Logan dropped out of East Moline High School at 16 and worked at Whitey's Ice Cream while he
pitched the Davenport Rough Riders to the Amateur Athletic Union regional championship in
1991. Drafted the following June by the Blue Jays, Logan lasted just three games in Medicine Hat before "something popped." When he came back from rotator cuff surgery a year later, he'd lost the 94-mile heater that had been his meal ticket. "And I hadn't bothered to develop any other pitches," Logan recalled. "That's how raw I was."
After a nomadic year on the road that he never discussed, Logan resurfaced in the Quad Cities in 1994 as a reporter for the Rock Island Line Item Veto, a local leftist weekly that has since folded. But the lure of the rosin bag was too strong, and by the spring of 1994, when the Greens came to town, Logan was already writing a local baseball column on minor-league baseball, "Farmland Blues," a column syndicated in several Midwestern newspapers.
Fate Norris, the Greens' director of scouting and player development, hired Logan in 1995 as his assistant. Logan served as team spokesman and Norris's right-hand man until January of 2000, when Norris died of a stroke. Logan stepped into the head of scouting position and hired John Dark, then only 16, as his assistant, explaining "talent is talent, and young talent is better than old talent."
Scheduled to ride shotgun on the team�s 2005 draft, Logan never showed, leaving his understudy Dark in the dark. Logan�s cargo van was gone from the Moline Park lot and from his driveway. His cellphone returned no signal. His fully furnished Milan apartment revealed no signs unless there was meaning in the bales of straw stacked neatly in the southeast corner of each upstairs room. A cryptographer from the University of Iowa could read no signs in those bales. A cartographer from the USGS office in Davenport was no more successful. About Logan�s disappearance the organization would release no information until a vacationing Deere executive from Moline recognized Logan on a beach in Crete, consorting with a young man he introduced as �a friend.� The executive brought back that word to Moline. That word reached the press and begat rumors (International scouting? Eschatology?) until the organization was forced to put out a press release declaring Logan AWOL and �presumed retired� but certainly �no longer part of the strategic planning of the Moline Greens or Deere, Inc.�
Known by some as the "Phil Spector of Player Development," Logan was detail oriented and relentless, pressing his regional and local scouts for complete specs on ballplayers, their tools, character, families, and ancestry. Perhaps because of his own experience Logan both favored hard throwers and simultaneously distrusts them as injury risks. "You cannot teach fast," Logan explained. "And you can't count on it either." For position players, Logan learned from Fate that speed is a lower priority. "The first question I ask is 'can he hit the ball?' Hitters will find a place, mere fielders can hope only for utility futures." A devout Branch Rickeyean, Logan remained adamant about the twin tenets of his scouting and development philosophy. "I like them young," he was fond of saying. "And they've got to be ballplayers, not just athletes. Baseball instinct may not be a tool, but it'll stand in for one if one's missing." Logan, like minor-league hitting coach Randy Bass, wanted discernment from ballplayers, particularly within the strikezone. "One never knows about amateurs," said Logan. "Some college programs teach hitters to respect the zone. Others confuse aggression for good judgment." It's a given that not all Moline batters will show the judgment of a Randy Bass or a Carlos Delgado, late of the Greens. But, said Logan, "acquiring high-ceiling talent and exposing it to shrewd tutelage affords such players ample occasion to learn."
Logan enjoyed renting movies and hosting literary dinner parties at the home that he shared with his cousin. Logan was a grouse hunter and beaver trapper, a proud scoutmaster of a local troop, and still dabbled in local leftist politics, though he once explained that it was "difficult to stay political when there is talent to scout. I'll sign a Knight of the KKK if he's got a good enough fastball or hits with power to all fields."