After God knows how many years, sportswriters have finally elected pitcher Bert Blyleven to the baseball Hall of Fame. Most of the newspapers are reporting that Blyleven is an Orange County native, a graduate of Santiago High School in Garden Grove, but none have yet reported on the other Orange County connection: that it was Jesse Flores of La Habra that discovered him as a scout for the Minnesota Twins and served as a crucial mentor early in his career.
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From my story and Blyleven's recollections of Flores:
If Bert made the big leagues in less than two years, Blyleven's dad
owed Flores a steak dinner. The Twins drafted Blyleven in the third
round of the 1969 draft. He pitched a year later. Flores enjoyed the
steak.
The Twins put Blyleven in their instructional league shortly after
the draft. Flores was the league's pitching coach and helped Blyleven
immensely–and not just on his baseball skills.
“I almost killed myself in instructional league one time,” Blyleven
says with a laugh. “Players had to find their own place to live and cook
for themselves. I had never lived away from my home, and my mother
always cooked for me. So one time, I bought some meat and put it in the
refrigerator. Ten days later, I finally tried to cook it. It kind of
looked brown, but I still ate it.
“An hour later, I started sweating and felt sick,” Blyleven
continues. “The only person I knew was Jesse, so I went to him and said I
feel terrible. I told him about how I had kept the meat in the
refrigerator. He asked how long I kept it in there, and I said 10 days.
'Oh, my goodness!' he said. 'You must have food poisoning!' He called
the trainer, and they gave me stuff to get the meat out of me.”
Blyleven didn't see much of Flores after he made the big leagues,
although he made it a point to work out with Flores' rookie teams during
winter league and spring training. “All the young kids respected him,”
Blyleven said. “He was like a fatherly figure, someone you respected.
You knew he had been in the game a long time and signed a lot of good
major-league players. All in all, he wasn't just a pitching coach, but
also a friend. If you had a bad outing, he'd get you ready for the next
one. If you had a good start, he wouldn't let you get too high. You took
the good with the bad, and that was what Jesse was about, like life.”
The two kept in touch once Blyleven left the Twins, talking every
couple of months. Blyleven was there when Jesse's wife, Consuelo, passed
away and he became friends with Flores' two sons, Steve and Jesse Jr.,
both of whom became renowned scouts in their own right. Blyleven and
Steve still hold charity golf tournaments in the Inland Empire for
hemophilia research.
“Jesse is someone I admired,” Blyleven says. “He was like a father
figure to me. I put Jesse in the same column as my pops. They were two
men who cared. That's how you want to be remembered–as a man who loved
what he did and had a lot of charisma to get the best out of other
people.
“It's easy to say a lot of nice things about Jess,” adds Blyleven. “Every time I think of him, I get a smile.”
