Coach: The storied life of Don Welke

Don Welke, a central figure on the Rangers’ scouting and player development team in the years leading to the franchise’s two American League pennants, died Wednesday night in San Diego. He had been the Padres’ Vice President of Scouting Operations for just over four years, following nine seasons with Texas, most of which were spent as Senior Special Assistant to General Manager Jon Daniels.

Welke, who would have turned 76 today, is survived by two daughters and a son.

Known to friends and those in the industry as “Coach,” Welke originally joined the Rangers in 2005, shortly after the Rangers had hired A.J. Preller from the Dodgers. Welke had been with the Dodgers from 1999 through 2004, mentoring Preller during that time. When the Padres hired Preller as their General Manager in August of 2014, he requested permission to bring Welke with him. It’s unusual for executives leaving one organization for another to take colleagues with them for at least a year or two, but Texas, out of respect for a man with half a century in the game, did not stand in Welke’s way.

A native of Harvard, Illinois (who was quick to tell unsuspecting folks, with a smile, that he had a Harvard education), Welke attended Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, playing baseball and basketball, after which he pursued a graduate degree from Eastern Michigan University. While at EMU, he also served as a graduate assistant with the baseball team. Thereafter, he had a six-year run as the baseball coach at Concordia College in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during which time he also helped coach the basketball team.

But before that, he started scouting. The Reds hired Welke to scout the Midwest United States for baseball players while he was at EMU. Once he landed the job at Concordia, he scouted the same region for the Royals. In 1977, he left coaching to devote his career to scouting on a full-time basis. He joined the expansion Toronto Blue Jays that year, working for GM Pat Gillick. It was a relationship that would span decades.

Welke was with Toronto from 1977 to 1995, earning World Series rings in 1992 and 1993. While with the Blue Jays, he was instrumental in the signings of John Olerud, Dave Stieb, and Pat Hentgen, and urged Gillick to use a Round 36 pick in 1985 on a one-handed high school pitcher from Michigan named Jim Abbott. Toronto made the pick but didn’t sign the player. Three years later, Abbott was an early first-round pick of the Angels, and went on to notch a third-place finish in the 1991 AL Cy Young vote and win 87 big league games.

Gillick, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, moved on to the Orioles in 1996. Welke went with him, spending four seasons in Baltimore before joining the Dodgers in 1999.

After his first year with the Rangers in 2005, Welke left to join Gillick for his first season as general manager in Philadelphia. Welke returned to Texas for the 2007 season, where he remained until departing with Preller in 2014. His relationship in the game with Preller has been nearly as lengthy as it was with Gillick. Here the two discuss a scout’s DNA, which one fostered in the other.

During his time with the Rangers, Welke was pivotal in the acquisitions of Adrian Beltre (whom he’d been around during his own time with Los Angeles), Elvis Andrus and Neftali Feliz, Josh Hamilton, Jurickson Profar, and Yu Darvish. In 2011, Welke was recognized by the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation with the Legends in Scouting Award, and at the Winter Meetings in 2012, he was honored by his peers in the industry as the Midwest Scout of the Year.

The Rangers, for years, have honored one of their scouts with the Don Welke Scout of the Year Award at their annual dinner, presenting the winner with a signature (and garish) red blazer in honor of Welke, a vocal fan of Louisville basketball.

Daniels offered his thoughts on behalf of the Rangers on Thursday:  “It’s a tough day for a lot of people in the game, and certainly with the Rangers. Coach was a pivotal influence on our organization and many of us individually. He helped us bring in some of the best players in our history. But more importantly, he helped create the culture of competitiveness and desire to think big that has fueled us. On a personal note, he was big in my own development, and a dear friend and mentor. He lived life on his own terms. I’ll miss his quirks and passion for people.”

Preller issued his own statement on Thursday as well: “Don had a tremendous career in baseball, both as a talent evaluator and in the relationships that he built. He was a visionary who knew and loved baseball, and he shared that knowledge and passion with me and countless other scouts throughout his five decades in the game. Beyond his accomplishments, Don was a loyal and generous friend. Everyone whose lives he touched were better for having known him.”

The Athletic’s Jayson Stark captured Coach’s presence perfectly on Thursday afternoon:

When I saw Don Welke at a ballpark, he reminded me of that guy who runs everybody's favorite restaurant in your town – because every single person in the park was happy to see him. And he knew everyone's name. And everyone's story.

A true baseball character. And wonderful man. https://t.co/TsRqTWAnoL

— Jayson Stark (@jaysonst) September 20, 2018

Welke was a storyteller, a decorated scout, and a true baseball man.

On a personal note, like so many whose paths crossed with his, even occasionally, I was fortunate to have the opportunity, here and there, to stand outside a chain-link fence at a baseball field with Coach. It was impossible not to learn something about the game every time you were around him.

When he left the Rangers four years ago to follow Preller to San Diego, I wrote the following story for the Newberg Report. I wanted to share it here. And if I had a red blazer, I’d probably put it on today. Just not in public.

“We need Don more than you do.”

So said Jon Daniels, a year into his job and casting an eye toward the 2007 teardown season, to Pat Gillick, the 25-year GM whose well-stocked Phillies were about to embark on a five-year playoff run. Gillick, who had Don Welke with him for 21 of those seasons, let Welke decide whether to make it 22, or to return to the Rangers, with whom he’d spent 2005 before joining the Phillies in 2006.

We know what Welke decided then, and given that history, it can hardly be a surprise that A.J. Preller, whose 13 years (with the exception of that 2006 season) in scouting have been with Welke, first with the Dodgers and then in Texas, would make the same suggestion to Daniels that Daniels had made to Gillick, or that Daniels, like Gillick, would pay things forward and let Welke decide.

Or that Welke would choose the bigger challenge, and the chance to continue to work with Preller, whom he described to Scott Miller (Fox Sports San Diego) last week as the “brightest young guy I’ve ever seen in my 47 years of scouting,” the prodigy who convinced Daniels to bring the mentor over from Los Angeles shortly after he’d arrived to join his college roommate himself.

There’s really no surprise here, other than the exception Daniels clearly made to what everyone is reporting as a two-year freeze on Preller’s ability to hire anyone employed in that time by the Rangers — until you think about the above, and that’s when you realize that the surprise would have been if Daniels had treated Don Welke differently from how Gillick did eight years ago, with unmitigated respect for the revered baseball lifer and what he wanted to do with his career at this point.

And with that, “Coach” was named on Tuesday as the San Diego Padres’ Vice President of Scouting Operations.

I’ll miss the scouting stories and the excessively red Louisville-issue blazer and that laugh and his description of the batting practice sound off certain bats as “not normal” and the million-dollar bills and, man, seriously, those scouting stories.

And the sartorial flair, the aptitude for harsh outfits, about which Thad Levine once told Richard Durrett: “It’s cutting edge. He’s not encumbered by what’s current, hip, or what fits.”

I read all those accounts of Coach and Preller, back when the latter was getting his full-time start in the game 11 years ago, hitting Jerry’s Famous Deli or Pantry Café in Los Angeles and talking baseball until 5 in the morning, and I’m just as unsuspicious of the truth of those stories as I am completely envious.

I’ve spent one-thousandth of the time around Coach that Preller has, and I still feel like I’ve learned more about baseball — about ability and about makeup and chemistry and the drive to compete and about building something — from him than just about everyone else I’ve run across, combined.

With Coach, you could learn plenty about “who” — he had his fingerprints all over key trade acquisitions (Josh Hamilton and Elvis Andrus and Neftali Feliz) and impact free agent signings (Adrian Beltre and very nearly Zack Greinke) and certain draft picks (Tanner Scheppers and Robbie Ross) and international kids (Yu Darvish and Martin Perez and Jurickson Profar and Jorge Alfaro) — but if you listened intently enough, it was impossible not to absorb tons about “why.”

A bunch of us made a father-son trip to Surprise in March, and we ran into Coach on his golf cart, seconds after Shin-Soo Choo had leaned over for a 10-minute talk with him, and after Nomar Mazara had swooped in to give him a hug, and after any number of uniformed instructors and trainers and scouts in floppy hats and chinos had leaned in for a quick handshake. Seeing Max, Coach probably made some instant reference to something they’d talked about three years earlier, and then he met four of Max’s friends, after which, this:

Preston, what’s the best thing about Jake’s game?

Max, what does Dominic do well?

Landry, is Max telling the truth?

Courtesy of John Payne

There’s really no reason that should seem unusually cool to you, but the whole idea of Coach making those boys think about the game and about a level someone else plays it at that’s worth shooting for and subtly encouraging them to appreciate and respect the game rather than trash-talk their own place in it — in the smallest moment — resonated with me and four other dads.

The story about Coach looking over the Braves official’s scorecard and asking who the catcher was, when he really just wanted to steal a glance at the name of that lanky pitcher throwing the easy gas (“Feliz”), and the Hamilton stories and the John Olerud stories and the Jim Abbott stories and the Durrett stories he told us a week ago (“his sister-in-law wouldn’t give me any dirt on the guy . . . not one usable tidbit . . . I mean c’mon!!”) and the story about Coach holding a baseball in one hand and a football in the other and simply asking Jordan Akins, “Which one?” — and looking not so much for the verbal response but the conviction behind it — those will always resonate, too.

Texas in one hand, and San Diego in the other.

Which one?

And then, weeks away from his 72nd birthday, the convicted decision to chase the challenge and to follow the man who has been like a son to him, and not in some hackneyed sense of the word.

When Texas traded for Hamilton, one of the things that had Coach pounding his fist on the table for him was a sense that the 26-year-old “had something to prove.” It was a recurring theme, as the Rangers noted that Beltre and Mike Napoli and Joe Nathan, among other veterans brought in to boost the roster, had never won a title. It would stand to reason that they were hungry. Had something to prove.

Does Coach have something to prove? Not really. But he’ll never not be hungry to build a winner, and though the ring narrowly eluded him in Texas (he has two, from the 1992 and 1993 Blue Jays), the challenge is greater in San Diego. It’s certainly not the prevailing reason he’s moving on, but surely that hunger factored in.

Would Darvish or Beltre or Hamilton or Perez be here if Don Welke hadn’t been? Most of us will never know that. But his influence was felt all over this organization in what has been its absolute heyday, from the standpoint of talent inventory and acquisition geography and hardware, and just as losing A.J. Preller isn’t a good thing even if the franchise remains extremely healthy without him, seeing Coach move on to another club to do his thing, with all the relationships he’s built around the game and all the wisdom and judgment and ability to evaluate he shares, is certainly not something that, in and of itself, makes you stronger.

Players moving on is how the world of pro sports works.

Deserving young executives changing organizations to find opportunity happens all the time.

But when a wise old scout leaves — and make no mistake, the scout’s “beisbol solamente” life is the most itinerant life imaginable to begin with — I suppose it shouldn’t shake you, but this one’s different for me. This one’s personal.

Sure, this will be Coach’s eighth organization in his nearly 50 years in the game. But Texas is where he spent the most time aside from one (Toronto, which he joined as an expansion club) and, more importantly as far as I’m concerned, it’s my team he’s leaving.

I feel like I learned a whole lot about baseball just being around Coach a little bit the last 10 years, and then I think about all the scouts and baseball operations folks in Texas who were around him nearly every single day, and it’s for that reason that I’m confident that the Rangers will be fine in his absence. His legacy includes dozens of players, from Kentucky to Japan, and Colombia to Mission Viejo, but it also includes the talent evaluators and advisors and coaches and, to be sure, a President & General Manager who brought him to Texas in the first place (and the second).

Ask anyone in the Rangers front office to identify the word that, when it comes out of Don Welke’s mouth in discussing a kid to draft or a free agent to chase or a veteran to trade for at just the right time, makes everyone stop down, and they will all agree: The word is “special.”

Yu Darvish. Adrian Beltre. Josh Hamilton.

Special.

Don Welke, too. Maybe it’s true that today, as opposed to eight years ago, they need Don more than we do, and I’m happy for him that he’ll get to keep working with Preller and that he’ll get to try and help redefine a franchise that hasn’t seen 162+ since 2006 and that hasn’t won a playoff series of any type since 1998. I’m confident that he’ll help San Diego do special things once again.

And I’m thankful for the nine seasons he spent in Texas, and the times in that span that I was fortunate enough for our paths to cross, every one of which deepened my appreciation of the game and my passion for it, not to mention my respect for the people who so uniquely help make it what it is, especially those who you’d realize in short order are special, and not normal.

Our thanks to Kelly Gavin and the Rangers for the excellent photos of Welke. The lead photo features him with Josh Boyd and Scot Engler.