ESSICK: COAST'S STAR STAR-PICKER
He Had Faith in DiMag, Gomez
"Bill Essick, who scouted ball players for the Yankees in California for twenty-five years, has retired. Bill made a pretty good score over the years, coming up with, among others, Joe DiMaggio, Frank Crosetti, Joe Gordon, Vernon Gomez and, I believe, Tony Lazzeri.
Not many scouts could look back on a record like that. Paul Krichell, now and for many years chief of the Yankees' staff ... Dick Kinsella of the New York Giants and Larry Sutton of the Brooklyn Dodgers, both now dead ... discovered more players than Essick. Krichell's greatest find was Lou Gehrig. Kinsella, a paint store proprietor in Springfield, Ill, a friend of John McGraw's and practically the only scout the Giants had over a span of almost thirty years, started with Larry Doyle and wound up with Carl Hubbell. Sutton, lone prowler of the sticks for the Dodgers in the time of Charlie Ebbets, stocked Brooklyn with heroes, his most illustrious being Casey Stengel. But Krichell, Kinsella and Sutton roamed far and wide, while Essick confined his operation to the Pacific Coast League and that great proving ground of baseball players in San Francisco, Golden Gate Park.
Bill was one of the scouts engaged by Ed Barrow in the reorganization of the Yankees that followed Barrow's engagement as general manager of the club in 1920. Before that, Jake Ruppert and Cap Huston, the Yankee owners, had spent hundreds of thousands for players, many of them not worth the price paid for them. Barrow, by putting together a group of competent judges of talent in the raw, not only saved the club a tremendous amount of money but built the teams that won pennants and World Series and made the Yankees famous the world over.
Essick didn't discover DiMaggio. Everybody on the Coast did, at virtually the same time. Joe's terrific hitting and his matchless fielding made him a natural, so you didn't have to be a trained observer to say, on looking at him for the first time: 'Here is one who is destined for greatness.'
It was Bill's faith in Joe that paid off. In the summer of 1934, with a dozen major league clubs bidding for DiMaggio, the late Charlie Graham, who owned the San Francisco club, was sitting still and saying nothing. The bids started at $25,000. Now they were up to $75,000. Charlie was patient. He felt he could afford to be. If he held out long enough, he could get $100,000. Maybe more.
Then, one day when the Seals were playing at home, Joe took a cab to his sister's house after the game. The game had dragged and Joe was late for a dinner party and as the cab pulled up in front of the house, he leaped from it and his left knee popped.
'Like a pistol,' Joe was to say later.
The cab driver helped him into the house. An ambulance took him to a hospital. The major league club owners who had been bidding for him stopped bidding. Who wanted a young player with a trick knee?
Well ... Bill Essick did. Trick knee or no, this was a great ball player in the making. When Joe got out of the hospital, Bill trailed him into and out of every ball park in the Coast League.
One night he called Ed Barrow.
'Buy DiMaggio,' he said.
'How about that trick knee?' Ed asked.
'Listen,' Bill said. 'That's what I've been looking at for weeks. He can run. He can pivot at the plate. He can make the fast breaks in the outfield. He can even go down for a ball and come up with it and throw it. They all think I'm crazy out here but I'm not, they are. This kid is going to be one of the greatest ball players you ever saw. Believe me, Ed.'.
Ed believed him. He called Charlie Graham. The asking price was $40,000. Ed offered $20,000. They finally settled on $25,000. This was one of the greatest bargains in baseball history. Ed never has claimed credit for it. The credit, he said, belonged to Bill Essick.
That was, undoubtedly, Essick's greatest achievement as a Yankee scout. Next to it, I would take his recommendation of Lefty Gomez, then pitching for San Francisco.
Lefty was a skinny kid out of Rodeo, Cal., a town nobody ever heard of before and that nobody has heard of since. He was ... and still is ... roughly six feet tall. At the time the Yankees bought him he weighed ... but let him tell it: 'I was in the office and they had just told me I had been sold to the Yankees,' he said. 'I wandered into the secretary's office and I saw a wire he was going to release to the papers about my sale. It said I weighed 147 pounds. There was nobody else in the office. I scratched out the 147 and made it '167.' I didn't want anyone to think the Yankees were buying a ghost.' Actually, when Gomez showed up at the Stadium, Barrow was startled. He thought he had bought a ghost. When the season ended, he turned Lefty over to the club physician, who prescribed, among other things, three months on a milk farm, where Lefty could be fattened up. It was then that Lefty pulled one of his celebrated tricks.
'You come back to us in the spring weighing 180 pounds,' Barrow said, 'and you'll make old Yankee fans forget Jack Chesbro.'
'If I come back weighing 180 pounds,' Lefty said, 'I'll make them forget Gomez.'
He didn't. That is, he didn't come back weighing 180 pounds and, after what he did in the years that followed, they'll never forget Gomez. He never weighed more than 170 and he was great. But, remember, it was Essick who caught him at 147 ... and he was keen enough to know he would make the major league grade with something to spare. Bill couldn't foresee the milk farm. He just knew the guy was a big league pitcher."
-Frank Graham, condensed from the New York Journal-American (Baseball Digest, March 1951)
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