No. 88: EPY GUERRERO / When the baseball scout came in off the road. It was as if Epy could see the future so many times, yet he never saw his own end coming.

Cooperstown has no honours for scouts but if it do the right thing and honour them properly the former Jays scout in the D.R. would be among the first inducted, no matter how sad his end

OVER the next little stretch, I’m going to post a a few throwback essays about scouting. I’ve always gravitated towards stories about that end of the sports business. In the opening of Future Greats and Heartbreaks, (Chapter 1 linked in its entirety here), I owned up to the fact that I’m often more intrigued by scouting and drafts than the actual games played, a weird admission that applies to all sports. Everyone can see every game from every seeming vantage point in high def these days and rewatch it forever—what goes on with the scouts in the field and in the war rooms and the like are sport’s only surviving mysteries.

“FORMER” is a loaded adjective, particularly when it modifies a job title, particularly in sports. Almost always it connotes that the best is in the past tense. You’ve been there and you’re not getting back.

“Former” is usually avoided when describing someone whose star is ascendant. If you were profiling, say, Rocky Balboa after he won the title from Apollo Creed, he’d be the “one-time club fighter” rather than the “former club fighter.” If Balboa had made it as far as his last sequels and was heading to a tragic end, then he’d be the “former champion” or “Cinderella Man who stayed too long after midnight” or some such.

For athletes, nothing is forever and thus being a former something will someday come. For those who work around the game, however, there’s the hope that they can hang around, that they can keep on keeping on. Maybe that’s what they tell themselves when they sign up. It ain’t stardom but there won’t come a day when I can’t do it.

Those who talk themselves into such sunny optimism are guilty of forgetting that it’s the business of sports they’re talking about. What seems like a forever thing might go on indefinitely, but ever remains subject to sudden change. The business of sports is more business than sports. There are winds of change, even whims of change.

Epifano Guerrero in his den at el Complejo

DAMN, it’s coming up on four decades. I met Epy Guerrero for the first time back in November ’85. Back when my square job was working the door at the Shamrock Hotel, I conned an editor into sending me to Santo Domingo for a week to write about the Blue Jays’ Dominican estrellas in the wake of the team’s first appearance in the MLB playoffs. Players identified by the head of the outfit’s Latin American operations had been key contributors to Toronto’s breakthrough and shortstop Tony Fernandez was arguably the critical piece of the puzzle and doubtlessly his favourite find. For his part, Fernandez looked on Guerrero as nothing less than a father figure.

Back in the 80s and 90s, Guerrero’s story fascinated me. First off, Latin America at that time was basically the wild west when it came to the talent hunt—teams were unconstrained by draft regulations and, with many teams having low or no interest in investing in Latin America in general and the Dominican Republic in particular, scouts were working in a buyers’ market. The Dodgers and the Jays were the first teams to go all in the D.R. and for a stretch they had their run of the place.

Further, a signed player there was utterly beholden to the organization to an extent that a North American prospect wouldn’t be. When a kid signed with L.A.’s Ralf Avila, he moved into the Dodgers’ complex and lived there pretty much year-round; likewise, a kid signing a contract with Toronto would move out to Guerrero’s private spread, el Complejo Epy, more modest by comparison. I’m less sure how the day-to-day operations played out at the Dodgers’ site (only spent a few afternoons on site), but I imagine it was pretty damn close to Guerrero’s, which was a never-ending boot camp. If it was daylight, the jugadores were working out. Something more than an eight-hour shift, six or seven days a week with time off for Christmas and hurricanes.

Back in the 90s I got a call from Malcolm Gladwell about the routine in the Jays’ operation—it must have been when he was first formulating his 10,000-hour rule for mastery popularized in The Tipping Point. Fact is, if that rule had been based on Guerrero’s operation with the experience of someone like Tony Fernandez walking in as a 16-year-old, the rule would be working with a number that was a multiple of 10K. (The experience with Guerrero’s charges hardly proves Gladwell’s theory, given that the vast majority of kids putting in 10,000 hours didn’t make it to the big leagues.)

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THREE months ago on this SubStack, I included a chapter from my Audible Original about a baseball fantasy camp hosted by Guerrero. (This will be behind the archive’s paywall for paid subscribers, though I think you can access it if you set up a free-trial account.) Subsequent to my misadventures at the fantasy camp I wrote a book about a winter in Dominican baseball, a lot of it set at Guerrero’s camp: The Only Ticket off the Island is out of stock on Amazon but you might be able to find it on some used-book website or a reference library. If anyone is really interested enough, reach out to me and I’ll dig out a copy. Weirdly, I have no copies of some books I’ve written but more of these hardcovers from three decades ago than any others. Take out a subscription and shoot me the postage and you can have one for free.

I got a couple of nice reviews for The Only Ticket, including the one in the Globe and Mail excerpted above. Mind you, Jack Batten did go a little overboard when he wrote: “To gather material … Joyce spent three months in the Dominican, a stay that, judging from his brushes with crime, the climate, the roads and other perils, ought to win him a medal for journalistic valor.” That wasn’t anything remotely journalistic on my part. That was simply a byproduct of riding shotgun with Epy every day. Thanks Jack, but I was pretty young and dumb when I wrote The Only Ticket and considered it a bit of a lost opportunity. I always wanted a do-over. I had to settle for the next best thing.

So, it was in 2004 I wound up going back to D.R. to check in with Epy, who didn’t last long in the Jays’ organization after the retirement of GM Pat Gillick. Gillick had given him his first shot at scouting in the Houston organization and Guerrero had followed him wherever he went. In this case, it was out the door.

Gillick’s retirement left Epy without a champion in the Jays’ front office and some folks in the Jays’ front office thought he was too much of a self-promoter, the farthest thing from a company man.

In an undated photo but clearly long after the cheering, Epy with his former boss, Pat Gillick

A stint in the Milwaukee organization didn’t last either. Epy had imagined that he’d be hunting and signing talent all his life but by ’04, just in his early 60s, he was a former scout. Back in 1990, The National, the sadly short-lived sports daily, had ranked Guerrero No. 16 overall on its MLB power list, ahead of anyone else in the Jays organization, then on the cusp of their World Series wins. By the time I checked back in with him in ’04, he was out of work and had even really given up trying to get a job with a big-league outfit. His job as a scout had been predicting futures but he had could never have predicted his own.

I went to the D.R. to write the story below for Toro Magazine (yup, another sadly short-lived publication) and when I said goodbye to Epy I knew it would be the last time I’d see him—he died a few years later at the age of 71. The life he wanted ended when he cashed his last check from the Blue Jays.      

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FROM TORO MAGAZINE

(The following is in the original draft format rather than the published piece, so you might hit a typo or something that didn’t get by the libel lawyer.)

EPY Guerrero sits in a shaded dugout and watches forty-five players working out on the diamond in the noonday sun. Whenever they pass by him, they nod, wave, wink. They call him jefe, boss, and when they make a good play in the field or drive the ball to the wall, they look to him for approval. None comes. He wears oversize black shades but even if he were to take them off you couldn’t tell what he’s thinking. His expression is impassive, a poker face that’s the product of thirty years of practice. After tens of thousands of workouts and tryouts on hundreds of fields all through the Caribbean, he wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if the second coming of Ted Williams were taking batting practice. He’d never tip anyone off.

Guerrero’s stony visage is a matter of habit, not necessity. There’s no one looking over his shoulder, no spies out there. He’s a half hour from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, but the diamond sits at the end of a hilly, washed-out road that would thwart any 4x4 and all but the heartiest goat. The diamond belongs to the baseball complex that he leases to the Seattle Mariners, and forty-one of the forty-five players are under contract to the ballclub. A few have played in the minors in the States; most played in the Dominican Republic’s rookie league. They’re known quantities. 

Guerrero speaks in something just above a whisper, as though he fears being overheard. He gives me the rundown of the pitcher on the mound: “Lefty. Eighteen. Bad body. Fastball 92. Got a hook, too. Good mechanics. Gonna play in the States. Got a shot.”

But even if rival scouts were lurking in the palm out behind the left-field wall, it wouldn’t matter if they knew what Epy Guerrero is thinking about this lefty or any other player here. He’s working, sure, but he’s not working for anybody. He’s nobody’s jefe. “I come out here,” Guerrero says. “Most days, I no have job. Thirty years in the game, no job.”

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