July 8, 200619 yr Scout's honor By Jeff Passan, Yahoo! Sports The sound of twisting metal woke up the whole neighborhood. There had been a nasty accident. A 16-year-old fussing with the radio lost control of his car, crashed into a parked one and thrust it into the next driveway. The kid was OK, just nervous that the guy whose car he destroyed might kill him. Brian Wilson, Cincinnati Reds scout, husband, father of three girls, pig farmer and, in this case, vehicle owner, emerged from the house. He was staying with Jimmy Gonzales, his good friend and also a Reds scout, and rather than survey the damage with narrowed and angry eyes, he walked to the car and emptied it. "He knew it was totaled," Gonzales says. "So he got his stuff out of his car. His car was dirty, too. Things everywhere. In the back, he had a bunch of Reds hats. And with everybody outside, at 6:30 in the morning, he started passing out Reds hats. To the neighbors. To the cops. He gave one to the kid." Scouts are the traveling salesmen of baseball, sentenced to lives on the road and overworked odometers. They are also the nurses, eminently underappreciated, and the teachers, terribly underpaid. And that is why when Brian Wilson, 33 years old, died of a heart attack on June 17, the news was relegated to a two-sentence blurb. more at link...
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