Gary Hughes (scout)

Gary Hughes

• School San Jose State University
• High School St. Matthew Catholic School, Junipero Serra High School

• Born February 2, 1941
• Died September 19, 2020 in Santa Cruz, CA USA

Biographical Information

Gary Hughes spent over 45 years in baseball. His son Sam Hughes has been a scout, while another son, Michael Rock, worked for the Florida Marlins and Miami Marlins as their clubhouse manager starting with the team's foundation in 1992; as of 2020, he was the team's longest-tenured employee.

He was a high school teammate of Jim Fregosi and Tim Cullen but never played professional baseball. His first job in baseball was serving as baseball coach at Marin Catholic High School in Kentfield, CA from 1964 to 1972, while starting to work as a major league scout on the side.

Hughes worked, as a scout or executive, for the San Francisco Giants (1967-1972), New York Mets (1973-1976), Seattle Mariners (1977), New York Yankees (1978-1985), Montreal Expos (1986-1991), Florida Marlins (1992-1998), Colorado Rockies (1999) and Cincinnati Reds (2000-2002). He was a special assistant to the general manager of the Chicago Cubs from 2002-2011 then moved to the Boston Red Sox, and finally to the Arizona Diamondbacks after long-time friend David Dombrowski's departure in 2019. He was scouting director for the Yankees, Expos and Marlins, and assistant General Manager for the Marlins, Rockies and Reds. Baseball America named him one of the top 10 scouts of the 20th Century. He signed Brad Arnsberg, Delino DeShields, John Elway, Kevin Millar, Mike Redmond, Greg Colbrunn, Cliff Floyd, Marquis Grissom, Rex Hudler and Rondell White among many others. He also scouted Tom Brady as a baseball player, getting the Expos to draft him, before Brady turned his attention full-time to football, and completed the trifecta of future NFL stars by signing future Pro Bowler John Lynch as a pitcher when he worked for the Marlins.

He has been called "the greatest scout of all time" and was a founder of the Professional Baseball Scouting Foundation, helping those in the profession who had lost their jobs when many teams began to lay off scouts in the early 21st Century in order to devote more resources to analytics. He had long advocated for the Hall of Fame to dedicate a special wing to honor scouts. He was inducted in the Professional Baseball Scouts Hall of Fame in 2009 and received the Baseball America lifetime achievement award in 2007.

He was diagnosed with liver cancer in June of 2020 and died at home that September, aged 79.

Sources

• 2011 Cubs Media Guide

Further Reading

• Evan Drellich: "Red Sox hire veteran scout Hughes", mlb.com, February 2, 2010. [1]
• Bob Nightengale: "Late Gary Hughes was the Babe Ruth of the baseball scouting world", USA Today, September 19, 2020. [2]
• Tracy Ringolsby: "Scout reminisces about signing Elway, Lynch: Veteran baseball executive renowned for signing multi-sport athletes", mlb.com February 6, 2016. [3]
• Tracy Ringolsby: "Meetings a family affair for scout Hughes, sons", mlb.com, December 11, 2017. [4]

Related Sites

• Obituary from Associated Press