Cheating talk steams scout who hit home run with Howard

It wasn't like the Phillies had only one guy watching Howard -- Scott and Brian Kohlscheen, the club's Central Regional Supervisor, saw him, too.

But for Lafferty, it became a mission, and he continued bird-dogging Howard, who grew into his cleats during his first couple of years of college.

Once, after watching the kid take a round of batting practice at Southwest Missouri State, Lafferty turned to a San Diego Padres scout named Dan Smith and said, "I wish this was the old days of scouting. I'd give this kid $1 million right now and put him in my car and take him to Philadelphia."

Another time, he was observing Howard during a fall session in the batting cage at the school when one of Howard's good friends at the time, a pitcher, stopped by and began to crack some jokes. Howard calmly laid down his bat, walked to the back of the cage and told his friend, "Hey, would you shut up? I'm trying to work today."

"It was a nice fall day, and nothing was going on," Lafferty recalls. "It was just another day of practice."

And another piece of information about the kid's character that the old scout filed away.

But as Howard struggled badly during his junior year of college -- Arbuckle supposes now that the kid had a bad case of "draft-itis" while fretting over where he might be picked -- many of the scouts watching him began to fade away. Lafferty was one who didn't.

"I guess the fastest way to say it is that the Moneyball scouts walked away from him," Lafferty says. "They walked away from him real quick. I'm a dinosaur guy. Tools mean a lot. Give me an athlete with tools, and I'll take those every day over numbers."

Much of the time, it has been successful for him. Meticulous as an elementary school teacher, Lafferty has had a hand in helping to deliver such players to the Phillies over the years as Darren Daulton, Andy Ashby, Steve Jeltz, Jeff Stone and, most recently, catcher Tim Gradoville. And it means the world to him.

"I work for what I think is the premier organization in all of baseball," Lafferty says. "Naturally, I'm prejudiced. But ... I've been treated royally by the people in the Philadelphia organization."

Says Wolever, chuckling: "He bleeds Phillies red."

Speaking of which, this fall, in a nice touch, Lafferty and Arbuckle -- along with longtime Phillies exec Lee Thomas -- will be inducted together into the Greater Major League Scouts of the Midwest Hall of Fame. In one of those quirky little baseball stories, Lafferty and Arbuckle -- who is four years younger than Lafferty -- were born in the same hospital and were raised in Trenton, Mo., a tiny town of 6,000.

The odds of two guys from a tiny farm community town both being employed by the same big-league organization have to be smaller than, what? That organization scooping up a guy who is turning out as well as Howard with the 140th overall pick, perhaps?

Come draft day, having eyeballed Howard since the kid's sophomore year in high school, you bet Lafferty badgered Wolever and the gang in the Phillies' draft room.

When it was time to make the club's fifth-round choice, Lafferty recalls Wolever saying something to the effect of, "Wait a minute, the fifth-round is long enough. Jerry's been jumping up and down and screaming."

Said Lafferty: "Him and Mike Arbuckle are the ones who pulled the trigger. I'm just the guy that yelled and screamed about him. I've yelled and screamed about a lot of guys. This time, they listened."

And after they did, and after Howard signed, the old scout then did pretty much what it is that he does.

"I told Ryan, 'When I walk out that door, you have a chance to be a multi-million dollar player,'" Lafferty says. "I told him, 'I'm going to a park to see another first baseman. If you don't pan out, it's my job to find another first baseman.'"

Because the park was in Howard's neighborhood, and because it was his college coach, Keith Guttin, who had recommended another possible jewel for the old scout to check out, Howard joined Lafferty and Guttin part of the way through the game.

Funny thing, too -- just as Howard walked up to them, the first baseman recommended by Guttin smashed a homer over the center-field fence.

Lafferty immediately turned to Howard and said, "See, I told you."

So from that point on, each time Lafferty would bump into Howard or his father over the years, the joke would be the same: The old scout would tell them that he was on his way to check out another first baseman.

Until last winter.

At a banquet at which the kid received a Rookie of the Year award, he acknowledged Lafferty out in the crowd. And do you know what he did? Stole the old scout's line.

"My scout is here," Howard told the crowd. "But he has to leave, because he's working on another first baseman."