November 15 - Longtime Major League Baseball scout Bill Buck was inducted over the weekend into the Mid Atlantic Scouts Association Hall of Fame during the organization’s annual banquet at Ripken Stadium in Aberdeen, MD.
Buck’s career spanned 30 years, beginning as an associate scout with the Baltimore Orioles in 1986. Short stints with the Houston Astros and New York Mets preceded a long tenure as an area scout with the Detroit Tigers from 1997-2015.
“This is as good as it gets in my career,” Buck said of his Hall of Fame induction. “Cooperstown to the best of my knowledge is not going to be calling me anytime soon, so when I found out this existed, this is something I genuinely wanted to be in. It’s pretty neat, there’s no doubt about that.”
The Manassas resident was credited with identifying and signing several future Major Leaguers. His most notable signings include 2011 American League Cy Young Award winner Justin Verlander and Billy Wagner, who is sixth all-time with 422 saves. Another signee of his was Rick Porcello, who won 22 games with the Boston Red Sox this season and is a favorite along with Verlander for this year’s AL Cy Young.
All three were first-round draft picks, and Buck also signed first-rounders Cameron Maybin, who was recently traded from Detroit to the Los Angeles Angels, as well as Kyle Sleeth, the third overall selection of the 2003 draft who battled arm injuries and never made the big leagues.
Other big leaguers signed by Buck include Max St. Pierre, Casper Wells, Scott Sizemore, Will Rhymes, and Anthony Shawler. He also signed Jay Sborz, who the Tigers drafted in the second round out of Langley High School in 2003 and appeared in the big leagues in 2010. He is the older brother of current Los Angeles Dodgers farmhand and McLean High School graduate Josh Sborz.
Buck, who will turn 70 next month, initially became interested in the profession in the early 80s while attending home games of the Alexandria Dukes, at the time one of the Single-A Carolina League’s affiliates. The Dukes played their home games at Frank Mann Field - then known as Memorial Stadium at Four Mile Run - not far from where he lived in Prince William County.
“I had always been a guy sitting around in the basement in my house reading The Sporting News when I should have been doing my homework,” Buck said. “I always felt I had a pretty good feel for who could play, and who couldn’t play. And it wasn’t always the guy putting up the gaudy statistics at [the Dukes’] level.”
His interest in becoming a scout led him to update his resume and send out applications. Shortly after, a package arrived in the mail.
“I wasn’t much aware of how the scouting tree worked, but essentially I was offering my services, and apparently worded it OK because I got hired via the mail,” he said of the Orioles mailing him his first contract offer in 1986. “I’m thinking, ‘Wow, I’m in pro baseball now’. And I didn’t probably have a grasp of how low on the totem poll that associate scouts are. But sometime early on, I realized that, ‘I think I can do this career-wise’.”
That career led him to scouting regions as far north as Canada and New England, and down through New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and into West Virginia. He sat in NFL Hall of Famer Howie Long’s living room when he scouted one of his sons - “It was like a commercial, an NFL pregame show coming live across the couch from you” - and enjoys telling the story of the time he devoured a plate of nachos at Mike Trout’s family home in New Jersey.
“I’d driven up from South Jersey and I was pretty hungry, but I wasn’t going to be eating the nachos while I was talking with him,” Buck said. “Once we were done, I got right after them.”
The Tigers, with the ninth pick in that 2009 draft, passed on Trout in favor of a Missouri high school right-hander named Jacob Turner, who is now a reliever with the Chicago White Sox. Plenty of others also passed on the perennial MVP candidate, who was taken 25th.
Paul VI Catholic coach Billy Emerson, who worked as an associate scout under Buck with both the Astros and the Tigers, was coincidentally sitting across from Wagner - who is now the coach at the Miller School of Albemarle - at a Virginia Independent Schools Athletic Association coaches meeting when reached yesterday.
Emerson was one of a number of young scouts to learned the trade from Buck, who was the MASA Scout of the Year in 2000.
“It was always a pleasure to be with him at a ballgame,” Emerson said. “The guy is the consummate professional, and he taught me that while you’re at a game, you’re there to do a job, and not attract attention to yourself. He always conducted himself as a professional.
“I learned a ton from him about the business of the game, but even more importantly, how to evaluate talent, and that made me a better coach. He belongs in that Hall of Fame, and I’m just so happy for him that it happened.”
Now retired and a fixture at local high school football games - “I try to get to see different teams every week,” he said - Buck reflects fondly on his time in professional baseball.
“I had some fun,” he said. “I got to do some things I’d say are pretty unique.”
Photos of Bill Buck are from a 2008 Topps baseball card series featuring scouts and first-round players they had signed.
