Hall of Fame baseball careers typically begin on sandlots with a bat and glove and not with a typewriter in a White Rock, B.C., garage. But then again, there’s been nothing typical about Allan Simpson’s career in baseball.
This weekend in St. Mary’s, Ont., the 63-year-old Kelowna, B.C., native will be one of three men inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, along with former Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Tom Henke and the late George Wood.
If Simpson’s name isn’t all that familiar to the average Canadian baseball fan, the magazine he started 30 years ago in that garage — Baseball America — surely is.
“It grew from the garage of his home to what I refer to in my eyes as the bible for baseball executives,” said current Atlanta Braves president and former GM John Schuerholz, who was one of a number of high profile MLB executives — including Pat Gillick, Terry Ryan, Doug Melvin and Alex Anthopoulos — who wrote a letter to the Hall committee endorsing Simpson’s candidacy. Not bad for a guy who, after quitting his job as GM of the Lethbridge Expos in 1975, went back to school and became a public accountant in British Columbia.
But in 1980, after five years away from the game he first fell in love with as a 10-year old while on a trip to California, Simpson was desperate to get back in.
“I just got such itchy feet,” he recalled earlier this week from his home in Durham, N.C. “My wife (Jill) recognized that I had always had this passion for baseball, so I just made this calculated gamble at that point to get in the game.
“My wife was very supportive. Everybody else thought I was completely nuts.”
The calculation was that a door had been opened when the Sporting News reduced their coverage of amateur and minor league baseball, and the gamble was Simpson’s lack of publishing experience and B.C. mailing address he feared would hurt the magazine’s credibility with Americans.
Run for the border
“When I lived in Vernon, I strategically moved to Vancouver to be right on the border so I could skip across everyday and pick up mail and have the publication printed in Washington State and mailed from Washington State,” he explained. “We did everything possible to give the impression that it was an American product, but it was essentially an American publication being published out of a garage in Canada.”
One of Simpson’s first cross-border runs on behalf of the magazine (it was initially called All America Baseball News) was to run his idea by then Seattle Post-Intelligencer baseball reporter, Tracy Ringolsby.
“There were a lot of fly-by-night people coming along at that time,” recalled Ringolsby, now a columnist with Baseball American and foxsports.com. “But Allan had values. If he told somebody he was going to do something, he’d do it. He wasn’t going to do anything to ruin the reputation he had.
“I just vouched for him to people like Peter Gammons, convinced them that they should write for the guy and they’d enjoy it.”
With Simpson routinely putting in 100-hour work weeks, the magazine quickly found an audience, aided in part, according to Simpson, by some fortunate timing.
“During the 54-day players’ strike in 1981, I think people and the media were so starved for baseball at the time that they directed their focus to minor league baseball, which had been on a steady downhill climb for 30 years,” he explained. “It was just a great sense of timing with this groundswell of interest in minor league baseball, the strike and the draft.”
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Doug Melvin (Brewers GM): “Some people in the media have big egos. Allan has no ego.”
Greg Hamilton (Team Canada coach/director): “It’s a special accomplishment and the fact that he’s Canadian isn’t something that I think everybody realizes. It’s a unique Canadian success story in baseball, in my opinion.”
John Schuerholz (Braves president): “Allan over his lifetime has demonstrated his passion and his affinity for baseball and especially his unique love of baseball information that is so crucial for our game.” Tracy Ringolsby (reporter): “I don’t think Allan realized how much media credibility he had because of they way he had handled himself in his jobs previously.”
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Schuerholz, who in 1981 was a year away from beginning an eight-year run as GM of the Kansas City Royals which included the 1985 World Series championship, recalls the immediate impact Baseball America had on front offices around the majors.
“Shortly after it became available, it was quickly viewed by me and many other people in baseball as a publication that had a lot of insight, unique perspective and information,” he explained. “There was a lot of work that Allan and his staff did to dig for stories that were not only interesting but were valuable pieces of information for we baseball executives to have our hands on.”
Philadelphia Phillies special advisor Pat Gillick was GM of the Blue Jays in 1981 when the magazine launched and said back then he tried to keep Baseball America — and Simpson — at a safe distance from his staff.
“Allan was a guy our scouts didn’t talk to back then,” he recalled. “He did such a great job with the magazine that we didn’t want to share our information with him.”
Bringing the draft to the masses
Another party not always willing to share information with Simpson back in those days was MLB itself, particularly when it came to the June amateur draft.
“There was a feeling back in 1981 that MLB and its clubs did not want the information to become public because they were fearful that agents and college coaches were getting information and using it to their benefit and to the detriment of Major League Baseball,” Simpson explained.
“A lot of times, if a player was drafted and he had a partial scholarship to a college and he was drafted in the fourth round, the school would up its scholarship to raise their chances to keep the kid and diminish the chance that a major league club could sign the kid. The harder MLB tried, the harder we tried to get the information and publicize it.”
When asked how the newspapers covered the MLB draft in those days, Ringolsby said, “It was ignored. (Simspon) was the first guy to ever give serious coverage to the baseball draft,” he continued. “Nobody had done mock drafts on baseball before Allan. It was unheard of. I remember the first couple we did, people thought we were nuts.”
Thirty years later, interest in the MLB draft continues to grow thanks to televised coverage and major web sites covering amateur baseball like never before.
“I really believe Allan is responsible for hundreds of jobs within baseball today,” said Doug Melvin, the Chatham, Ont.-born GM of the Milwaukee Brewers. “Someone like Keith Law might not have his job today if not for Allan.”
According to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, Baseball America originated with 1,500 subscribers and 30 years later has a base of approximately 250,000 readers.
Due South
In the early 1980s, Simpson relocated his family and Baseball America to North Carolina shortly after then Durham Bulls owner Miles Wolff purchased a controlling interest in the magazine. But despite living south of the border for more than 25 years now, Simpson has remained a loyal supporter of Canadian baseball — especially at the amateur level.
“When we started up our national awards banquet years ago, he was there covering it for Baseball America,” said Greg Hamilton, Team Canada head coach and director, national teams. “He didn’t have to do that and he didn’t do it out of charity, but a genuine interest.”
An interest and, perhaps, a touch of national pride as well.
“I always maintain that being Canadian has always been beneficial to me because I think I’ve had more to prove by being a Canadian coming into a game that’s really an American game,” said Simpson, who is now working with event and scouting service Perfect Game since leaving Baseball America five years ago.
“Scouts will always tell you that when you scout a Canadian player, you never have to question his makeup or his work ethic because Canadians typically have that hockey mindset where they’ll run though a wall to succeed and I just felt like I had a little bit of that mentality as well.”
