Half his nights end in a hotel, thanks to a job others think they’d love. They only see the hook that snagged him: attending baseball games. He also knows his job as a baseball scout entails much more.
It’s the part friends or others rarely see. It’s the nightly phone calls from associate scouts or cross-checkers or parents of potential draft picks or a coach touting a player. It’s the nearly 40,000 miles he puts on his car every year. It’s the reports he must file. It’s the missed family life.
“The phone never stops ringing this time of the year,” said Bill Buck’s wife, Patsy. “It is stressful. … I tease Bill and tell our friends that we’ve been married for almost 17 years because he travels so much.”
For Buck, a Manassas resident and longtime area scout with the Detroit Tigers, this is also the busiest time of the year. Now he’ll find out if any of the players he scouted will be drafted Thursday.
Buck is on the road several days a week, sometimes for a week to 10 days, during the baseball season. Besides the Washington, D.C. region, he’s responsible for New York, Connecticut, Eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware and sometimes Massachusetts and the Carolinas.
“I have more guys [to see] than I have days,” said Buck, who has driven as many as 50,000 miles in a year.
Occasionally, he’ll see two games in a day, though in the northeast, where night baseball is rare, that’s difficult.
He’ll attend college league games during the summer. There’s the Commonwealth games in July, as well as high school showcase games each August. And colleges have scout days.
“Not many kids will slip through the cracks,” said Buck, a scout since 1986. “If I do my job right, I don’t have to run around looking for names come February.”
The Internet and global positioning systems have helped make his job easier. But he still sleeps approximately 180 nights a year in a hotel. That can be tough when you have a wife and 12-year-old daughter. They’ll accompany him on some summer scouting trips; and he chats with his wife several times a day when he travels. He shuttles his daughter around in the offseason, but once colleges start playing in February, he’s gone again.
“Sometimes I feel I should be at home and help [his wife] be the disciplinarian,” Buck said. “But I don’t want to come home and chew her out for something she did three days ago. I probably disrupt their life more when I come home.”
There is one nice perk: hotel reward points. He cashes them in to buy CDs or for free nights at a hotel on family trips.
“I may as well use them,” he said. “They regenerate daily.”
