07/25/99

By Ken Daley / The Dallas Morning News

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It is the stuff of scouting legend, a Texas tall tale so improbable, not even Hollywood would touch it.

But on Sunday, as Nolan Ryan stands at a podium in Cooperstown, N.Y., to show his gratitude for induction into baseball's Hall of Fame, one of the first people he will thank is John Murff.

"Red" Murff, as he has been known throughout most of his 78 years, was the New York Mets scout who stumbled upon the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow one sunny Saturday morning in South Texas.

It was April 25, 1964, and Murff, whose own professional pitching career had ended with a back injury eight years earlier, was on his way to Galveston and then on to Houston. It was to be just another long, routine scout's day, sitting through one high school game and a college doubleheader in the ongoing quest to find potential professional talent.

Murff's friendly nature got the better of him, however, and he pointed his car off Highway 45 toward Clear Creek, where he knew a high school coach was staging a weekend tournament. Murff wasn't planning to stay long, but he wanted to express his gratitude for the games to encourage the coach to keep scheduling them.

"When I got to the ballpark, there was only one other scout there," Murff recalled. "That was Mickey Sullivan, the Baylor coach, but he was also a birddog for Philadelphia.

"I thought, 'Well, there must not be anybody here.' "

Murff chatted a bit while noticing Alvin High School coach Jim Watson summoning a lanky righthander from his bullpen. Out of habit, he flipped to a fresh page in his scouting notebook, the same one he had used two nights before at Houston's Colt Stadium while watching Cincinnati's Jim Maloney oppose the Colt .45s' Turk Farrell.

The skinny kid wound up and delivered.

"And the first pitch he threw, I tell everybody it had to be 100 mph, because it was the fastest pitch I'd seen in my life," Murff said. "Then he threw another one. He had two strikes on the hitter and threw a curveball, and the hitter doubled into right-center field."

It was the start of a big inning for Clear Creek High, one that quickly chased the skinny pitcher - kid by the name of Ryan, Murff would learn - out of the game.

"I don't know if he got anybody out or not," Murff said. "But he had that fastball. And that was enough to make me want to prepare him for a major league career."

A copy of Murff's original scouting report card, now on display in the Nolan Ryan Center on the campus of Alvin Community College, reads, "This skinny high school junior has the best arm I have ever seen in my life. This kid Ryan throws much harder than Jim Maloney of the Cincinnati Reds, or Turk Farrell of the Houston Colt .45s (I saw them pitch Thursday night). Ryan has the potential to be a high-performance starting pitcher on a major league staff. A smiling, friendly faced kid. Wide shoulders, long arms and strong hands. Good athlete."

Murff stuck around until the game was over, then rushed to Watson's side to express his interest in Alvin's sensational young pitcher.

"The coach named off two or three people before he got to me," Ryan recalled. "He said, 'That kid?' In his mind, I was way down on the totem pole as far as being one of his better pitchers."

Murff began visiting Ryan regularly, offering tips on his pitching mechanics, pitch selection, even his diet and conditioning. Ryan, initially skeptical, began to sense a possible destiny.

The Mets drafted Ryan in the eighth round of the 1965 draft, with the 295th overall pick. On June 28, 1965, 14 months after first seeing him throw, Murff got Ryan's signature on his first professional contract. The signing bonus was $12,000 and the salary was $500 per month.

The rest truly was history.

"Sure enough, it turned out that way," said Murff, who will attend this weekend's ceremonies in Cooperstown. "I had no idea he was going to be all this great, but I knew he had the great arm. I probably made the understatement of a lifetime on my report.

"I wrote, 'Best arm I've ever seen.' That's pinpointing it to one person. Maybe it should be, 'Best arm the world will ever see.'"