"Player development has been and will continue to be the cornerstone of this franchise," says Moline G.M. Rolf Samuels. "And Fate Norris was our master mason."
Norris came to the Greens in 1994, the year the team moved from Seattle and changed its name from the Timbers. Norris had been scouting for the Cubs for a number of years, but when Chicago downsized its scouting operation, Samuels snatched up the venerable bird dog. The best players of Fate's first draft, outfielder Manny Ramirez and catcher Charles Johnson, have become starters for the big-league club. In subsequent drafts, Norris and his protege Josh Logan, pressed the limits of available scouting information. With Norris at the helm, the Greens pursued the young, high-ceiling player but never forgot the value of character assessment. "Good tools, coming skills, and some sense," is how Fate used to refer to it.
Norris came to scouting many years back after a brief career as minor-league infielder and pitcher. "I'd a been somebody if I'd a had talent and health." In a 1994 Moline Dispatch interview Norris recalled a long life in baseball and a life outside the game, which included a wife whom he lost as vaguely as he married. To his dying day, Norris continued to deny any connection to a banjo player of the same name who played for Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, a Georgia string band of the 1920s and 30s. "I don't recall that name," said Norris. "It's baseball that's kept me going all these years."
After a winter of ill health, Norris died suddenly in January, 2000, succeeded in his position by Logan, who hired baseball wunderkind John Dark, as his own assistant. "We will miss Fate, yes," said Logan. "What can we feel but loss? Still, he stays with me, with this franchise every time we pass on an 18-year old pitcher and gravitate towards a pure hitter. He is the man who taught me to look down the road, over the hill, past today, this month, this year. It seemed sometimes an endless deferral, but the championships of this franchise are proof that it was not."