Scout Who Signed Pujols Now Works At Wal-Mart

[ThomasTomasz]

Dave Karaff misses the nomadic life of a baseball scout. Instead of sitting behind home plate at dusty ball fields across the Midwest, aiming his stopwatch and speed gun at hot prospects, Karaff spends his days stocking the grocery shelves at a Wal-Mart in Hot Springs Village, Ark.

The St. Louis Cardinals may have dismissed him as an area scout three years ago, but Karaff will forever be linked with one nugget of baseball history.

He's the scout who signed Albert Pujols.

As Pujols has amassed one of the most prodigious first six seasons of any player in major-league history, Karaff tunes in Cardinals games from his home on the second fairway of Balboa Golf Club and can only smile.

It was Karaff, a former baseball coach at Hickman Hills High School and area scout for the Cardinals, who filed the reports on Pujols, a hulking shortstop at Fort Osage High School in Independence and Maple Woods Community College, and signed him in 1999 after St. Louis took him in the 13th round of the June draft.

"I felt he was going to be successful, but I didn't know how successful," Karaff said. "I don't think there's any way we could have seen all these things."

Incredibly, Karaff had one reservation about Pujols.

"My one fear was whether he was going to hit, if you can believe that," Karaff said. "If we all felt he could hit consistently, he would have been a first rounder and got his $3 million bonus.

"He still does some of the things that I feared, but he has the ability to make adjustments, and that's something I never saw. When you watch him, when he's going bad, he's out on that front foot . . . He was a power guy, he had great hands, great arm. I felt he could play third base."

Apparently, Karaff was not alone in his evaluation. Though Karaff didn't rate Pujols as a third- or fourth-round pick, he considered him better than a 13th rounder. So as the draft progressed, Mike Roberts, a Cardinals scouting supervisor armed with Karaff's reports, spoke up on Pujols' behalf.

"He was in the board room and said, `Wait a minute, we've got to start looking at this guy,' " Karaff said. "This guy has strength. That is something you never let get by."

The Cardinals agreed, but Pujols, who still had another year of eligibility at Maple Woods, was so disappointed with being the 402nd player taken in the draft, he turned down a $10,000 signing bonus and played summer ball for the Hays Larks of the amateur Jayhawk League. Finally, the Cardinals came up with nearly $60,000 and signed him in time for the 2000 season.

"The Cardinals were lucky," Karaff said. "The other clubs, I don't know what they were thinking. People asked, `Where was he going to play?' People talked about him as a catcher. Hindsight is great. You can ask any scout . . . I know of one club, maybe two, where the area scout had him rated up there, but he went for a workout and didn't perform well.

"He didn't turn me on at first. In high school, we used to have those tryout camps before Legion tournaments, and he came one time and had trouble swinging a wooden bat. And he was heavy."

Once Pujols signed with the Cardinals, he stormed through one minor-league season, won a spot on the big-league roster in spring training 2001 and became National League rookie of the year in 2001, batting champion in 2003 and MVP in 2005.

Karaff, meanwhile, was let go by the Cardinals in a 2003 shakeup of the Cardinals' scouting department.

"He said I wasn't going to make the big leagues," Pujols said, laughing, in the Cardinals clubhouse. "That's why he got fired."

Not exactly.

"We made some decisions to go into a different direction in our scouting," said Cardinals general manager Walt Jocketty. "We rearranged some of our scouts, we let a few go, we hired a few ones, and Dave was a casualty of that restructure of our scouting. There were some scouts who were less productive than others."

But how could they release the scout who signed Albert Pujols? Who could be more productive than that?

"In the old days, that wouldn't have happened, and I wouldn't have wanted to keep a job just because I signed Albert Pujols," said Karaff, who also signed pitcher Braden Looper, the Cardinals' first-round pick from Wichita State in 1996, among others. "I don't think I was that bad a scout to lose my job."

In 2001, Karaff had moved to Hot Springs, near the home of his wife, Jannette, and for the next two years, he covered his territory from there. After Karaff was fired by the Cardinals, he tried to retire but needed insurance benefits, so he took the job at Wal-Mart.

"I'd love to have gotten back into scouting," said Karaff, 64. "I miss it. You get excited about seeing kids who you think could really play."

And none he saw has turned out better than Albert Pujols.

"I'm proud of the fact that I have an association with him," Karaff said. "What makes me feel best is he's a great kid. After he got to the big leagues, we had meetings in St. Louis, and I asked him what his first thought was when he walked in there. He said, "Dave, I knew I'd be here.' "

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunhera...l/14646725.htm

[Giants666]

Man that' ****ing sad! There's no way he should be working at wal-mart.

[Dry1313]

It really is sad. But it sorta makes it look like he just got lucky. His other notable was Braden Looper, who sucks ass.

[Kingdom]

3.42 ERA does not suck ass.