Stan had been a Cubs area scout since 2001. He started with the Expos in 1979 where he drafted Cliff Floyd. Baseball lost a good man today. Stan was the best.

Cliff Floyd had a long career.

Stan Zielinski, the auto parts king.

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"All crowds boycotting football games shouldn't care who sings or takes a knee because they aren't watching." - Nas

Another really good article about Stan the Man.

http://atmlb.com/2jxlnqZ

He and his brother Ray ruled the industry!

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The Cubs are honoring Stan before Sunday nights game and presenting his family with his WS ring. Good move by them.

Dan McGrath

I got blank stares or roll-the-eyes indifference from our Leo Lions baseball players when I spoke of Quinn Buckner, Boyd Batts and other exemplars of the Thornridge Falcons' legacy as a sports power when Leo traveled to Thornridge High for a ballgame this season.

These kids today. Live totally in the moment.


I mean, it was only 45 years ago that Thornridge was easily most renowned sports school in all of Illinois, I grumped as I took a seat in the metal bleachers along the first-base line. The press box atop the football grandstand beyond the fence in right-center field brought me back a mere eight years, to 2009, when one of my favorite people in baseball told me one of his favorite stories.

Cliff Floyd was a senior at neighboring Thornwood High in 1991, and as Midwest area scout for the Montreal Expos, Stan Zielinski had the left-handed slugger on his radar. At 18, Floyd had a big leaguer's body — 6-foot-5 and 220 pounds — and he had demonstrated light-tower power, probably the most precious tool among the five scouts are trained to identify.


Stan persuaded an Expos crosschecker to come have a look, but he wasn't impressed after Floyd managed a couple of singles against unimposing pitching.

"Big, strong kid," he said. "But the swing's a little long, and if the bat looks slow against high school pitching …"

At Stan's urging, the crosschecker came back for a second look, at a conference game at Thornridge on a cold, damp, hitter-unfriendly spring day.

"I don't think we're going to see many homers today," the man grumped as he and Stan settled into their bleacher seats and tried to stay warm. Barely had he finished speaking before Floyd got hold of one and drove it off the press box atop the football grandstand beyond right-center field, a majestic shot that traveled more than 500 feet.

Nobody bothered to track exit velocity or launch angle or any of the other complicated metrics that have baseball resembling astrophysics these days. No need. A high school player who can hit a ball that far ...

"Well, Stan, I see what you mean," the supervisor said. A few weeks later the Expos took Floyd with their first-round pick, No. 14 overall, in the 1991 amateur draft, and he went on to play 17 big-league seasons.

Stan recounted that story before the 2009 draft, as I followed him around for a story on cold-weather scouting. The premise: A scout working the Midwest or Northeast has to project a prospect's value based on three or four viewings, whereas a scout in the warm-weather environs of Florida, Arizona or California has year-round access.

Stan had moved to the Cubs in 2001, at the behest of old friend Jim Hendry, who regarded Stan as one of the best "projectors" working. The Theo Epstein regime concurred, retaining him after taking over Cubs baseball operations in 2011. Three years later, Stan sold them on another cold-weather, left-handed bopper who was Floyd's polar opposite as a body type, but possessed the same light-tower power that justified investing the fourth pick of the 2014 draft.

If it's possible for a text to convey pure pride and joy, Zielinski's messages did as Kyle Schwarber announced his presence with authority during the Cubs' 2015 postseason. If Schwarber's miracle recovery from a gruesome knee injury defied medical odds in 2016, it didn't surprise Stan, who'd gone off the charts in describing the kid's makeup and grind-it-out resolve.



And if you're tempted to buy into the Schwarber-for-a-pitcher narrative occasioned by his sluggish start, read the recent Sports Illustrated piece on the Schwarber-Zielinski relationship. He's not going anywhere. The Cubs love Schwarber, in large part because of how much Stan Zielinski loved him.

References to Stan are in past tense these days. He was only 64 when he died at his Winfield home in January, apparently of a blood clot just days after "routine" knee-replacement surgery. He was the Cubs' Scout of the Year in 2015, and he'd been inducted into the Midwest Scouts Association Hall of Fame a month before his death.

But what set him apart were the relationships he formed, the trust and understanding no metric can measure, no matter how advanced. Stan is listed as the "signing scout" for Schwarber, Floyd, Jeff Samardzija and Rich Hill among others, but the "find" whose success really moved him was Kirk Rueter.

A tall, gangly left-handed pitcher from downstate Nashville, Rueter didn't throw hard enough to impress most scouts, but Stan loved his makeup and moxie and persuaded the Expos to take him out of Murray State in the 18th round of the 1991 draft that also brought them Floyd. Rueter went on to win 130 games over 13 seasons with the Expos and Giants.

"I bet you didn't think I'd ever win 100 games in the big leagues," Reuter told Stan when they reconnected years later.

"Kirk," Stan said. "I was one of the few people who did."