Edward Scott Sr. (October 17, 1917 – January 11, 2010) was an American

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding t ...

scout. Before he became the first

African-American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ensl ...

scout in the history of the

Boston Red Sox The Boston Red Sox are an American professional baseball team based in Boston. The Red Sox compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) East division. Founded in as one of the American League's eigh ...

Major League Baseball Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), ...

, Scott was a talent-spotter for the

Negro leagues The Negro leagues were United States professional baseball leagues comprising teams of African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latin Americans. The term may be used broadly to include professional black teams outside the leagues and it may be ...

, and he signed Henry Aaron, the Baseball Hall of Famer and future

home run In baseball, a home run (abbreviated HR) is scored when the ball is hit in such a way that the batter is able to circle the bases and reach home plate safely in one play without any errors being committed by the defensive team. A home run i ...

king, to Aaron's first professional contract for the

Indianapolis Clowns The Indianapolis Clowns were a professional baseball team in the Negro American League. Tracing their origins back to the 1930s, the Clowns were the last of the Negro league teams to disband, continuing to play exhibition games into the 1980s. Th ...

Early life

Scott was born in

Dade City, Florida Dade City is a city in and the county seat of Pasco County, Florida, United States. It is located in the Tampa Bay Area. The population was 6,437 at the 2010 census. Dade City is popular with tourists for its antique stores, restaurants, and ...

, but moved to Mobile, Alabama, as a young man, where he played baseball for a local, semi-professional African-American team, the Mobile Black Shippers. He worked in a paper company and barnstormed the area with his baseball team. When his playing days ended, he started scouting. The

baseball color line The color line, also known as the color barrier, in American baseball excluded players of black African descent from Major League Baseball and its affiliated Minor Leagues until 1947 (with a few notable exceptions in the 19th century before the l ...

had been broken in minor league baseball in , and in MLB the following year, by Jackie Robinson. But the 16 Major League teams were slow to integrate and the Negro Leagues were still operating when Scott's scouting career began.

Hank Aaron signing

According to Ed Scott Jr., his father discovered the teenaged Aaron playing in a Mobile

softball Softball is a game similar to baseball played with a larger ball on a smaller field. Softball is played competitively at club levels, the college level, and the professional level. The game was first created in 1887 in Chicago by George Hanc ...

game. "If that boy can hit a softball that far, how far can he hit a baseball?" his son quoted Ed Sr. as saying. He was able to sign Aaron for the Indianapolis Clowns, and by , the 18-year-old player was offered a contract by the Boston Braves. Aaron would go on to play 23 big-league seasons, and shatter (in )

Babe Ruth George Herman "Babe" Ruth Jr. (February 6, 1895 – August 16, 1948) was an American professional baseball player whose career in Major League Baseball (MLB) spanned 22 seasons, from 1914 through 1935. Nicknamed "the Bambino" and "the Su ...

's all-time record with 755 home runs over his career. (Aaron currently stands second, all time, to Barry Bonds.)

Red Sox signings

Scott spent four decades with the Red Sox as a scout, beginning in the early 1960s. Among the players he signed for Boston were George Scott (no relation),

Oil Can Boyd Dennis Ray "Oil Can" Boyd (born October 6, 1959) is a former starting pitcher in Major League Baseball. Boyd played for the Boston Red Sox (1982–1989), Montreal Expos (1990–1991), and Texas Rangers (1991). In a 10-season career, Boyd collect ...

and

Amos Otis Amos Joseph Otis (born April 26, 1947) is an American former professional baseball player and coach. He played in Major League Baseball as a center fielder from to , most prominently as an integral member of the Kansas City Royals team that won t ...

, who was drafted out of the Boston system as a minor-league prospect by the

New York Mets The New York Mets are an American professional baseball team based in the New York City borough of Queens. The Mets compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member of the National League (NL) East division. They are one of two major league ...

. Ed Scott was still listed as a scouting consultant by the Red Sox in .''Boston Red Sox 2001 Media Guide'', page 419 His son Alex also was a Boston area scout based in Mobile during the 1990s.

Personal life and death

Also an accomplished

golf Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible. Golf, unlike most ball games, cannot and does not use a standardized playing area, and coping ...

er, Scott was inducted into the Mobile Sports Hall of Fame in 2003. He died in Mobile at age 92 on January 11, 2010.

References

External links

Ed Scott profile by Negro Leagues Baseball Museum
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scott, Ed 1917 births 2010 deaths Boston Red Sox scouts Negro league baseball players Sportspeople from Mobile, Alabama 20th-century African-American sportspeople 21st-century African-American people