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Long before his Michael Jordan days, Jerry Krause believed he had found the next Mickey Mantle

Jerry Krause scouts talent as the Bulls’ GM in 1995. (AP)
Jerry Krause scouts talent as the Bulls’ GM in 1995. (AP)

Long before the Chicago Bulls, Jerry Krause was a baseball scout. This is a lesser-known part of Krause’s legacy because he is most famous for building the Bulls’ dynasty by drafting Scottie Pippen out of Central Arkansas and plucking a hippie coach named Phil Jackson from CBA obscurity.

But at heart, Krause, who died Tuesday at 77, was always a scout, right down to the rumpled suits he wore through NBA arenas; a man happiest driving the highways searching for brilliance that others missed. And in the late 1970s, while working the Midwest for the brand new Seattle Mariners, Krause came across a player he was sure would be the team’s first great hero.

“I found the next Mickey Mantle,” he gushed to Mariners scouting director Mel Didier.

That would be Kirk Gibson.

Gibson wasn’t the only prospect Krause fell for in his baseball life. He also was enthralled by the high school versions of Greg Luzinski and Ozzie Smith, predicting their greatness to his bosses years before they arrived in the major leagues. But nothing may capture the essence of Krause better than the story of him and Gibson that was told to me in 2004 by Didier and Lou Gorman, the former Mariners general manager who hired Krause.

When Gorman brought Krause to the Mariners in 1977, he wasn’t sure if he had hired a genius or a slob. Once, on a scouting trip, he got into Krause’s car only to find it so packed in the back with old newspapers and McDonald’s bags that you could barely see out the back window.

“Why don’t we stop at a car wash and you can get your car cleaned out,” Gorman said he told Krause.

“No time for that,” he said Krause snapped. “We’ve got too many players to see.”

Less than a year after Krause joined the organization he saw Gibson and was instantly dazzled. He sometimes got big feelings about players – a kind of scout’s gut instinct – and something told him Gibson could be one of the best he’d ever find. In February, in one of his last interviews, Krause told The Vertical Podcast with Woj that he knew right away Gibson “was going to be a star, probably a superstar.”

It was hardly a secret discovery. At the time, Gibson was a star wide receiver for Michigan State’s football team who also played baseball in the spring. Baseball scouts had seen enough of Gibson crushing home runs and running down fly balls to know he would be a first-round pick in that year’s draft. Still, Krause raved to Mariners executives as if he had found Gibson in the back of a cornfield.

Kirk Gibson is on base for the Tigers in 1987. (Getty Images)
Kirk Gibson is on base for the Tigers in 1987. (Getty Images)

“He can hit the ball and he can fly,” Didier remembered Krause saying. “He can’t throw, but he can do everything else.”

Krause saw Gibson as a huge star in Seattle’s Kingdome, which had been built with a short right field to accommodate football seating. Gibson, he noted, had the perfect, powerful left-handed hitter’s swing, and Krause was sure Gibson was a natural for the stadium’s dimensions.

“He’ll hit 50 home runs in the Kingdome,” Gorman recalled Krause telling everyone affiliated with the Mariners. “He’ll be a legend.”

After convincing Gorman and Didier that Gibson absolutely had to be the choice when the team picked sixth overall in the June draft, Krause set about to make sure no one else took Gibson first. So he began a disinformation campaign. More specifically, as Gorman and Didier remembered, he made up stories about Gibson and spread them to the other scouts. He said Gibson was set on a football career and would be impossible to sign. He said it would take $500,000 to get Gibson to change his mind, an astronomical sum for a draft pick in those days.

Krause later told the New York Daily News that Gorman and Didier had embellished this story. He didn’t lie to the other scouts, he said, rather he stretched the truth about Gibson’s baseball intentions.

“I’d [tell them] he’s a hell of a football player,” Krause said.

Whatever he did, it worked. Gorman and Didier said other teams backed off Gibson. When they did, Krause went to work on the player. Gorman and Didier always marveled at the way the short, frumpy Krause managed to befriend athletes and gain their trust. Gibson was no different, and soon Krause had set up a secret meeting between Gibson and Gorman at a Holiday Inn near the Michigan State campus. At the meeting, Gorman got Gibson to agree to sign for $50,000 if the Mariners drafted him. The only condition was that Gibson had to play his senior year of football.

This is where things got complicated.

Gorman, who died in 2011, took the Gibson deal to Danny Kaye, the actor who owned the Mariners at the time. Kaye asked what would happen if Gibson got hurt playing football. Would he still have to pay Gibson the $50,000?

Gorman said yes.

Kaye did not like that. He didn’t care that his team’s Midwest scout who drove around in a car filled with old McDonald’s bags was certain he had found the next Mickey Mantle. Kaye thought $50,000 was a lot to spend on a player who could ruin his knees playing football. Pick someone else, the owner said.

In June 1978, the Mariners chose Tito Nanni, a high school outfielder from Philadelphia. They even reportedly gave him $100,000. If you have never heard of Tito Nanni, there is a reason. He languished for eight seasons in the minor leagues before retiring in 1985. Gibson was taken six picks later by Detroit, who did let him play his last year of football. Six years later he led the Tigers to the World Series, where they beat the San Diego Padres in five games.

“Jerry was upset with me,” Gorman said.

By then, Krause – who had scouted part-time for the Los Angeles Lakers in his Seattle days – was long gone from the Mariners, having moved on to the Chicago White Sox, whose owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, would buy Chicago’s basketball team in 1984. Not long after that purchase, Reinsdorf called Krause and asked him to be the Bulls’ general manager. Kirk Gibson was forgotten.

Jerry Krause’s legacy would not be the next Mickey Mantle. His future was something much bigger than that.

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