(One in a series of articles highlighting former Oriole players, managers and front office employees whom I interviewed for my oral history more than a quarter-century ago, but only on the phone, depriving me of a recording I could play now as a Bird Tapes interview.)
By the time he became an Orioles scout under farm director Harry Dalton in 1964, Al Kubski had already wandered baseball’s bush leagues for longer than just about anyone.
A Baltimore native, Kubski had started his pro career with the Easton (Maryland) Browns of the Eastern Shore League in 1937. From there, he moved on to the Salisbury Senators, also of the Eastern Shore League; the Hickory (North Carolina) Rebels of the Tar Heel League; and the Staunton (Virginia) Presidents of the Virginia League. He eventually advanced as far as Triple A, but when he never received a callup to the majors, he returned to the bushes as a manager for such teams as the Blackwell (Oklahoma) Broncos of the Western Association, the Grand Forks (North Dakota) Chiefs of the Northern League and the Hobbs (New Mexico) Pirates of something called the Sophomore League.
In 1963 — 26 years after his pro debut in Easton — he was managing the Kingsport (Tennessee) Pirates of the Appalachian League when he ran into Dalton in an elevator. The chance meeting changed his life, as Kubski recalled in 1999 during his interview for my oral history of the Orioles, From 33rd Street to Camden Yards.
“I had grown up in Baltimore and was living in Granada Hills, California,” he told me. “I’d been managing in the Pittsburgh chain for 10 years, but I was starting to grow a family and needed to be home. I was managing in Kingsport and we were in Bluefield [West Virginia] playing the Orioles’ rookie-league club. I was riding up in an elevator and Dalton was there and he said, ‘Are you Kubski? [Baltimore sportswriter] John Steadman says a lot of nice things about you.’”
Dalton was looking for someone to scout the West Coast for the Orioles. Later that year, he met with Kubski during the Winter Meetings and hired him.
“Harry didn’t pay a lot, but he was great to work for,” Kubski laughed.
Kubski joined a sharp scouting staff that filled the Orioles’ organization with quality players. Scouts such as Jim Russo, Frank McGowan, Walter Youse, Ray Scarborough and Fred “Bootnose” Hofmann weren’t well-known outside of the baseball industry, but they were renowned inside the game.
“We had a lot of meetings all the time,” Kubski said. “The scouts and minor league managers sat around and talked about players and the game. If you lived baseball, it was a great place to work.”
A list of the Orioles’ scouts in the 1964 media guide
Kubski fit right in, his eye for talent sharpened by his years in the minors.
“Al was a grinder, a digger,” said Don Pries, another scout who worked for the Orioles under Dalton and was later director of the Major League Scouting Bureau. “Al was a chance-taker. He would give players the benefit of the doubt, and many times, the ones he gave that to, they came through.”
In eight years as an Orioles scout on the West Coast, Kubski signed future stars Bobby Grich and Doug DeCinces and also Rich Coggins, a speedy outfielder who played three seasons for the Orioles before being included in the trade package that brought Ken Singleton to Baltimore.
When I spoke to him in 1999, Kubski told me about those signings.
“Grich was a great football player, a high school quarterback in Long Beach. [UCLA football coach] Tommy Prothro really wanted him. Prothro told him, ‘Come with us and we’ll make you a Heisman Trophy winner.’ It was 1967,” Kubski recalled. “But in baseball, on the two-to-eight range that scouts use, Grich was a lot of fives — five as a runner, five as a fielder, had some power. But Brooks [Robinson] was a two runner and a three thrower and he’s in the Hall of Fame. There are a lot of guys with great natural ability who can’t play. Grich could play.
“When it came to the draft, we had [Don] Baylor listed ahead of him. But Harry said, ‘We have a lot of outfielders in the minor leagues; we need infielders. If those two guys are available, we’ll take Grich first and Baylor second.’ That’s what we did. We offered Grich $30,000 [to sign] and he was sitting on it, and then I read in the paper where Prothro had recruited three other quarterbacks. That helped us. We upped the offer to $35,000 and he signed. Baylor signed for $7,500.”
His story about Coggins was a classic.
“I went to see a [high school] catcher. There was a centerfielder playing against his club. He was Black and weighed about 150 pounds. But he could run and throw above average. That was Coggins,” Kubski said. “I liked him over the catcher, but I had no information on him. So I looked around the crowd watching the game and there was only one Black guy there. I went up to him and said, ‘Excuse me, is that your son out there and is he interested in playing pro ball?’ The man said, ‘Well, sure.’ We end up taking him in the 21st round.
“So I go to the house to sign him, and it was a big house; Coggins was an engineer and he had a $300,000 home up on a hill. I get there and have $4,000 to sign his son. So we’re talking and I’m getting along with the dad, but the youngster ain’t saying a word. The dad says to his son, ‘Do you wanna play pro ball or go to college?’ He says, ‘Dad, I want to play pro ball.’ The dad turns to me and says, ‘Al, $4,000 ain’t much.’ I said, ‘That’s what your round gets.’ He said, ‘Well, the money isn’t the thing. I want him to play for three years, and after that, I want you to tell me if my son can get to the major leagues or not.’ Well, that little son of a gun went out and really played and made it to Baltimore in three years. But the sad part was his dad died of a blood disorder before he got to the big leagues.”
DeCinces, in his interview for my oral history, recalled being scouted by Kubski.
“The first time I met him, Kubski goes, ‘Yeah, I know who you are.’ Kubski’s wife was best friends with my future wife’s mother,” DeCinces told me. “My dream was to play in the major leagues, of course, and Al said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen you play. You don’t run good enough and you throw like a girl.’ He really shattered my dreams. Al had a way of testing your personality. It was a resounding success for me when he signed me [for the Orioles] later on. I said, ‘Does this mean I still throw like a girl? He kind of chuckled and said, ‘Oh, you remember that?’ But you don’t forget things like that.”
In 1970, before they selected DeCinces in the third round of the major league draft, the Orioles took two other California players Kubski also had scouted – Mike Reinbach in the first round and Jim Fuller in the second round.
“There were players everywhere,” Kubski told me. “Reinbach was a tremendous prospect, an infielder, good athlete could run, throw, field better than Fuller. He’d gone to UCLA on a football scholarship as a quarterback and hurt his shoulder. He signed for $12,000 and had some big years in the minors but then he hurt his knee and went to Japan and played there. Fuller was an outfielder and what power. His manager in the Florida State League said he was the best ballplayer he’d ever seen. He hit 20-something homers and then went to Rochester and hit 30-something. Everything looked great but Jim Frey, the Rochester hitting coach, tells me the kid has some holes in his swing and if he doesn’t close them, he’s going to be in trouble. He had those holes and never did correct them and he never did much in the major leagues.
“It was funny. DeCinces had less ability than either Reinbach or Fuller. We called him a ‘chance’ prospect when we drafted him. But he could play the game in high school. We signed him for $2,000 and he wound up playing 15 years in the majors.”
When Dalton left the Orioles to become GM of the California Angels, several of his top scouts, including Kubski, went with him. Kubski scouted for the Angels until 1977, when the Kansas City Royals hired him — John Schuerholz, the Royals’ GM at the time, was another Baltimore native who’d started out working under Dalton with the Orioles. When Schuerholz became the Atlanta Braves’ GM, Kubski went with him.
Other notable players Kubski signed included Royals pitchers Bret Saberhagen and Danny Jackson.
A baseball lifer if ever there was one, Kubski continued to scout almost right up until his death at age 89.
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