KANSAS CITY, Mo. — This one is personal.
The screen has been blank for 30 minutes, and the thought of keeping it that way has finally faded. This is an impossible task, I’m sure you would agree, because Art Stewart was my friend and one of the best baseball people I’ve ever known, and that description still falls woefully short.
Art had stories. Holy smokes, that man had stories. He worked 68 years in professional baseball. He stood 5-foot-6 and was the biggest man in any room he entered. Those two sentences might look like typos. They are the truth.
Art died Thursday morning at his home, peacefully. He is mourned by wife Rosemary and his daughter Dawn, along with her husband Brian, and sons David and Mark.
He is also mourned in every corner of baseball. Everyone has an Art story. Most of them involve sitting in a press box or a back field or a ballgame listening to his stories.
“I was born on Babe Ruth’s birthday, the year he hit 60 home runs,” he often said as a way of introduction to a new friend.
He presented that as proof that he was meant to be in baseball. Art was also telling you that he believed in magic. He never said that part directly, and we don’t mean rabbit-out-of-a-hat stuff, but rather that feeling a lot of us get when there’s a game in front of us.
Art lived all of his 94 years with that feeling.
Art loved “the great game,” as he always called it, and the men who played it. He loved the Yankees, who gave him his start, and he especially loved the Royals, where he led the scouting department of what was then the most successful expansion franchise in the sport’s history. He is one of the most important people to ever work for the Royals.
In many ways, he was the Royals.
Art also loved Donna Wakely. They met while scouting a player. Art never got distracted at a ballgame, but Donna was the exception. Everybody noticed her, including the scouts. One who worked for the Angels started a conversation.
“There’s only one club in baseball,” she told him. “And that’s the New York Yankees.”
That’s all Art needed to start a conversation. She knew the team in and out. She knew the player Art was there to see and broke down his strengths and weaknesses. Art liked to say she watched more baseball than anyone in the world who wasn’t paid to do it. They made a great team, married close to 50 years before cancer took her in 2008.
Art’s superpower was making others feel a bit of what he felt. He loved the game with his entire heart, without reservation or cynicism or doubt. He was so charming that once, when his rental car ran out of gas along Alligator Alley in Florida, a stranger volunteered to siphon fuel from his tractor to Art’s car using a hose and his own mouth.
“It’s gonna be a great one today,” he said a million times, and it could have been Game 5 of the 2015 World Series, when they sprayed champagne, or it could have been Game 128 in 2006 for the 100-loss Royals, when they scored 10 runs in the first and still lost.
When I close my eyes and think, the Art-iest conversation I ever had started in the Royals’ clubhouse after a loss late one night. I was down there for a story, but I quickly realized that whatever Art was talking about was more interesting than whatever my idea was.
We talked down there until the room cleared out, then went up the elevator and out the stadium, him shuffling along with a baseball-bat cane that had a ball for the handle. He was telling me about some minor league pitcher he’d seen the night before — Art drove around the country on scouting trips long after most of his peers quit doing it that way — and I just remember being in awe of his capacity to think, feel and love.
Art scouted the way he saw life, always optimistic. He liked to say he looked for the can, not the can’t. That was how he saw people and ballplayers. It’s why he signed more than 70 players who made the big leagues, including Carlos Beltran, Johnny Damon and Bo Jackson (he LOVED that story, which we’ll get to soon).
He had a career that began during Ted Williams’ prime and lasted into Mike Trout’s. He saw his first big league game on Aug. 18, 1939, the second night game ever at old Comiskey Park. Decades later, Stewart still knew the lineup from that day, and how the men in the bleachers tossed their straw hats into the air after Luke Appling homered off Bob Feller in the bottom of the 11th.
Art had stories, man.
There was the time he signed a left-handed pitcher with pinpoint control who eventually became a wife-swapper. Art’s voice always cracked when he hit the punchline: a wife-swapper! There was the time he had a great young pitcher named Jim Bouton on a summer team he coached. He scheduled a bunch of their games at prisons, just to keep the talent a secret. Bouton became an All-Star and pitched for the Yankees in two World Series, and wrote Ball Four, a ground-shaking book that told some of baseball’s juiciest secrets.
There was the time he signed a player for a stove, the time he sneaked under the staircase of a prospect’s home to hear another scout’s offer, the time he forgot his passport and sweet-talked a customs agent to see a ballplayer in Canada, and the time a scout couldn’t make a meeting with a prospect because a rival scout stole his wooden leg. That’s another one that always made Art’s voice crack.
“But you know what?” he’d say. “He just went back later and signed the kid anyway.”
Art’s favorite story might be the Bo Jackson story. I’ve spent more time than I should thinking about exactly why Art loved that story so much. To be sure: It’s a great story, involving a once-in-a-generation talent, trust, lies, corruption, patience, urgency and a narrative that shook up Major League Baseball and the NFL.
The short version is that Royals scout Ken Gonzales saw Bo early and never gave up on signing him. When he visited, Gonzales made sure to stay at the Ramada Inn where Bo’s mother worked. He found out when she took her coffee breaks and planned his day accordingly. They developed a friendship: Through multiple draft processes, Bo’s mom noticed how Gonzales always kept his word when others didn’t.
Art loved the climax of the story, when, as the Royals’ scouting director, he took the phone and announced the club’s fourth-round pick in the 1986 draft with his signature flair: “The Royals select Vincent Edward Jackson, outfielder, Auburn University, better known as Bo.”
There are times I’ve wondered if he told me so many Bo stories because he knew Bo was (is) my favorite athlete ever. But that’s selfish. There are times I’ve wondered if he told the stories so often because Bo’s signing with the Royals was so unexpected, and so consequential. But that’s not right, either.
I’ve become convinced that Art loved the Bo stories because they combined all of his favorite things — imagination-bending talent, dogged and honest scouting, a happy ending for his franchise and, as much as anything else, a chance to celebrate another scout.
Art had a showman’s flair, but he was never about himself. Always about baseball first, and those who make it great.
Scouting is a hard way to earn a living — all of the driving, all of the waiting, all of the disappointment. It’s an even harder way to become well-known outside of specific circles.
That was never Art’s intention, but the way he reflected the sport and shared his passion left no choice. He’s the only scout in the Royals Hall of Fame. He is one of the most important people in the franchise’s history, and almost certainly the most beloved.
Here’s an Art story that won’t leave. After Donna died, Art was in a bad way. His face lost color. His voice flattened. He tried to tell some of the old stories, but they lacked feeling. Friends worried. I worried. He still had baseball, but baseball wasn’t the same without Donna.
I saw him a year or so later, and it was like a time machine. He looked younger. Sounded vibrant. The stories had punch. I told him what I noticed — what was obvious — and he told one of the most incredible stories I’ve ever heard. Of all of Art’s stories — and he had them all — this was the best.
It was about a girl.
This was New Year’s Eve, 1958 turning into 1959. He’d met this woman at a small Lutheran church in downtown Chicago, and right away they both felt it. Art took her to My Fair Lady at the Schubert Theater, and right there in the the middle of the crowd, walking out of the show, he proposed. She said yes.
They told their families, set the date, made invitations. They even reserved the church, that same small Lutheran church where they’d met. Then, a month or so before the wedding, they felt something different. He was 31. She was 19. Too young for a man who lived Art’s life, always on the road. They put off the wedding. Set a new date. Then another. Deep down, they knew this was the breakup.
Not too long after that, Donna Wakely told an Angels scout that there was only one club in baseball, and that’s the New York Yankees.
Fast-forward nearly 50 years. Art is in Chicago, visiting his daughter. He goes to that small Lutheran church for the first time since he planned that wedding. He sees Rosemary. Yes: Her name was Rosemary. They recognized each other immediately, even after all that time. They felt it again, even after all that time.
Some of you might know that I wrote a book with Art. Maybe I should’ve mentioned that earlier, but if I’m honest, I didn’t really write a book with Art. What I did was talk with Art, laugh with Art, even cry with Art. And then I wrote down what he said. Nobody will ever write an easier book or enjoy the process more.
I read through some of my favorite parts of that book this week after hearing the news. I smiled when I read how he signed it — Thanks a million for telling the story so perfect and being such a good friend through all these years.
I cried when I read the end of Chapter 19:
“I’ve worked in the game I fell in love with as a boy for more than 60 years. I’ve loved two franchises, and now I’ve loved two women. I couldn’t have imagined this life.”
