"Elco Sandlot Star Still Scouting Around"

Your Humble, Faithful Blogster has two feature articles in the Mon Valley section of today's Tribune-Review. Neither, however, is on the newspaper's website. I will blog them, until (unless) they show up on-line at the Trib. (I didn't notice any substantive changes to either from what I had submitted.) This is the first.

It’s Spring. And that means baseball.

From tee-ball leagues to the majors, teams have been formed, and players have been practicing for weeks, and the games are underway. Coaches have sized up their roster, figuring out who will work best in which position. And the scouts, too, have already been sizing up the players.

Tony Segzda, of Elco, has been travelling the ins and outs of baseball for seven decades. First, he played as a boy in pick-up games, then as a star high-school pitcher who went on to play seven seasons with minor-league teams in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ farm system. Now, he’s a part-time scout for the Baltimore Orioles.

Growing up in Crescent Heights, West Pike Run Township, Segzda started playing baseball when he was five or six.

“They didn’t have Little League back then, of course. You just played with a bunch of kids,” he points out.

By the time he was a senior in high school, Segzda had become a star attraction for California’s team. “When I was a freshman,” he notes, “they didn’t have baseball because of the war. They started it again when I was a sophomore.”

His sister-in-law Linda Barli, of Dunlevy, recalls those days. “Tony and Eddie Roebuck would have pitching duels. Eddie played for Brownsville,” she explains, “and when their two teams were playing each other, people would go to the game just to see which pitcher was going to win.”

Roebuck went on to have an 11-year career in the majors, starting with the Dodgers in 1955.

The day after his high-school graduation in 1947, the Boston Braves (now in Atlanta) took Segzda to Pittsburgh to work out with them. He was somewhat concerned when they quickly asked him to come off the field.

“It was a really, really short workout. I didn’t even break a sweat,” he remembers.

But they had already decided to ask him to go with the team to Cincinnati for a week.

“I don’t know if my parents will let me go,” he recalls having to say. But a telephone call got their approval to do whatever he wanted.

After a week with the Braves in Cincinnati, and another five days working out with one of their minor-league teams, he got a contract offer. But he decided to go back home and wait on word of a Penn State scholarship he thought might be coming his way.

Shortly, he pitched a no-hit shutout in an American Legion game. The very next day, Segzda remembers, a local Pirates scout came knocking on his door, offering him a contract. His contact for the scholarship possibility was away on vacation, so he decided not to pass up the chance with the Pirates’ organization.

Except for the 1952 season, when he was in the Army, he played for several of the Pirates’ farm clubs over the next eight years: he started in Uniontown, went as far west as Waco and as far south as New Orleans, and finally ended his minor-league career in Williamsport in 1954.

“After that, they released me – though others might say ‘fired’,” he grins.

He came back home and got a job with Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel in Monessen, where he worked until early retirement in 1986. He played semi-pro ball on a couple of local teams for a couple of seasons, last playing in 1956.

“That league finally folded,” he said, “because the bottom teams couldn’t compete, and the top teams couldn’t afford the players any more.”

A chance meeting in 1987 got Segzda back into the sport professionally in a different capacity.

His brother-in-law, Roy Barli, had been a starting freshman on California High School’s team during Segzda’s senior year. Barli ran into the scouting director for the Baltimore Orioles at a Valentine’s Day dance at the Charleroi Elks. Fred Uhlman, a 1948 Charleroi graduate, had played against Segzda in their high-school days.

“Tony was a very good pitcher,” Uhlman remembers. “He had a good fastball and a good curveball. Every team in the area had some good pitching back then, but he was at the top.”

Uhlman and Segzda had later played together in the minors – sometimes on the same team, sometimes against each other. On that February night, he asked Barli what Segzda was doing those days.

“The mill is closing down,” he replied, “so he won’t be doing anything.”

Thereupon, Uhlman provided his phone number at Memorial Park in Baltimore, with the request that Segzda give him a call.

“At that time, I was recommending scouts,” Ulhman says. “And I knew that Tony would be a good one, because of his experience and his concern for the game.”

At first, Segzda thought he’d be scouting for a year or two. And his wife, Mary Alice, says, “Every year, he thinks this could be his last year.”

But he’s spending his nineteenth season travelling as far north as Erie, as far east as Harrisburg, and sometimes to the northern reaches of West Virginia and Maryland.

His next-door neighbor, Chuck Gismondi, coached baseball at California University of Pennsylvania from 1973 to 1996. Gismondi considers it a privilege to have been invited along on scouting trips with Segzda and a local scout for the Dodgers, the late Don “Ducky” LeJohn, who had played for the Los Angeles team in 1965.

“I learned more baseball sitting in the car with them than anywhere else. And Tony has an uncanny knack,” he continues, “to project what a player will be able to do five years down the road.”

Rick Krivda is a Cal U graduate whom Segzda recruited for the Oriole’s farm system in 1991. Krivda was his first recruit to make it to a major-league club, starting with the Orioles in 1995.

“Krivda was my best player ever,” Gismondi says. “Only a handful of scouts were interested in him. So, a lot of scouts were wrong about him, but Tony was right.”

What does Segzda look for in a young player? “I look for these. Can he hit? Can he hit with power? Does he run fast? Does he have a strong, accurate arm? And does he have quick feet and soft hands?”

A player with “soft” hands is good at holding onto the ball once he gloves it, rather than having it bounce out.

“We call somebody with all of those a ‘five-tool’ player,” he continues. “Now, he doesn’t have to have all of them to be really good. But if he does, he’s a terrific looking ball player.”

How has the game changed since he played?

“If a pitcher was doing good, he stayed in the whole ballgame,” Segzda remembers. “Today, they put a limit, especially on the younger ones. They’ll bring in a set-up guy in the eighth inning, and a closer in the ninth, even if the starting pitcher is doing really good.”

“And nowadays,” he continues, “the manager stands in the dugout giving signs to the catcher to give to the pitcher. I wonder if the managers these days think they’re smarter than before, or think the players aren’t as smart as they used to be.”

Segzda was inducted into the Big-Ten Fayette County Baseball Hall of Fame in 1986, the Trojan Booster Club (California, PA) Hall of Fame in 1991, and the American Legion, Department of Pennsylvania, Sports Hall of Fame in 2001.

His Big-Ten citation reads as follows: “His playing ability has gained for him a berth among the greatest sandlot players of all time.”

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sun. 05/22/05 09:06:18 PM
Categorized as E.L. Core @ The Tribune-Review.