http://tinyw.in/JLyz
不冗長不精確不客觀不正確翻譯：
紅雀的球探Mike Roberts在2010年檢測罹患癌症，並成功康復歸隊。
裡面有說到，即使是Mike Roberts這樣頗富盛名的球探，難免看走眼，而且這
行業看走眼的機會高的嚇人。他放掉Rafael " Oops, I Hope That Wasn't
Steroids" Palmeiro，也放掉甫交易至老虎的條子球星Ian Kinsler。不過，他
也發掘一個主打三壘手並客串捕手工作的大學球員，認定他能成為好的捕手，這
位球員就是後來的捕手金手套Tom Pagnozzi。當然，不能漏掉最有名的一筆：
Albert Pujols。在診斷癌症並接受化療療程當年，Mike Roberts獲邀參加冬季
會議，同時也獲頒中西區年度球探殊榮。同時他的老婆也作出承諾：他的先生來
年還會繼續作球探！接下來的三年期間他在醫生、化療與球賽間折返跑。
現在他宣布已經完全康復，同時紅雀也趁勢公佈Mike Roberts將轉任業餘球探特
助(special assistant of amateur scouting)。這個職位認可他長久以來累積的
專業知識並授與球探顧問的地位。Roberts老先生認為借此機會他可以向其他人士
分享自己的知識經驗以及教導球探應盡的本份，同樣也能告訴他們選秀與順利簽下
合約對球探來說是同樣重要的。不過一切八次沒一撇，他將會忙上好一陣子。老人
家說他從十八歲開始就和棒球結下因緣，到這把年紀還是喜歡著棒球、喜歡作球探
這工作，而且還覺得有他所未完成的志業，還想繼續幹下去！
The only championship ring Mike Roberts ever wore was the first he received,
a gleaming 1982 World Series ring from his employer, the Cardinals. After
scouting several games one day in 2010, he realized the familiar weight on
his finger was gone and he wasn’t sure where he misplaced it.
Roberts and several other scouts had spent the day at USA Baseball’s
training complex in Cary, N.C., where, in order to get a view of two games at
once — a tip he often gave younger scouts — they had settled near a tree.
It was sweltering. Roberts didn’t notice the ring had slipped off his finger
until back at the hotel. It was found safe about midnight, but when Roberts
went to Joe Almaraz’s hotel room to tell his colleague about the ring, any
show of relief had to wait.
Roberts explained why he was so exhausted, at times preoccupied.
He told his friend the reason he’d lost weight, so much that the ring wouldn
’t stay on.
“I’m going home to Arkansas when this is over and I’m going to have
surgery,” Almaraz recalls Roberts’ telling him. “It might be good. It
might be bad. I’m prepared for it. I’ve got cancer, and I don’t know how
bad it is. I’m battling this thing.”
During the next three years, Roberts fought, as promised, through radiation
treatment and the 30 or so rounds of chemotherapy needed to attack colon and
rectal cancer. He subdued the creeping intruder, and his appointments slowed
to every three months, to every six months, and then to an end a few weeks
ago. Shortly after the Cardinals lost the World Series, Roberts, 73, learned
he had won his battle with cancer.
And through it all he never stopped doing what he does — scouting.
“I almost lost it when he first told me,” Almaraz said, his voice cracking.
“He said it’s his job, and it’s his job to get better. That’s the kind of
man he is. It’s like this: Driving 500 miles to see a player is nothing for
Mike. He’s going to get the job done. He won’t lose.”
As the Cardinals advanced this autumn toward a National League pennant and
the club’s fourth World Series appearance in 10 years, the industry lauded
their ability to cultivate young talent while remaining competitive. The
roster had the youngest average age for a National League playoff team, the
youngest pitching staff of any winning team in baseball, and, in the World
Series loss to Boston, received 50 percent of the innings from rookie
pitchers. Michael Wacha, 22 and less than 17 months removed from college, led
the way with four playoff wins.
Developing talent for what is regarded as one of the game’s better farm
systems starts with identifying talent, putting the club’s scouts at the
grassroots of the Cardinal Way. Players and management describe how the
franchise’s success stems from its continuity and a connection to the past.
While players see Red Schoendienst and other Hall of Famers around the
clubhouse and the banners flying over Busch Stadium, there is the history
deeper in the organization, the one in the walls, the scaffolding for the
Cardinal Way. Coaches once went to longtime coach George Kissell to learn it.
Catchers were sent to coach Dave Ricketts and now Mike Matheny. Scouts go to
Mike Roberts, “Lefty” as his peers calls him.
Roberts’ wingspan covers generations of scouts he’s mentored for the
Cardinals. He has befriended them, visited them on the road, scouted with
them, and nurtured them in a role he’s had for more than three decades. One
called him “a very good baseball man and the best human being.” He did not
go long while fighting cancer without a member of this extended baseball
family calling to scout the teacher’s recovery. Like others in the
organization, his Cardinals roots run deep. Roberts once pitched to Stan
Musial. He signed Tom Pagnozzi, advocated for Albert Pujols and was there on
a chilly opening night at Texas A&M to evaluate Wacha.
“We had a very young scouting staff, and he would travel with each of them,
eat with each of them, have a drink with each of them, have breakfast with
them, sit in their car with them and just talk baseball with them,” said
Roger Smith, a national cross-checker like Almaraz for the Cardinals. “He
was a mentor for all of them. He developed a scouting staff. The results
speak for themselves.”
Said Lee Thomas, a former general manager and now adviser with the Baltimore
Orioles: “He’s the ultimate pro — an outstanding scout and teacher. This
guy is what it means to be a scout. I wish I had 10 of him.”
The road often traveled
The call came over a loudspeaker, drawing the attention of Roberts and the
other Cardinals minor leaguers on a backfield. A lefty in the system about 50
years ago, Roberts heard his name, knew the field to which he had to report,
and had no idea who was waiting for him.
A western Missouri native, Roberts grew up idolizing Musial, the Hall of
Fame-bound hitter on the other side of the state. Now he stood 60 feet 6
inches away, assigned to help the three-time MVP get ready to face lefthanded
pitching.
Roberts bounced his first few pitches in the dirt short of home plate.
“I thought to myself,” he said later, “what if I hit God?”
As a boy growing up south of Kansas City, Roberts had listened to Cardinals
game with his dad on a radio station based in St. Joseph. His father, Verl “
Stub” Roberts, played ball in the area, a few times against the Kansas City
Monarchs. Winner took the gate receipts. Mike Roberts was a hard-throwing
lefty who could be wild, as Musial saw. Roberts climbed to Class AA before
arm trouble cost him his fastball. The scout in him says he “was always the
maybe guy, the wait-and-see guy and turned out like I should.”
He went from pro ball to coaching high school to running tryout camps and
then scouting. In the late 1970s, he joined the Cardinals as an area scout.
“The scouts took me under their wing and I listened and listened and
listened,” Roberts said. “I just tried to pick up things they saw in the
player, stories they told. I got a good feel and I started building my
library. I’ve seen a lot of players through the years, so I can say he
reminds me of and reminds me of and reminds me of …”
Roberts took to the difficult livelihood. The job means months away from the
family, extended travel, bad food, long days, and, as Roberts advanced to a
cross-checker role, those 6 a.m. flights to another town to evaluate another
player or two for the area scout. He said his two children would “sooner
live in a Holiday Inn,” because that’s where they spent the summer,
hotel-hopping.
It is not glamorous. And the road is paved with more misses than hits.
“Scouting is a tough job,” said Mark Newman, a senior vice president with
the New York Yankees who coached at Southern Illinois and has known Roberts
since the early 1970s. “People can get negative, bitter doing it. The
failure rate is so high. But Mike isn’t that way. Professionally, he’s
really, really good at what he does. But he’s also one of those guys you
love to see. He’s always positive.”
Roberts relishes the chance to see and talk baseball. He likes to “sleep on”
what he’s seen from prospects before offering an opinion, and he collects
stories. There was the time when longtime Cardinals scouting executive Fred
McAlister called from a speaker phone to ask Roberts about Rafael Palmeiro
and Pete Incaviglia. Roberts gave a detailed advocacy of Palmeiro, a first
baseman to replace Keith Hernandez. McAlister clicked the phone off. Roberts
found out later he wanted backing to pick Incaviglia. There’s the miss on
Ian Kinsler, who was slowed by an undisclosed injury when Roberts saw him. He
scouted future Gold Glove-winner Pagnozzi at Arkansas but saw the third
baseman play a midweek game at catcher.
In 1999, as the 13th round of the draft arrived, Roberts saw a familiar name
on the board, one the Cardinals had expected to go in earlier rounds. He had
seen the infielder as a high schooler and later cross-checked him.
“What are we waiting for?” Roberts was said to have asked in the draft
room. “There he is.”
The pick? Pujols.
A year earlier, Roberts and a young Cardinals official watched Austin Kearns
take midnight practice at a ballpark in Kentucky. A coach brought five
buckets of baseballs out. “Brand new pearls,” Roberts called them. Kearns
hit the first three pitches meekly and then, as Roberts recalled, hit the
rest of them over the wall. That young official was John Mozeliak, now the
club’s general manager. Roberts has mentored many.
“I think one of the reasons why the game is finding a fancy with our
organization is our generations of knowledge,” Mozeliak said. “Mike Roberts
has more than three decades as a scout, five decades of knowledge. As our
scouting department evolved and we became more diverse — a playing
background is less critical now than it was 20 years ago — we had to get our
scouts up to speed. Mike bridged that gap.”
Time to slow down
In December 2010, Roberts came to the Winter Meetings in Lake Buena Vista,
Fla., with 28 radiation treatments down and five to go. His wife, Sarah,
accompanied him as his peers recognized him at an annual banquet as the
Midwest area’s Scout of the Year. The night included a new ring, “Scout of
the Year” engraved on it, and a promise. Sarah told Baseball America that
Lefty would “get back out scouting next year.”
Chemotherapy didn’t keep him from fulfilling his wife’s statement. If chemo
came on a Monday, he would spend eight hours with the doctors and be out on
the road that weekend seeing games. Scouts see games, he often tells the
younger scouts. While chemo attacked the cancer, the road improved his health.
“My energy was low. I got real sick at times. I mean, they were putting
poison in my body,” Roberts said. “But I needed to be on the road. It
really did me good.”
He had to add to his “library.”
This is the phrase he and other scouts around him use. In more contemporary
lingo, it’s the personal database of players that a scout keeps internally.
When watching Matt Carpenter several years ago, Roberts could draw on decades
of seeing similar hitters who maybe didn’t fit a position.
“He can reflect on all he’s learned from the tree of baseball,” Almaraz
said. “Wiggle it all you want and there will be arms and legs that come
down. But not many hitters. If there’s a hitter, you better get him.”
Mozeliak called the move to have his new wave of scouts spend time with
Roberts “strategic.” He wanted the young scouts to start building their
library, their database of players by downloading from Roberts. This month,
the Cardinals announced that Roberts would move from Midwest cross-checker to
a new title, special assistant of amateur scouting. It is a formal way to
acknowledge his role as mentor, as the longest-tenured member of the scouting
staff.
He sees his new role as a chance to “share information, share what to keep
to ourselves, and show how drafting is one thing. You have to get them
signed, too.”
The Cardinals see the new job as a way for Roberts to travel less. The club
knows there is no way to keep him off the road entirely.
Nothing has yet.
“Since I was 18 this game has been my life,” he said. “I still love it. I
still like scouting. I still believe I have value I can add. You can just
fish so much. You can only play golf so such. Do I get excited? I still get
excited about that thrill of the chase, the next player you haven’t seen.”
This past year, healthy and back on the road, Roberts didn’t wear his 1982
World Series ring. At a game together, Almaraz and Roberts talked about the
bare finger.
Roberts said he was keeping it open for the next championship.