy Cooper
(Left-handed. Four pitches, including screwball)
Live arm. Running fastball. Three-quarter arm acting with tight curveball. Biting screwball. Total command on all pitches. Top starter in early career. Valuable stopper near end of career. Very desirable.
Leon Day
(Right-handed. Top-level makeup)
Front-line starter. Short arm type. Everything quick. Strikeout pitcher. Very durable. Worked with three days’ rest. Played second base or left field between starts. Top athlete. Very desirable.
Willie Foster
(Left-handed. 8 control and poise)
Front-line starter. Hard sinking fastball and over-the-top curveball. Both pitches strikeout pitches. Spotted all pitches well. Koufax reminded me of Foster. Very desirable.
Wilber “Bullet” Rogan
(Right-handed. 8 curveball and 8 poise, top-level makeup)
Not a big man but broad shoulders and muscular forearms. Live high fastball and hard, sharp breaking ball that we called a “dropball” — strikeout pitch. Excellent athlete. Hit fourth in lineup when he played the outfield. Very desirable. Bob Feller type.
Hilton Smith
(Right-handed. 8 curveball, top-level makeup)
Front-line, first-division type pitcher. Two fastballs — one overhand riser, other three-quarter sinker. Excellent curveball. Dizzy Dean counterpart. Very desirable.
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I began this bananas project by promising to give away 100 Baseball 100s, expecting that to last for a while — but we passed 100 sometime on Wednesday. So, to celebrate that, I’m going to give away ANOTHER 100 Baseball 100s. I have truly lost my mind.
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This landed in my inbox while Paul Simon's "Cool Papa Bell" was playing.
The cynic in me wants to say that we should take these all with a grain of salt, if not the whole shaker. After all, they're not so much scouting reports as they are O'Neill's reminiscences from 50+ years before, in some cases, just musings about guys he never saw.
The cynic says that the only reason any of those guys is in the Hall is because of Buck O'Neill's lobbying for them. (The non-cynic agrees, but notes that this is a GOOD thing!)
I mean, take Smokey Joe Williams. His record on Baseball Reference is underwhelming to say the least: 16-19 in about 50 games over four seasons. Leon Day's record shows that he pitched 100+ innings in a season just twice, and only once won more than 8 contests in a year. Andy Cooper struck out 4 batters per nine innings in his career. Louis Santop's major league career, such as it was spanned just 4 seasons and was worth 2.5 WAR. None of it sounds like much.
But then the cynic in me is kind of a jerk sometimes. In my day job, I get paid to pick apart other people's plans and designs, and I allow that cynicism to leak over into my attention to baseball.
It's OK to have a healthy skepticism of what the numbers tell us. I'm sure, for example, that Turkey Stearnes or Willard Brown would not have hit .350 for their careers against an integrated major league if one had been available to them, if only because nobody else ever has. But that should not mean completely discounting their accomplishments either, or O'Neill's insistence in lobbying for them to be inducted into Cooperstown.
Louis Santop's "Major league" career was in the Eastern Colored League from 1923-26, when he was already 34 years old. He'd been in organized baseball since at least age 21, but nobody was paying too much attention, not enough to really keep track of his exploits. Ditto for Joe Williams, whose "major league" career did not start til he was already 37, and even then he had the best K/W ratio three years running. In reality he pitched from age 23 to 46, in semi-organized Black baseball if not in what we now consider Major leagues. He struck out over 1200 batters and won 137 games, and those are just the ones we know about. He must have pitched more than 7 times for the NY Lincoln Giants in 1915, when he was 29, but that's all we have records for right now, and maybe ever.
So we have to infer a lot about what he and others like him might have done, and yes we have to take O'Neill's word for a lot of it and throw the salt away, because these guys deserve better than to be forgotten just because nobody wrote down what they did often enough.
Thanks for sharing this, Joe. 8 for Sentimentality and an 8 for Fun, which is what baseball is supposed to be for anyway.