University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal called athletes labeled as having great potential as those who “haven’t done anything yet.”
While other baseball people saw little promise or potential from a wiry, wild-armed hurler from Alvin, Red Murff saw in Nolan Ryan a future major leaguer who might one day become the most dominant pitcher of his generation.
It doesn’t take much innate ability to “discover” Alex Rodriguez or Ken Griffey Jr. It’s that ballplayer who’s not so obvious - the diamond in the rough, or, in baseball’s case, the rough on the diamond - that makes professional baseball scouting an inexact science. It’s seeing past the newspaper clippings, the statistics, the hype of a high school coach or father and having a vision of what a youngster might contribute to a baseball organization.
John Robert “Red” Murff had that natural instinct. He was the quintessential baseball scout. The guy with a radar gun and stopwatch who spends countless hours slipping into a ballpark in Who-Knows-Where, USA, sitting in rickety bleachers, leaning against a fence post, peering through the chain link and making copious notes about a prospect who catches his eye.
Murff’s passing last month in Tyler at age 87 took another sliver of that piece of Americana. He was one of those great baseball storytellers who had seen the game from backwater towns in and out of the country to its highest pinnacle.
Despite having traveled much of America’s landscape, it was the simple, straightforward life in the Milam County community of Burlington during the Great Depression where Murff’s foundation was laid.
In his book “The Scout, Searching for the best in baseball,” he credits Burlington’s “schools, churches and people who prepared me for life, taught me to live clean and placed Christianity and the Golden Rule as the way to live.”
He is now buried in a Rockdale cemetery.
Prior to speaking at the Temple Wildcat baseball banquet in 1996, Murff recalled the Burlington days of his youth fondly. “I’ve still got that black mud between my toes to prove it,” he joked.
Murff finished school at Rosebud High School, where he played football and basketball. Though Murff was a latecomer to baseball, it was his lifeblood.
He served in the Army Air Corps in World War II and worked for a time in a chemical plant before deciding in his late 1920s to see once and for all whether he had what it takes to be a big league pitcher. He caught on in the Evangeline League with teams from Baton Rouge, Nashville and Texas City before hooking up with clubs in Tyler and with the Dallas Eagles, posting a 27-11 record in 1955.
The following year he found himself donning a Milwaukee Braves uniform as a 35-year-old rookie alongside future Hall of Famers Hank Aaron, Warren Spahn and fellow Texan Eddie Mathews as well as All-Stars Lew Burdette, Johnny Logan and Del Crandall.
However, a major league career that would be limited by advanced age was further truncated by a back injury. Murff pitched with the Braves for two years and was a member of the ’57 World Series championship team.
A lanky 6-3 right-hander, he knocked around a few more years in the minors and even managed a team. But it was as a scout where Murff established his baseball legacy.
Maybe he spotted a little bit of himself when he caught a glimpse of another tall, thin Texas farm boy. While others called him “chicken-chested” and never thought Ryan would amount to much of a pitcher, Murff saw the potential of the hardest-throwing right arm anywhere.
Now, 324 victories, 5,714 strikeouts, seven no-hitters, a World Series ring and a Hall of Fame induction later, Murff was proved even more right than even he ever dreamed about Ryan’s potential. Murff witnessed Ryan’s fifth and seventh no-hitters and his 300th victory. He also was in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1999 when Ryan was immortalized in the Hall.
“I didn’t know what I had,” Ryan once said. “No one did. Only Red Murff.”
But Ryan wasn’t a one-hit wonder for the wily scout, who himself was inducted into the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame. He signed scores of players for the Houston Colt .45s, the New York Mets, the Montreal Expos and the Braves. Pitcher Jerry Koosman, catcher Jerry Grote, infielder Ken Boswell and Ryan - all signed by Murff - were key components in the Mets’ 1969 World Series championship team.
Although he often tried to convince good high school prospects to sign a pro contract rather than go the college route, Murff was instrumental at getting a few college baseball programs going, including the one at Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton.
UMHB dedicated its original field to honor him in 1994 and re-dedicated the new Red Murff Field at Crusader SportsPlex in 2005. What always mattered to Murff was that baseball would somehow be advanced.
Murff’s discernment between empty promise and true potential is what made him one of the game’s greatest scouts. Fueling it was an infectious passion for the sport.
Murff closed his book with a prayer of praise for the game that gave him as much as he gave it: “Thank you, God, for baseball and its wonderful people and all the game has done for me and meant to me. God, I do love it so."
twaits@temple-telegram.com
