The Baseball Whisperer Read online

  Then one of the coaches who had signed him to his scholarship, Steve Gillespie, who went on to be the head coach at Youngstown State, began to work with him one-on-one. Once again, an Eberly was redeemed by a coach. Gillespie made Rod work, tweaked his swing, and kept the pressure on him at just the right level. And Rod delivered. He hit .360 with 8 home runs and 60 RBIs. But the major league draft came and went again, and Rod Eberly never got a call.

  He headed back to Clarinda to play for the A’s that summer. For the first time in his life, his enthusiasm for the game was gone. He was disconsolate about the draft and about the Cardinals’ handling of his situation the year before. His mood infected the team, which included a number of players who had dreamed of being drafted only to be disappointed. “We let it affect us,” Rod said. “I was playing for what the game could give me instead of the other way around. It was my dad’s last summer, and that was something I regret as a player and as Dad’s son. Knowing it was his last year, why couldn’t I have sucked it up? When you are young and dumb, sometimes you don’t think of others.”

  The A’s started league play that year a miserable 4-13. “Dad was tearing his hair out. He was pretty mad at us,” Rod said. “He was questioning what we were doing.” Merl put it bluntly to his players. “If you are not playing for love of the game to get better, why are you playing?” he said.

  There was also a moment when Rod felt the full brunt of his father’s wrath. Playing third base, with runners on second and third, he tried to backhand a ball when the proper play would have been to shift his feet and get his body in front of the ball, blocking it to prevent runs from scoring.

  Merl was furious. This wasn’t how he taught his sons to play. He got to the top steps of the dugout and yelled at his son. Rod looked at him and waved him off with his glove, a clear sign of disrespect. “Needless to say, he had some choice words for me when I got back to the dugout,” Rod said. “He didn’t care who I was. You were not going to be disrespectful to him.”

  Merl eventually got the team behind him. The A’s went 14-3 in the second half of the season and qualified for the National Baseball Congress tournament, ensuring that Merl could have a well-deserved bow as a coach.

  The tournament had its own special rhythm. Games were played around the clock, even if that meant starting at 2:00 A.M. That schedule was part of the charm, and part of the test. A photographer for the Wichita Eagle captured Merl in a pose after a fourteen-inning win against a team from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a game that had started at 10:00 P.M. His arms are folded just below his chest. Despite the victory, he looks more frustrated than joyful. His lips are scrunched tight, and his cheeks are puffed. His eyebrows arch, pointing toward each other like the lines of a triangle. Something isn’t quite right. The Eberly family would laugh at the photo for many years. They had seen some version of that look so many times, in so many contexts, over so many seasons of their lives. They knew that Merl was not pleased about something. He didn’t have to say anything. You could tell by the look.

  The story in the paper that day was a tribute to Merl and the A’s. Word had started to spread during the season that this would be Merl’s last as a manager, after more than forty years of wearing a uniform. Indeed, that year he was revered throughout the tournament, as a baseball oracle whose wisdom was sought. Everyone there knew that Merl had long brought something special to Wichita when he brought his A’s, with their powder-blue uniforms and beat-up team bus. Even more revealing, however, of what Merl had built with his team and his devotion to his players, as the Wichita Eagle’s Kirk Seminoff noted, was that “the A’s don’t chop up their team in August to bring to Wichita a new ‘best of’ roster including players from other teams that didn’t make the field. Instead Eberly believes in dancing with the one that brung ya.” Merl didn’t believe in gaming the system, and over time his approach had been validated: the A’s were always competitive in Wichita.

  In Wichita that year, other coaches, fans, scouts, and players all came to pay their respects to Merl. He had left a mark in Kansas as well as in Clarinda. But there was a sense of melancholy in the moment. In his sixties, Merl still looked good in his “uni” (every spring, if he saw that he was getting a paunch, he’d go on a diet of steak and grapefruit), but he had lost track of the number of fungoes he had hit, or the batting practice pitches he had thrown, or the hours he had spent standing in the coach’s box at third base, or the lineup cards he had drawn up, or the pre- and postgame speeches he had delivered. He would miss all that.

  Yet it was clear to him that this was the time. In addition to his frustrations about the game and the players, he knew that if the A’s were to be sustained, he would have to take on the full-time role of general manager. The time that he had spent on the field would now have to be devoted to the perennial task of raising money and trying to keep the program alive. He had been doing both jobs for decades, but now he needed to focus on business even more than baseball if the A’s were going to make it.

  Merl was not the only one to see the threat to the A’s. Ed Miller, who served on the A’s board, challenged other directors to look at the steady decline in attendance at the games. “It’s something we need to really think about, get out and visit with people about this problem,” he said after the season had ended. “Right now, I don’t have any answers, but it’s something we have to come to grips with and what our next step will be if we can’t come up with a solution. People are awfully busy in our fast-moving society.”

  Another longtime board member, Jim Thuman, put it even more starkly. “If we are doing all this work just for our own entertainment, then maybe it’s time to move on. I ran the gate this year, and people just weren’t there most of the time. Everyone seems to be doing other things than coming to A’s games. It’s kind of sad, but that’s what appears to be happening.”

  Ryan Eberly suggested doing additional baseball clinics for kids in the area to reestablish connections in the community. Others suggested that players be more active and visible in town. No one, however, really had the answer.

  In his column, Merl implored the people of Clarinda to help come up with ideas “on what can be done to get people back to the ballpark.” Perhaps, he thought, appealing to the comparatively pure and simple nature of what the A’s were offering was a pitch he could sell. Major League Baseball was still dealing with repercussions from the 1994–1995 players’ strike, and its relationship with fans was strained. If you loved baseball, Merl reasoned, why not see it at the amateur level where money was not the object? He said that the A’s could still be a showcase for future major leaguers, as it had been. Just as important as financial support was more commitment from fans. Merl’s players were starting to notice the empty seats at Municipal Stadium. It was “fans, or lack of them, [that] the players talked about,” Merl wrote. “This summer was one of the lowest ever and the vets noticed it even more than the rookies.

  “Baseball at this level is as good or better than the low minor leagues and is a real bargain for the fan,” Merl wrote. “Families can come to every A’s game for just a few dollars. It’s a clean, wholesome atmosphere, no beer sales, great up close seats, good playing facility and the A’s auxiliary does a great job with the concession stand. Baseball bingo was introduced this season.”

  He was offering an analog solution, however, in an emerging digital age. Some on the board of directors had a different idea for increasing revenue. They thought selling beer might be the answer. But there was no way Merl would go for that, and his view prevailed. In seasons to come, one of the A’s biggest rivals, the Mustangs of St. Joseph, Missouri, just a little over an hour away, would routinely attract an average of two thousand fans to each of their games. One clear reason: a spacious beer garden. Many college summer teams are for-profit enterprises. The A’s would never be one of them.

  To Merl, success wasn’t worth it if you had to do it that way. Just as John Tedore had given his life direction by showing him a positive path through s
ports, Merl saw baseball as a vessel for instilling larger values in his players. Even with the success his team had achieved and the small dose of attendant fame, he knew that the lore of the A’s wasn’t enough to attract a top prospect. At the same time, he had always known that the Clarinda A’s weren’t simply in the business of producing professional players: the team, with the people of Clarinda, was in the business of providing opportunity and molding young men.

  “However corny it might sound, I think we’re all supposed to do something while we are here on this Earth,” Merl said in an interview with a local radio station. “I guess the good Lord took me out of the garbage can and said, ‘Go play sports, but don’t forget the message that it teaches you.’ If you get the opportunity, pass it on . . . Try to be a little better person. Respect others, which we all need to do in this day and age. Don’t do anything halfway. If you are going to do this or anything else you do in life, do it with passion. I think if we could do that in life, period, things would be a lot easier for all of us. It’s not about can we make them a better baseball player. It’s about can we make them a better person.”

  Indeed, while the A’s produced an outsized share of great baseball players, many others who passed through Clarinda went on to excel in other fields—as doctors, lawyers, politicians, entertainers, and successes in business. There was Mike Sanchez, who went on to become a state legislator in New Mexico, and there was Cas Soma, the pitcher Merl sent home the year the A’s won the NBC World Series, who became a successful surgeon in Hawaii. And of course, there was Danny Gans, who was packing in the fans for his Las Vegas shows.

  As conflicted as Merl felt about the state of the game and the players, he knew in his heart that he couldn’t stop being involved in baseball and probably wouldn’t for as long as he lived. When word spread that he was stepping off the field, letters started to pour in from former players, as part of a project to provide a living memorial to Merl’s work. When Merl read those letters, not merely from his players who went on to be professional stars but also from players whose lives were transformed, he realized that he had achieved his larger dream—to teach something beyond baseball.

  One former player, Ben Snyder, acknowledged in his letter that his decision to come to Clarinda to play had not been easy. He had played the previous summer in Alaska. As a Californian, he was not exactly captivated by the notion of Iowa. But Von Hayes really encouraged him to travel to the cornfields, so he did.

  My first memory of Clarinda is you walking down the stairs of your house and greeting me. You looked big, but gentle. I was scared and uncertain. I didn’t know it right then but I was going to have one of the best summers of my life . . . I learned to trust people and appreciate relationships. You set the example by caring more about me, the person, than me the pitcher. Second, you taught me to leverage my strengths and challenge the world. You always encouraged me to do so, especially after I tried and failed. And finally, I learned that I couldn’t fool everyone like I thought I could. I needed to be true to myself and others. At times, I thought you had powers beyond any mortal: how else would you have known how late I was staying out at night. A lot of people know you as Merl Eberly, the baseball coach who puts together and manages great teams. But I know you as Merl Eberly, the man who changes lives.

  Snyder’s life was changed in another way by his summer in Iowa: he married a woman from Clarinda.

  Terry Unruh’s letter was handwritten in red ink and took up an entire page. “Some people are great because of what they accomplish and others are great because of what they acquired, but only a few are great because of what they have planted in the lives of others. Thank you both for being among those few,” he wrote.

  A major league scout, Bill Clark, who had come to Clarinda in the early 1970s, was ending his thirty years on the road and, like Merl, taking stock of his life. “In the wide-ranging view of this scout, there is no place in the world where baseball is more pure than in Clarinda, Iowa,” Clark said.

  Donny Carr, who had an outdoors business, recalled in his letter to Merl that his own father had taught him to

  never allow anybody to have a great influence on my life without letting them know in writing how they impacted me . . . In your case, you were not only a friend over the years, but a great example of how to do life, and a consistent fiber in a world of inconsistency. I watched you share with others when I know you and your family were in need. I also watched you mold young people, like me, who were ungrateful and naive about the commitment you had to achieve the end result, which was good for me . . . one of my regrets is that I have waited this long to let you know how much I look up to you. My respect of your character and integrity, and the uncompromising conviction to what is right set you apart from anyone else I know. This isn’t intended as flattery Merl, it is said in sincerity because you have earned the right to know how much difference you have made in the lives of many men.

  To Jeff Nichols, Merl was “a player’s coach,” one who intuitively understood how a player could reach full potential.

  As a player playing for a college coach who designed my style of play, it was rather puzzling for me to play for Coach Eberly for the first year. I didn’t know what he wanted. Rather than bunt, steal, hit and run he was telling me to focus and hit the ball hard or look for that one pitch and drive it. In practice, he mentioned the physical attributes that I had and asked me why I wasn’t using them, which made me really wonder. I finally understood that he didn’t want me to play his game, he wanted me to play MY STYLE of baseball. That is a life lesson which has stayed with me, to take risks and explore my abilities in whatever I do. It is safe to say I came to Clarinda confident in my game and left Clarinda confident in myself. It also let me know Merl Eberly doesn’t just care about players, he cares about people—that is not something you find in just any coach. The only thing Coach Eberly wants from a player is to respect himself, the community and the game. He is a great coach but he is a better man.

  Some of the letters also came from Merl’s former teammates. It was as though Merl was taking part in a living wake, but hearing from those whose lives he had touched also affirmed his decision to keep the program alive. “He gave me confidence in my ability to accomplish what I never thought possible,” said former teammate Ernie Tomlinson. “He was so positive and so gracious. It demanded that you give your best plus another 50 percent because we knew he was giving that much and more. When ‘Ebe’ was behind the plate you could strike out anybody. You knew with one swing of the bat that Ebe could win the game for the home team.”

  Merl’s impact on so many people came in large part from the way he honored the game’s most sacred traditions. In addition, he asked his players to approach the sport with the same buoyant enthusiasm they’d had in their Little League days. Quoting from a baseball essay, Merl taught them that to play baseball you have to “carry that little boy with you in your back pocket.”

  Who could possibly carry on the tradition that Merl had built? The people of Clarinda knew that he couldn’t go on forever. But the team and the town were stronger than one large man. As Merl readily acknowledged, Pat was his anchor. She was a master at logistics and details, and her relentlessly optimistic manner was infectious. The team structure was dated, and no doubt a bit sexist. Men were on the board of directors, and women were on the auxiliary. Pat in many ways had a foot in both camps, but in the 1990s the A’s were a male-dominated enterprise, even though women played indispensable roles.

  While the continued presence of the combination of Merl and Pat ensured that the team could go on, that still left a void on the field. Merl’s sons were not yet candidates to take over the team, for a number of reasons. So Merl turned to his old friend Noel Bogdanski—a former teammate who had come to Clarinda from Chicago—to carry on the tradition. “Bo” Bogdanski was a big, strong man, much like Merl, who inspired respect.

  “Taking over the A’s is going to be a big step for me,” Bogdanski said at the time. “I have s
ome really big shoes to fill. I have been with the A’s off and on since 1973 and have seen some very high moments and also some very low ones. Merl has taught every one of his ballplayers something while they have been here, dealing with life or baseball, and I hope I can do the same—even if it only stays with them a couple of days. As coach I plan on running the same tight ship that has been the trademark of the A’s program.”

  Merl may not have been in the dugout anymore, but he was hardly away from the team. Instead, he transitioned into the role of a very active general manager. His presence was felt at every game as he stationed himself on a folding chair near the A’s clubhouse along the left-field line. He had a clear view of the field, and he continued his practice of second-guessing umpires, coaches, and players. He didn’t miss a pitch.

  He tried to explain his feelings in his column, but only from a baseball perspective; his other feelings were too private. “Changing from playing to just managing was tough, but trying to help youngsters to be better players and better people became my goal—a great feeling when you see the paths many of them have taken and you feel you have succeeded more than you have failed. Winning was and is important, but even more important is to teach the players that the lessons they learn on the field can carry over into their lives and make them good people.

  “It was me that made me step down. I had come to the age where it was really hard to physically teach and coach, and I didn’t want the kids to have to suffer because of that . . . I just don’t have the energy to do both the field managing and business end of the program. You bet I will miss it but ‘nothing is forever’ as the saying goes. You can’t be with young people every day for three months each summer for as long as I have without some feel of loss when it’s over.