Why Scouts Whiffed on Eddie Murray

A future Hall of Famer isn't selected until the third round? In advance of Murray's vintage interview being posted next week, the Orioles scouting director who drafted him explains what happened.

In the early 1970s, the Orioles’ scouting department had an informal arrangement with five other clubs that included sharing their preference lists after each year’s draft. With baseball’s draft still less than a decade old at that point, sharing information helped the Orioles sharpen their best practices and gain further insight into what constituted consensual thought.

After the 1973 draft, the Orioles’ director of scouting, David Ritterpusch, was surprised to discover that none of the other five clubs had Eddie Murray on their preference list. A star catcher-first baseman from Locke High School in Los Angeles, he hadn’t impressed the other clubs enough for them to consider taking him.

The Orioles had taken Murray in the third round.

In hindsight, even that relatively high selection underestimated Murray. Of the three players from the 1973 draft who’ve made the Hall of Fame, Robin Yount and Dave Winfield went third and fourth overall and Murray went, cough, sixty-third.

Why didn’t he go higher? Why did most scouts, including many with the Orioles, basically whiff on a player who would become one of the greatest clutch hitters ever?

I’m pleased to report the Bird Tapes has an impeccable source on the matter — Ritterpusch himself. We became good friends after I wrote about him for the Baltimore Sun two decades ago; an early and ardent proponent of psychological testing, he was back with the Orioles as a director of information systems after having spent most of his professional career in the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of colonel.

Noe retired and living in Northern Virginia, Ritterpusch is a Bird Tapes subscriber. As the Orioles’ scouting director from 1973-75, he also drafted future cornerstones Mike Flanagan and Rich Dauer and green-lighted the signing of Dennis Martinez. But drafting Murray is his favorite memory.

We recently exchanged emails about it. It’s a timely subject at the Bird Tapes because I’m going to post my vintage interview with Murray early next week.

“Eddie is a terrific subject in part because he was so badly misread by so many, and for so long,” Ritterpusch wrote in an email.

The core problem, Ritterpusch suggests, was Murray’s preternaturally calm playing demeanor. Whether in the field or at bat, he never revealed his emotions, positive or negative. Major league fans would come to recognize that as one of his signature qualities, but it fooled the scouts when Murray was in high school.

“His incredible emotional control left the evaluators with the impression that he wasn’t motivated,” Ritterpusch wrote.

Given the nature of scouting at the grassroots level, this became the consensus opinion of him. “Local scouts chat back and forth all the time and often create a mass view that protects each of them from being way off the consensus. Eddie was an extreme case” of that custom resulting in a mistake, Ritterpusch wrote.

Other factors also contributed to his going in the third round, including the consensus view of his potential as a hitter. “The scouts made him out to be a ‘double or nothing’ power hitter,” Ritterpusch wrote.

Fortunately for the Orioles. Ritterpusch dispatched Bill Werle, a special assignment scout, to assess a handful of other prospects in California. A former major league pitcher, Werle scouted for the Orioles from 1971 through 1989, mostly looking at pitchers. But he checked on Murray in 1973 and filed a report containing a contrarian view that proved impactful — enormously so in the long run.

“I didn't let our local or regional scouts know that I had Bill looking closely at Eddie and other prospects in California. Bill saw him as a gifted contact hitter,” Ritterpusch wrote. “Frankly, except for Bill and myself, I doubt any of our scouts saw Eddie as much more than a second division major leaguer. Bill and I saw real star potential, although neither of us realized that Eddie was a Hall of Fame talent, let alone a top-tier Hall of Famer.”

Werle’s positive report helped Ritterpusch decide to draft Murray, as did the fact that Murray was just 17 years old in the spring of 1973.

“He was a year younger than the other high school prospects in the draft; a year younger and already as good,” Ritterpusch wrote. “He was so good so young.”

Murray’s vast upside potential began to surface when he sat for the psychological testing that the Orioles gave all prospects. It measured players in intangibles such as drive, trust, aggression, mental toughness and emotional control. The Orioles tested Murray twice — before the draft, when he was an amateur, and then at the team’s minor league camp in Florida in early 1974.

“Eddie tested very high in the three traits we found to be critical to position players becoming stars,” Ritterpusch wrote. “One was emotional control, or composure. One was trust, which is very important, means he is a team player. And one was mental toughness, the ability to strike out in one at-bat and then come back and hit a home run in your next at-bat.

Murray scored in the same ranges both times he took the test, “which reinforced our findings,” Ritterpusch wrote. The notion that he lacked motivation simply was incorrect. “In fact, he tested very high in drive,” Ritterpusch wrote.

Of course, the Orioles didn't lock up Murray just by drafting him. They still had to sign him, and that wasn’t assured. There was no agent involved; Murray’s mother, Carrie, represented him in talks with the Orioles. A strong influence, she preferred that her son go to college rather than turn pro.

“The negotiations were a challenge. In fact, the local scouts kind of threw up their hands,” Ritterpusch wrote. “In the only such case I ever had, I wound up handling the negotiations myself.”

Ritterpusch and Carrie Murray usually spoke by phone in the evenings, when the hour was late in Baltimore, where Ritterpusch lived. He was in bed at times, next to his wife, who was pregnant with their second child.

“Mrs. Murray and I committed to keeping our conduct with each other on the very highest plane,” Ritterpusch wrote. “Somewhere along the way, she found out that I was the son of a clergyman. Somehow this helped smooth the way. In the end, it was Eddie who wanted to sign and was ready to be a professional ballplayer. I gave him $25,500, which (Orioles GM) Frank Cashen objected to. But he relented.”

Four years later, at age 21, Murray was the American League Rookie of the Year. He wound up hitting 504 home runs and amassing 3,255 hits and 1,917 RBI during a 21-year major league career. He played 13 years with the Orioles.

Ritterpusch is understandably proud of the fact that a player he drafted became just the third major leaguer to collect at least 500 home runs and 3,000 hits, after Willie Mays and Hank Aaron.

But Ritterpusch’s favorite Murray career statistic is his .399 average when batting with the bases loaded — a clear reflection of the composure that fooled scouts decades earlier but ended up taking Murray to the Orioles and the Hall of Fame.