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Bill Kearns, 93, of Milton; longtime baseball scout

Bill Kearns taught in Somerset and Weymouth, and coached at Tufts.handout

Bill Kearns, who spent years balancing scouting for Major League baseball with coaching and teaching at Somerset and Weymouth high schools, believed a player’s demeanor was as important as his skills.

“Body language is important,” he told the Globe in 2009. “A guy sitting in front of the computer can’t tell that.”

In 1973, he signed Frank Niles to a Kansas City Royals free agent contract. Niles subsequently was head baseball coach at Hingham High and chief executive of the South Shore Baseball Club.

“In later years when Bill came to scout my players, he would say ‘I want to see their eyes’ – his unique way of evaluating them,” Niles recalled.

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Mr. Kearns, who received Major League Baseball’s Scout of the Year Award in 2013, died of an aortic aneurysm Jan. 1 in Milton Hospital. He was 93 and had lived in Milton since 1968.

A full-time scout for the Seattle Mariners for nearly 40 years, Mr. Kearns never wavered in his evaluation of University of Maine pitcher Billy Swift. “He liked the way my ball moved, but Bill was more interested with my composure, the way I handled myself,” said Swift, who was drafted by Seattle in 1984 after strong input from Mr. Kearns.

“Now, when I’m scouting high school players, I look for those same intangible qualities, like Bill would have,” added Swift, who spent 13 years in the Major Leagues and is now head baseball coach at Arizona Christian University.

Mr. Kearns was a multi-sport standout at Watertown High School, where he is in the athletics hall of fame, and at Tufts University. He was a promising shortstop in the Brooklyn Dodgers system, but Pee Wee Reese and Don Zimmer were ahead of him. So Mr. Kearns embarked on a scouting career that spanned more than 60 years, and from which he never retired.

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While working as a part-time scout for Brooklyn, the Chicago White Sox, and Kansas City, he coached boys’ basketball and taught math at Somerset High, Weymouth High, and Weymouth North High from fall until spring training.

Mr. Kearns was inducted in 2001 into the Massachusetts Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame. His 1967 Weymouth High team was undefeated in the regular season.

“Bill was the greatest coach a kid could ask for,” said John Hassan, a star on Weymouth’s ’66 and ’67 teams. “By the time you graduated you knew more about basketball than you could ever imagine.”

Ed Schluntz, a former Brookline High coach and athletic director, played second base for Tufts in 1947 when Mr. Kearns was the shortstop. “On the bus trip to Bowdoin, Bill drew up a pickoff play in which I would sneak behind first base during a bunt,” he said. “Well, we were ahead by a run and we fooled the runner on first with a pitchout, tagged him out, and won the game. He just knew baseball inside and out.”

Mr. Kearns was head baseball coach at Tufts in 1956 and 1957. In 1983, he received the Jumbo Club Award for embodying the spirit of Tufts athletics.

Born in Cambridge, William Michael Kearns was the only son among six children. During the Depression, he worked in his teens delivering blocks of ice from a horse-drawn cart and with a traveling carnival.

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After he heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Coast Guard and later served in the Navy on a submarine chaser and as a gunner’s mate on the USS Pamina.

A 1950 Tufts graduate who took classes when he was not playing baseball, Mr. Kearns was with the Dodgers’ farm team in Fort Worth in 1948 when it hosted Brooklyn’s Major League squad for an exhibition game. It was Jackie Robinson’s second year with the Dodgers at that time.

“I remember the black fans were lined up 10 deep behind the center field fence,” Mr. Kearns told the Globe in 2009.

Carl Erskine, who was Fort Worth’s pitcher that day and went on to star for the Dodgers, remembered Mr. Kearns as “tall and lean with very good range. The Dodgers had 26 minor league teams then, so for Bill to make it all the way to AA ball, he already had to pass some very good players.”

In 1953, Mr. Kearns was on a Falmouth hillside at Old Silver Beach during Hurricane Carol when he noticed a young woman struggling to escape a nearby cottage. “That was my mom,” said his daughter, Carol Kearns Andrews of Milton. “She was from Scotland and working at the Sea Crest Hotel. Dad waded into the water, carried her back to the hill, and they were married in 1955.”

Phoebe (Wilson) Kearns died in 2012. The couple named their daughter after the storm that brought them together.

Mr. Kearns cherished teaching his granddaughter, Isabel, how to score a baseball game and bantering with friends at Wollaston Golf Club. There, Mr. Kearns was presented with champagne after shooting his age when he was 76. He also shot an 80 when he was 80.

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Jim McDermott, a three-time state amateur champion, was his partner more than 30 years in Wollaston’s Fallon Cup member-guest tournament.

“He’d fight and claw to win a match, but when we sat in the cart, the talk was about family,” McDermott said. “When my son, Michael, was 8, a package arrived at our home from Japan and inside was a baseball autographed by Seattle star Ichiro Suzuki, and that was all because of Bill.”

A service has been held for Mr. Kearns, who in addition to his daughter and granddaughter leaves his son, Michael of Somerville; and two sisters, Catherine of Cohasset and Elaine Russo of Wayland.

Mr. Kearns “led us by example and by telling us stories more than telling us what to do,” his daughter said.

“His advice to us was ‘buckle down and shake it off,’ and our family was so fortunate to have his love and generosity.”


Marvin Pave can be reached at marvin.pave@rcn.com.