January 28, 2020

By J.P. Antonacci

Canadian Baseball Network

For the first time in 50 years, Murray Zuk doesn’t have a ballgame to get to.

The dean of Canadian amateur scouting called it a remarkable career last fall, just in time to celebrate a milestone birthday.

“I turned 80, and that’s always been sort of (the plan) – I’m not going to work past 80,” he said.

After covering thousands of games as a scout with Cincinnati, Atlanta and San Diego, criss-crossing the country to find the next star from north of the border, Zuk hung up his radar gun and headed home to Souris, Man. He retired as the longest-serving Canadian scout in baseball – and perhaps the most beloved and respected as well.

THE QUINTESSENTIAL SCOUT

“A grinder is probably the best word to describe him,” said veteran scout Walt Burrows (Victoria, BC), who covers Canada for the Minnesota Twins.

“He’s the first guy there and the last guy to leave, and gives everybody an equal opportunity.”

Angels scout Don Archer (White Rock, BC) said Zuk’s archive of scouting reports was second to none.

“He would leave no stone unturned. He kept good records and had a lot of good insights on guys,” Archer said. “I think he always had a zest for it. He never cut any corners.”

“He was very conscientious and extremely thorough,” added retired Blue Jays scout Don Cowan (Delta, BC). “Murray’s probably still got boxes of stuff he had on guys from 30, 40 years ago. He started at a different era and continued on. It’s probably unheard of today for somebody to be there 50 years.”

“He went about his business the right way,” said Blue Jays area scout Adam Arnold. “He worked hard. He showed up for the first pitch and stayed till the last pitch. And that’s tough to do. Some of those games are long; the talent leaves early. But I don’t think he missed a pitch.”

“That doesn’t describe a lot of us,” Burrows said.

CINCINNATI’S MAN IN MANITOBA

Zuk didn’t imagine he’d become a baseball lifer when the Reds first came calling in 1969. The 29-year-old had just been named president of the newly amalgamated Manitoba Baseball Association and Cincinnati offered him a job as an associate scout, known in those days as a recommending scout.

“I said, I don’t know anything about scouting. And they said, well, we’ll train you,” Zuk said. “I sort of fell into a few things and away it went.”

He may have been new to scouting, but Zuk knew the game, having won a senior championship with his hometown Hamiota Red Sox. The multi-sport athlete later became an umpire and coach in Souris, guiding the Cardinals to the 1967 Western Canada juvenile championship.

One of his first assignments with the Reds was scouting diamonds in Hamiota and Souris at the 1970 national senior championship, with Cincinnati scouting director Joe Bowen covering games in nearby Brandon.

“He asked me who I liked, and the only guy I liked was Dave McKay,” Zuk said.

The next year, McKay (Vancouver, BC) signed with the Twins and went on to have a successful career as an MLB player and coach, including starting at third base when the Toronto Blue Jays played their inaugural game in 1977.

So Zuk became Cincinnati’s man in Manitoba, scouring the prairies in search of the best players in Western Canada. Canadians weren’t eligible for the draft at that time, so teams had to sign them as international free agents. Zuk was tasked with setting up tryout camps where the club could evaluate promising youngsters.

“I had to invite all these kids to the tryout camps, and I didn’t know any of them,” he recalled.

He broke the ice in new towns by arranging for media interviews to promote the opportunity and then dropping in to meet with local coaches.

“We would haul in the best players we could find,” he said.

To cope with the nomadic lifestyle of a scout, Zuk convinced the Reds to put his wife Donni and their young children up in a camper so the family could travel together from tryout to tryout.

“My kids were at a lake here, a lake there for a while,” he said, adding that Donni was good-humoured about the adventure.

A NEW CHALLENGE

Associate scouts don’t get paid or have expenses covered. If a player they’ve flagged ends up signing, they get a commission, but essentially they do it for the love of the game. When Cincinnati promoted Zuk from associate to part-time scout in 1971, he felt the added pressure.

“They’re paying you so you’d better not miss anybody,” he said. “If you miss too many guys, they’ll be looking for somebody else.”

Scouting directors would cross-reference the players from Western Canada signed or drafted in a given year with Zuk’s list of recommended players and follow up about any missing names.

“Then you have to start being a little more definitive in what you’re evaluating,” he said.

One player Zuk liked was Terry Puhl, the future big leaguer from Melville, Sask. Zuk brought the young pitcher to a tryout camp in 1972.

“We ran the pitchers too, and he really could run,” Zuk said, explaining that the Reds had a strict “run and throw policy,” meaning prospects needed strong arms and fast feet.

Puhl was 16 at the time, too young to sign, so Zuk’s supervisor told him to work on playing the outfield because he had all the tools.

“The next year we came back, he ran well but he couldn’t throw a lick. Terrible,” Zuk recalled.

Based on that poor showing, Cincinnati passed on Puhl, but Houston snapped him up and soon he was patrolling left field for the Astros.

When asked about it years later, Puhl revealed that he’d pitched nine innings the night before that lacklustre tryout but hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. In retrospect, he was grateful for how it turned out, since in Cincinnati he would have been blocked by the stars of the Big Red Machine, whereas with the young Astros club he had a clearer path to the majors.

“So he said ‘you did me a favour by not signing me,’” said Zuk, who still has Puhl’s player card – the first of many he filled out over the years – in his home office.

COVERING CANADA, COAST TO COAST

For 28 years, Zuk pulled double duty as a school principal and a scout.

As soon as school let out for the summer, he headed to ballparks throughout Saskatchewan and Manitoba, scouting independent league games in Brandon (including the short-lived Prairie League) and Winnipeg, home of the Goldeyes.

While covering Team Canada at the world youth championships in Brandon, he filed reports on standout prospects from other countries, such as Joe Mauer, Yunel Escobar, and Brandon League.

Zuk worked under Cincinnati cross-checker Bill Clark, who modelled the work ethic for which his protege would become famous.

“Bill Clark was Murray’s mentor, and his philosophy was ‘be the first guy there and the last to leave.’ Murray sort of followed up on that,” Cowan said. “Guys would tease him about being there all day and all night, but he took it well.”

It was Clark who first trained Zuk and would have a lasting influence on his career.

“Absolutely. No question,” Zuk said. “And we’re still very good friends.”

Two years after he retired as an educator, Zuk followed Clark to Atlanta, serving as Western Canada scouting director from 1998 till 2001.

The new role pushed him further afield in search of talent. Zuk would often be in one town for a Saturday game and at a diamond in another town on the Sunday – a pace he kept up for five decades.

“When I worked with the Braves and then the first eight or nine years with the Padres, I did tryout camps right across Western Canada. I did 10 or 12 every July and August,” he said.

That practice wound down once the MLB Scouting Bureau started setting up its own tryout camps, where players were evaluated en masse.

In 2002, again aided by Clark, Zuk started scouting Western Canada for the Padres, but the club quickly promoted him to national scout.

“They phoned me and said, you know what, you’re turning in a lot of Eastern Canada guys anyway, so why don’t you do that too?” Zuk said.

Wherever Canadians played ball, Zuk was there. He became a fixture at seemingly every Junior National Team appearance, the Canada Cup, national championships, Tournament 12 in Toronto, and the Best of the West in Kamloops.

He also kept tabs on the Ontario Blue Jays, the Langley Blaze, University of British Columbia Thunderbirds, Okotoks Dawgs Academy, and many other programs.

By the time he retired, Zuk had put 440,000 km on his 2002 Chrysler. “And it still runs like a dream,” he said.

Mark Conner, San Diego’s director of amateur scouting, appreciated having Zuk’s sharp eyes evaluating talent for the Padres.

“We’re a believer that players come from anywhere and everywhere, and Canada has a very good tradition of producing good players. Having Murray up there definitely put us in a good position every year,” Conner said.

“How the draft works with things lining up, only one scout can get a player every round. Sometimes it worked out in his favour, sometimes it didn’t, but he made it a tough decision every time.”

With the Padres, Zuk signed pitcher Mark Hardy (Campbell River, BC) in the 43rd round in 2010. His final pick was pitcher Keegan Pulford-Thorpe (Newmarket, Ont.) in the 33rd round of the 2019 draft.

Ever modest, Zuk explained that drafting and signing a player is a team effort.

“You put in a report on a high school player. And because you’ve got a report in there, they immediately focus on that kid in college,” he said. “But I can’t take credit for signing them.”

Zuk started files on plenty of future Canadian big leaguers, including Andrew Albers (North Battleford, Sask.), George Kottaras (Scarborough, Ont.), James Paxton (Ladner, BC), Rowan Wick (North Vancouver, BC), and Cal Quantrill (Port Hope, Ont.), San Diego’s first-round pick in 2016.

“The (Padres) scouting director sent a memo out saying how important it was to have files on these kids,” Zuk said. “When other scouts see one of your players and put a report in, it helps your case.”

He pushed hard for Josh Naylor, and the Padres had the slugger from Mississauga, Ont. highly ranked heading into the 2015 draft. But the Marlins struck first, nabbing him 12th overall.

“So we just traded for him the next year,” Zuk said.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Over the years, Zuk developed a keen eye for talent – and more importantly, potential.

“You look for athleticism, first of all,” he said. “If he’s got athleticism, it may be that he hasn’t had the coaching. One tool but not athleticism, maybe I’ll see him again someday. If he’s got athleticism, then you start digging a little deeper.”

Scouts grade on a scale from 20 to 80, with the average big leaguer at an overall level of 50.

“Probably the highest number I ever put on a player was Adam Loewen,” Zuk said of the pitcher/outfielder from Surrey, BC. He gave Loewen a 68 on account of his velocity and “an outstanding breaking ball.”

Zuk has always been a shrewd judge of character, a trait that proved most helpful as a scout. He visited players at home to meet their families, using the interview skills honed as an educator to find out what made them tick.

“Is their work ethic good? Are they going to struggle when things go bad for them? He worked hard at finding that out,” Archer said.

To reveal their mental makeup, Zuk asked players about their values, goals, and training regimens.

“That all helps you get an idea of whether their skills are going to improve or whether they’ll stay stagnant,” he said. “And the price you’re paying now for high draft picks, you’d better know something about them.”

His knack for building relationships was a godsend for scouting directors.

“Murray was tremendous at it – the connection with the families. He knew them and they knew him. It’s something that we definitely value, and he took it to a whole new level,” Conner said.

“If you go back to the year we took Cal Quantrill in the first round out of Stanford, Murray had a lot to do with knowing the background and the family, and everything that he scouted from high school. That really helped us throughout that process.”

Parents would often come up to Zuk at the ballpark to update him on how their kids were doing, and he made a point of keeping tabs on certain favourite players who made it to the pros.

“I’ll never quit following Mike Soroka. We spent a lot of time with his family,” he said of the 2019 Tip O’Neill Award winner.

Families were eager to welcome Zuk into their homes because he had a reputation for finding college placements for players who had promise but weren’t quite ready to turn pro.

“Some of them became professional players and some of them didn’t, but they got an education,” Zuk said, adding that college coaches would also seek him out looking for players to fill their rosters. “So it works both ways.”

This education-minded approach benefited the likes of future big leaguer Corey Koskie (Anola, Man.), who impressed evaluators at a Winnipeg tryout camp but needed to refine his swing.

“He was a good athlete, so we got him a chance to go to Boone for a year,” Zuk said.

After stints at Des Moines Area Community College in Boone, Iowa, and the National Baseball Institute in British Columbia, the Twins nabbed Koskie late in the 1990 draft.

“Had Corey come through the system now, there’s no way he’d be a 26th rounder,” Burrows said of the Canadian success story that Zuk quietly made possible.

ONE OF THE TRAILBLAZERS

Zuk made it his business to know what was going on at sandlots and stadiums from coast to coast. His career mirrors the growth of Canada from largely uncharted territory to a rich source of talent for MLB clubs.

When he started with the Reds, Zuk recalled, “They didn’t have anything in Canada in those days. Very few of the teams did. It was just us and the Expos running tryout camps.”

Other scouts would do “fly-ins” to work certain tournaments, Zuk said, citing Houston’s signing of Puhl as an example of this targeted approach.

Before Canadians became eligible for the draft in 1991, teams had to use one of their coveted international visas to sign a Canadian player.

“That meant Canadians had to beat out everyone in the world for those 10 visas,” Zuk said.

Players like Chris Reitsma (Calgary, Alta.), Ryan Dempster (Gibsons, BC) and Larry Walker (Maple Ridge, BC) attracted attention because teams started to follow the paths blazed by Zuk and Clark with the Reds and Blue Jays scout Jim Ridley.

Burrows said he likely wouldn’t be in baseball today were it not for the pioneering work of those early scouts whose diligence convinced teams to take a harder look at players north of the border.

“(Teams asked) ‘what’s Murray Zuk and Bill Clark doing? Why are they going to these places?’ It created the job that I had when I joined the scouting bureau in ‘91. There’s players up there and (teams) wanted to draft them,” said Burrows.

“The hard thing was convincing the American guys at the top that Canadian kids still had a big upside,” Cowan added.

“They hadn’t had the real coaching and hadn’t been playing baseball 300 days a year for 10 or 15 years. There was still the chance for them to develop. What you see isn’t necessarily what you’re going to get.”

Interest picked up in the late 1990s with the advent of the Junior National Team program, which gathered the best young players in the country together on the same diamond, making them easy to scout. When the JNT started touring during spring training, teams sent their Florida scouts to check out the young Canucks, which prompted scouting trips north.

“They realized that there were a lot of good ballplayers in Canada, so they started sending scouts up here,” Zuk said.

One of those ballplayers was Justin Morneau (New Westminster, BC), drafted by Minnesota as a catcher in 1999. That spring, Zuk scouted Morneau at the Parksville Tournament on Vancouver Island and urged his bosses to take a long look at the slugger.

“I put a big, big number on him,” he said.

A cross-checker subsequently saw Morneau at a tournament and came away unimpressed after the youngster scuffled. This cross-checker told Zuk he wouldn’t even have written a report on Morneau had Zuk not talked him up so much.

“I said not only can he hit, but he’s got upper deck power,” Zuk said. “When you just see a kid for two days, you don’t know what’s going on.”

These days Canada is flooded with scouts, and Zuk said the players they find are faster and stronger than ever before.

“You bet. A lot. When I started scouting, there were very few kids who did individual training programs off the field. Now, everybody does it,” he said.

The increased attention and exposure has led to an attitudinal shift in some players, he added.

“The big dollars have certainly made an impact. A lot of Canadian kids take a look at what Naylor, Quantrill, Soroka got and they think they’re just as good, so they want the same money. And they’re not that good,” Zuk said.

“They get drafted but they end up going to college instead because they don’t get the money they think they deserve.”

In recognition of his efforts to grow the game in Canada, Zuk was named the Canadian Baseball Network Scout of the Year in 2013. He was inducted into the Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame in 1999, and somehow found time in his busy scouting schedule to coach the 1990 Western Canada Bantam Champions and serve as an official, coach, and administrator across many sports in Manitoba, with a particular interest in figure skating.

‘HE’S A BEAUTY’

To a man, Zuk’s colleagues consider him the quintessential scout and an even better person.

“We gravitated (to each other),” said Archer, who made a point of getting together for dinner whenever the two scouts were in the same town.

“Murray was always very easy to talk to and very professional. And a good friend,” Archer said.

Arnold first caught Zuk’s eye as a young pitcher in Kamloops.

“I don’t think I ever saw him without a big grin on his face,” Arnold said. “Part of loving what you do is being there. Some of those days are long and cold. We’re freezing our butts off in Kamloops and he’s all bundled up, but he’s there.”

After Arnold turned to scouting four years ago, he and Zuk became fast friends.

“He’s a beauty. One of the other Blue Jays scouts and I, we always refer to Murray as ‘the sweetheart.’ Never in a bad mood and always happy to be at the park,” said Arnold, Toronto’s area scout for the Four Corners (Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico).

“Murray’s a guy that I always enjoyed sitting beside,” he added. “It wasn’t talking shop, it was talking about anything and everything.”

In fact, Arnold said he could tell when Zuk was at the ballpark long before spotting him.

“He’s known around baseball for the laugh that he has. It’s a deep, loud, heard-from-pole-to-pole laugh,” Arnold said. “It’s known coast to coast.”

Over his 25 years scouting Canada for the Blue Jays, Cowan and Zuk crossed paths often.

“Murray and I liked to have a Scotch together and the odd beer, but he wasn’t a real drinking guy. He used to go to church every Sunday, which not many of the other guys did,” Cowan said.

“He’s just a super nice guy. And very accommodating to everybody – he’d always help somebody who needed a hand. If guys missed games or missed people and asked how they did, he probably didn’t go into any details, but he did help a lot of guys out that way. You do those things for each other.”

Zuk said he was happy to assist his fellow scouts – to a point.

“You don’t share information – or at least, you’re not supposed to. If you have a really good friend, you might say ‘you’ve got to see this kid,’” he said.

“When you’ve been around as long as I have, you get to form some really good friendships with some of the scouts. There are others who you don’t listen to so much because they’re trying to pump you for information or sell you a bill of goods.”

As technology advanced, trying to hide promising players from other scouts became less relevant, he added.

“With the current communication channels there’s no secret where the good kids are. All you have to do is log on Twitter.”

As the elder statesman among the scouts, Zuk’s meticulous approach extended to how he packed for the park.

“He always had extra batteries for his radar gun or his stopwatch, stuff like that. The normal guys were always running out of those things,” Cowan laughed. “He was just so well-prepared.”

Zuk’s contemporaries paid attention, especially his associate scouts, a list that includes James Parker, now a Four Corners scout for the Padres, and Allen Cox, who Zuk hired out of the Dawgs Baseball Academy in Okotoks.

“People would look at him and see how he goes about his business as thorough as he does,” Conner said. “I think the younger guys saw a lot of good things to take away and understand that this is how you can become a good scout.”

Zuk made special mention of associate scout Andy Boehm, who he called “my right hand man with the Padres.” Boehm paid his own way to scout the Canada Cup and JNT training camps in Florida.

“He helped me an awful lot, and we’re still really good friends,” Zuk said.

A KEEN EYE

In his early years, Zuk set out armed only with his trusty notebook. Writing reports on players, he says, was a constant challenge – “sitting at a desk and trying to find the right words to describe what you want to say.”

That task was made a little easier in the latter part of his career, since the Padres require video clips of every player scouted. “It was good, because when you go to write your report, you just open up your video camera and there it is,” Zuk said.

He sees the value of baseball’s data revolution as part of the overall player evaluation puzzle, but said analytics didn’t factor into his process much.

“Not for me. That’s more done at the office,” he said, explaining that scouts in the field don’t have the tools to determine spin rate, launch angle and the like.

“All you have is a radar gun, a stopwatch, and a video camera. But you’ve got your eyes.”

After watching so many games, he knows how to read the ball out of a pitcher’s hand or judge how it explodes off the bat.

“You can tell if it’s good or bad. You just don’t get a number, that’s all,” he said.

“(Analytics) is just another piece of information. Some clubs have gone overboard with that and taken the human element out of it. I have an objection to that. Those things don’t tell you anything about makeup. They’re just numbers.”

Statistics can be deceiving without context, Zuk continued. A slap hitter, for example, will have an unimpressive launch angle but may have superlative bat control.

“Launch angle is fine … but you’ve got to put it into perspective and put everything together. I’m fortunate that the organizations I’ve worked for used stats in conjunction with everything else,” he said.

“Some organizations let go of all their scouts. (San Diego’s) hiring scouts.”

BIG SHOES TO FILL

The man tasked with hiring Zuk’s successor isn’t relishing the job.

“We’re going to miss the camaraderie with Murray. There’s not a better person out there. How he goes about treating people, the infectious personality that he has, the love of the game, just the love of doing it – that’s hard to find,” Conner said. “Fifty years is a huge milestone and something he should be very proud of.”

The fact of Zuk’s retirement, which leaves Claude Pelletier (St-Lazare, Que.) of the Mets as the longest-serving member of the Canadian scouting fraternity, hasn’t quite sunk in yet.

“I haven’t got totally used to it. I’m not sure if I ever will,” Zuk said.

Following the winter meetings from afar rather than being in the thick of the action was a strange feeling, he added.

“The Padres were making some trades and I’m watching it like a hawk,” he said.

“San Diego right now, they’ve got Naylor and Quantrill. It was probably hard for him to retire with those guys there,” said Cowan.

Arnold was touched that Zuk reached out personally to tell him he was retiring.

“He didn’t have to do this, but he told me he enjoyed being at the park with me. And obviously we (scouts) can’t say enough about how we feel about him,” he said, adding that he’ll miss sharing jokes with Zuk, winding him up and hearing that famous laugh.

“It’s kind of a bummer that he’s not a little younger and to see it out a few more years. This upcoming spring, they’ll miss having him around. I know I will.”

A NEW FOCUS

Zuk may have never missed a pitch, but that dedication came at a cost. Daughter Lindsay Lepla remembers many a time that her dad had to duck out of a family gathering – or skip it altogether – to get to the ballpark.

“He sacrificed a lot to be a scout,” Lepla said.

Zuk admitted that it was tough to be at a hotel 90 nights a year.

“You’re not home very much. You’ve got to have a really understanding wife,” he said.

He has such a wife in Donni, who kept the family’s five children in line while Zuk was away.

“She picked up lots of slack,” Lepla said.

It was Donni who told the kids that the Padres had chosen their father to represent the club and announce San Diego’s picks live on MLB Network during the 2013 draft. Zuk hadn’t thought to mention it.

“He’s very modest,” Lepla said. “We’re very proud of him, for sure. He worked long, hard hours to learn the level he was at.”

“That was the highlight of my career,” Zuk said of the trip to New York, which turned into a mini-holiday for him and Donni.

“I couldn’t believe it when they phoned and asked me. I was driving down the road and I almost drove into the ditch.”

He was treated to lunch and a tour of the MLB offices in Manhattan before slipping into a suit and heading to the network studio in Secaucus, New Jersey. Before the broadcast he had an unexpected reunion with his old scouting director in Atlanta, Paul Snyder, who was there announcing his club’s picks.

“It was pretty special,” Zuk said of the draft day experience. “I’ve got a World Series ring (with the 1990 Reds), and that was more impressive.”

Lepla’s appreciation for her father’s expertise grew in later years as she watched him quietly take his grandkids aside to give them pointers about how to be better ballplayers.

“It was pretty neat to see, actually, the skill level he had. Whatever he does, he’s always so professional,” Lepla said.

Zuk appreciated his family’s support throughout his demanding career.

“I think they took a little pride in it that their dad was a big league scout,” he said.

Lepla said Donni always valued Zuk’s work, but she’s glad to have her husband home more often.

“It’s his absolute passion. To be 80 years old and still be as mobile and active as he is, she definitely attributes that to still scouting,” Lepla said.

Zuk had been talking about retirement for a while, but the reality of it still hit his daughter hard.

“When he actually decided that this was it and he headed off to Vancouver for his last scouting expedition, it broke my heart,” she said.

She made sure Donni instructed Zuk to get a picture to commemorate the end of his exemplary career. Zuk dutifully complied, asking another scout to snap a photo of him with his radar gun at the ready.

A third scout asked what the occasion was and was told that Donni had requested the photo. “And he said, ‘she wanted proof he was actually at the ballpark,’” Zuk chuckled.

As he reflects on his career, Zuk is grateful to have formed many lasting friendships through baseball.

“I certainly did,” he said. “It’s going to be hard not seeing those guys next year.”

But he’s looking forward to finally taking the cruise he’s promised Donni for a few decades now and still catching the odd ballgame, especially if one of his 13 grandchildren is playing.

“He’s a diehard,” Lepla said. “I’ve never seen a more dedicated grandparent.”

The photo of Zuk’s last game as a scout is a special one, symbolizing as it does a lifetime spent advocating for Canadian players and contributing to the growth of the game in Canada at every level.

But there’s another picture that his family will also treasure – a photo from this past Christmas of Zuk and his grandchildren sporting Padres caps, all gathered together at home.

“We’re just so proud of him,” Lepla said. “We missed him a lot, always, when he was on the road. But we’re all so proud of him.”