SCOUT’S HONOR
As Coney Island’s Billy Blitzer battles health issues, the longtime Cub scout sees dream of ring in reach
Billy Blitzer looked out at the Wrigley Field warning track, felt a surge of excitement and tried to catch his breath. It was a warm autumn evening last October, and more than 42,000 fans were buzzing with nervous tension as the Chicago Cubs prepared to host the hated St. Louis Cardinals in Game 3 of the National League division series. Theo Epstein, the Cubs’ president of baseball operations, had ordered all of the organization’s scouts to Chicago, though no one knew why.
Blitzer, whose 33 years of service made him the Cubs’ longest-tenured scout, had flown in from his home in Brooklyn, even though he was just two months removed from major surgery. The balding, 62-year-old baseball lifer was already jittery when the staffer boomed, “Billy Blitzer to the front.” Epstein wanted the fans to see the people responsible for assembling this team, and he wanted Blitzer, ailing and hobbled, to lead the procession onto the field.
Standing in front of the ivy-covered wall, Blitzer managed to slow down and savor the moment, a feeling he would later describe as the highlight of his career. As they made their way toward center field, Blitzer waved to the fans in the stands, then toward home plate. He looked at the dugout, where manager Joe Maddon had assembled the players on the top step, applauding. Blitzer’s eyes misted. He had personally experienced a significant chunk of the longest stretch of futility in the history of American professional sports — the Cubs have not won the World Series since 1908, and have not played in one since 1945. And in the midst of a season in which anxious Cubs fans were daring to think beyond September, Blitzer’s health was faltering: An abscess on his colon, and surgery that lasted nearly six times longer than expected. A cancer scare. A colostomy bag, and another surgery to remove it.
The Cubs went on to defeat the favored Cardinals in that series, stirring excitement and hope in Chicago. Could it finally be happening? Then, they were swept quickly from the next round by the Mets. Another season, same result: No ring.
This year, the Cubs have come back even stronger. They’ll finish the regular season this weekend with baseball’s best record and arrive at the playoffs on the verge of what might finally be — sorry Chicago, we know you don’t want it said aloud — the year. Blitzer has another surgery looming but has postponed it; he refuses to have it until after the playoffs. The Cubs being the Cubs, and mortality being mortality, this might be his final chance.
Blitzer, who still lives with his 85-year-old mother in Coney Island and speaks in a New Yawk dialect straight out of “On the Waterfront,” has spent a lifetime on backfields and farms, in urban housing projects and minor league towns, looking for players to make the Cubs better. “This man has the most loyalty I have ever seen in this game,” says retired pitcher Jamie Moyer, who owes his successful 25-year big-league career to Blitzer’s scouting eye. “He has worked for one organization, the Chicago Cubs. As long as I have known him, he has been dedicated to that organization. He has been offered many jobs throughout the game with other organizations, and has always stayed with the Cubs.”
Adds Jim Hendry, the general manager of the Cubs from 2002 to 2011, and now a top advisor to Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman, “I hope he gets a World Series ring, because I don’t know anyone over there who has put their heart and soul into the organization more than Billy has. He just bleeds Cubbie blue.”
It’s 7 p.m. on an August Wednesday in Reading, Pa., and Blitzer is settling into his seat three rows behind home plate at FirstEnergy Stadium. After finishing a rubbery cheeseburger, he pulls out his pen, radar gun and stopwatch, and prepares to scrutinize the hometown Fightin’ Phils and the Bowie Baysox, Double-A affiliates of the Phillies and Orioles.
John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian, says that the first scouts to work for a big-league team were probably employees of the Spalding sporting goods empire, recommending players to the A.G. Spalding-owned Chicago White Stockings in the 1880s. Since then, the career evaluators have spent nearly every day, from March until September, on the road, watching games with a finely tuned precision that eludes even the most baseball-savvy among us.
Scouts worked basically without interference for more than a hundred years; then, in the first decade of this century, many veteran scouts began to fear that theirs was a dying art. Author Michael Lewis’ 2003 bestseller “Moneyball” portrayed Oakland Athletics then-general manager Billy Beane as a devotee of advanced statistical analysis and datadriven decision-making. Beane’s low-budget success led some owners to question the necessity of spending the money required to send scouts all over the country, if computer printouts could tell them just as much or more.
But as technology continued to improve, and analytics became more accessible, a funny thing happened: Most baseball organizations settled on a middle course, and even the most progressive, metrics-driven front offices continued to recognize the irreplaceable value of their scouts. What Blitzer does during batting practice alone — watching to see how the players interact with one another, chatting with the manager, gathering intelligence from reporters — is a uniquely human contribution. Every intelligent GM understands this.
“We are a long way from (stats) replacing scouts,” says one executive from a team that is heavily reliant on analytics. “I don’t think it will ever happen. They complement each other well. We don’t have the tracking data in the minor leagues, (and) you need scouts for projection.”
Epstein runs such an operation, one that takes into account both objective numbers and subjective observation of the kind Blitzer provides. Ever since his days as the wunderkind GM of the Boston Red Sox — he was just 30 years old when that team broke its own 86-year curse to win the 2004 World Series — Epstein has always belied his new-school reputation by taking tradition into account as well. “We weren’t going to turn our backs on the people and the history that had come before,” he told me. “Billy knows players and he knows people.”
As the Reading-Bowie game begins, this becomes readily apparent. In the first inning, a player on the Bowie team steps into the batter’s box.
“He’ll be weak on offspeed pitches,” Blitzer says. “How do you know?” I ask. “Look,” Blitzer answers, pointing to a slight, twitchy movement in the batter’s front foot. “He’s jumpin’ at the fastball.”
Sure enough, the batter flails badly at a curveball a few minutes later, striking out. He was revved-up, hungry for the heater, and could not adjust. Later, a Reading player bashes three home runs before the seventh inning, stirring great excitement and a standing ovation in the ballpark.
“This guy a prospect?” I ask, after the third homer.
Blitzer shakes his head, able to ignore that drama that swayed the rest of us, as we watched the ball disappear over the outfield fence. “Look at him closer next time,” he says. “He has a big, looping softball swing. And the pitcher is only throwing 90 (miles per hour). I would want to see how he does against a better fastball.” Should Epstein ever ask, his scout is not fooled by the impressive numbers, and sees at best a minor-league slugger.
All through the night, Blitzer jots down notes. The next morning, after his complimentary breakfast at the Fairfield Inn, he will write out a full report on several players, a few among roughly 500 that he completes every season.
The Cubs’ front office in Chicago collects the reports, filing them away to reference whenever a trade is being discussed. Faced with a quick decision on which players to acquire, a GM might also call the scout. Jim Hendry recalls that, during his nine years with the Cubs, Blitzer never paused when put on the spot about any of the hundreds of players he had written up; he always launched immediately into a detailed analysis.
Blitzer is a pro scout, meaning that he covers the major and minor leagues. Every team has separate departments for scouting professional and amateur ball; the Cubs, whose structure is typical of most clubs, have 19 pro scouts; Blitzer is responsible for the Mets, Orioles and Pirates, and a combined 20 minorleague affiliates.
Blitzer spent the first 28 years of his career on the amateur side, mostly as an area scout in the northeast, living in Brooklyn the entire time. He was once promoted to regional cross-checker, but asked off it after a few years, saying that he was overwhelmed by the extra responsibility, which involved a lot of traveling to compare the players recommended by area scouts. “It was too much pressure,” he says. “I had a lot of anxiety.” As he neared 60, he moved to pro scouting, where the travel was less rigorous.
In his second season with the Cubs, Blitzer made his greatest discovery, a player who more than anyone in his era represented the value of quality scouting: On Labor Day weekend in 1983, on a farm pasture in York, Pa., he spotted Moyer.
The lefty would go on to enjoy a remarkable career, sticking in the big leagues until he was 49 years old and winning 269 games without much of a fastball. “Without Billy Blitzer, I don’t know that I ever sign with a team,” Moyer, who is now retired and living with his family in California, told me. “Billy gave me my opportunity in Major League Baseball.”
Even at age 20, Moyer’s velocity was well below average, rarely reaching 85 mph. But Blitzer noticed high levels of what coaches call “pitchability” — a knowledge of how to outthink hitters. On that afternoon in York, Moyer was changing speeds and locating his pitches with laser accuracy. Blitzer introduced himself, and vowed to observe Moyer again.
The following spring, he traveled to Florida to watch Moyer pitch for St. Joseph’s University. At the outset, 20 scouts were there. Then, in the first inning, Moyer gave up a base hit to the leadoff hitter, and walked the next guy. An error by the second baseman followed, and the cleanup hitter launched a grand slam. Five minutes into the game, Moyer trailed 4-0.
In the second inning, Blitzer looked to his left, and to his right, and noticed that all the other scouts had left. Moyer went on to pitch nine innings that day, and did not allow another run. Blitzer convinced the Cubs to draft him in the sixth round, and an unlikely career was born.
The two remain close, and Blitzer
informally advised Moyer throughout his career. When they happened to be in the same town, they would meet for dinner, and Moyer would pick his friend’s brain for insights on his next opponent. It was often helpful, though Blitzer laughs when recalling one time when it was not. “We were in New York before a game against the Mets at Shea Stadium,” Blitzer says. “We went to dinner the night before, and he says, ‘Tell me who’s hot.’ David Wright was going good at the time, and when he’s going good his power is to rightcenter. So I tell Jamie, ‘Whatever you do, don’t pitch him away. Wright has a long swing and he’ll hit the outside pitch to right center. You have to jam him inside.’
“The next day in the game he tries to do that, but the pitch gets too much of the plate, and Wright crushes it over the left field wall. Jamie doesn’t even turn around to watch it go out. He stares right at me, sitting behind the plate. I can almost hear him saying, ‘You son of a bitch.’”
Blitzer laughs now in his seat in Reading, clearly treasuring the memory. “I told him, ‘It wasn’t my fault! You were the one who didn’t get it in!’” He pauses, sighs, still smiling. “That’s the game within the game. Most people don’t see it.”
Blitzer’s body began to betray him last summer, as the Cubs made a run at the playoffs. In August, he underwent what he thought would be a two-hour procedure to remove an abscess from his colon. Eleven hours after he went under, he woke to news of unforeseen complications: The abscess had fused his colon and bladder together, forcing the doctors to cut both organs and install a colostomy bag. They feared that Blitzer might have cancer, and wanted the organs separated, to make chemotherapy more effective.
Following a week of tests, Blitzer was relieved to learn that he did not have cancer, but he would soon encounter another setback. After doctors opened him up again to remove the colostomy bag, Blitzer developed a hernia from having the two surgeries so close together. The condition, which did not become apparent until May of this year, causes his stomach to bulge and requires yet another surgery, no small deal after the last two procedures turned out to be more harrowing than expected.
Were Blitzer in another line of work, or if this were any other season, he might have had the surgery already. But because Chicago is — again, cover your eyes, Cubs fans — a championship contender, he has been dragging his swollen belly around the country. “You’re not taking care of this until the season is over,” Blitzer told his doctor. “We’re having a good year.”
When I visit Blitzer’s home in the Sea Gate section of Coney Island, his mother Lillian is sitting in an armchair in the living room, watching “Judge Judy.”
“So you’re a Cubs fan?” I ask, and she squints at me like I’m nuts. “Of course, I am!” she says. Clearly excited to have me there to interview her son, Mrs. Blitzer rises to bring us glasses of cold seltzer while we chat on the terrace.
The family hangs on every Cubs rally now, but 50 years ago in Brighton Beach, young Billy was a Mets fan. The elder of two sons born to Lillian and Herman Blitzer, who drove a truck and ran a small messenger business on Varick Street in Lower Manhattan, Billy competed with and against future big-league All Stars John Candelaria and Willie Randolph in Brooklyn’s famed Parade Ground League. At Abraham Lincoln High School, he was a high-school teammate of Lee Mazzilli, who went on to play for the Mets and currently works for the Yankees. His neighborhood pals were standout athletes, but Blitzer was already a skilled enough evaluator to realize that he was not.
“I was one of those kids who always walked around with a ball or glove in my hand,” Blitzer says. “But even then, I knew I wasn’t good enough to play professionally. So I figured that I would become a teacher and coach, just to stay in the game somewhat.”
As he prepared to graduate from Lincoln in 1971, the city’s budget crisis caused a hiring freeze for teachers, and suddenly that didn’t seem like a promising career path. So he enrolled in Hunter College as an accounting major, and continued playing ball. Despite his limited skills as an outfielder, coaches noted his knowledge of the game, and made him an assistant. Months after he graduated, Blitzer was named head baseball coach at Hunter.
He had also begun working for Ralph DiLullo, a longtime Cubs scout who was then at the Major League Scouting Bureau. DiLullo saw potential in Blitzer, and enlisted him as a “bird dog,” or a scout who observes amateur players on a freelance basis. In 1982, the Cubs hired him full-time to scout amateurs for the draft. Because he never married, the job has been his life ever since. “It’s baseball,” he explains with a shrug. “There was no time.”
When he began his career, before he understood that to love the Cubs was to suffer, he thought he would win his first ring in fairly short order. In 1984, they won 96 games, and finished in first place in the National League East. Then, in the decisive Game 5 of the NLCS, first baseman Leon Durham drove a stake through the heart of every fan: A ground ball rolled through his legs, allowing the San Diego Padres to take a lead they would not relinquish.
“I was home (watching on TV),” Blitzer says. “I punched the couch. I still can’t watch that tape. I was going to take my father to the World Series. It was all set. I’m only two years into my career. I figured, we’ll be back. And here we are 32 years later. My ring went right through Leon Durham’s legs.”
Two decades later, Blitzer saw another ring disappear into the hands of infamous fan Steve Bartman. The story of the oblivious man who grabbed a foul ball in the 2003 NLCS that left-fielder Moises Alou might or might not have caught — well, it’s so familiar, and so painful, that we won’t force Cubs fans to relive it here.
Eight years later, and still no title, the Cubs brought in Epstein to take a shot. At his first organizational meetings with the Cubs, at the Phoenix Marriott Mesa in Mesa, Ariz., in February 2012, Epstein stood at the front of a packed conference room and picked up the microphone. “Before I say anything,” he began, addressing more than 120 attendees, “I’m going to call on someone who has been here for years.”
Of all the people in the room, Epstein handed the mic to Blitzer. “I wanted someone to testify about what the organization means to people, how deep that connection runs, how meaningful it can be,” Epstein told me in an email. “Billy has a wealth of experience, of course, but more importantly, he knows players and he knows people. He’s a great example for the other scouts, and each day helps us get closer to being the organization we want to be.”
The team always has next year, but individuals aren’t so lucky. How many Cub fans have lived and died unfulfilled? Generations file in and out, yet the suffering continues. Even as he spoke that day four years ago in Arizona, Blitzer had no idea that the clock on his own tenure was about to start ticking louder, as his health faltered.
Blitzer stood, told a few jokes and stories, then turned serious. He lifted his right hand in the air and spoke in a voice wobbling with emotion. “Guys, you see this hand?” he said. “No ring. I have been waiting 30 years, and I don’t have another 30 to give. Let’s go.”