The Baseball Whisperer Page 18

  “I am looking forward to devoting my time to assuring that the program will survive through the years . . . Being the GM will allow me to still be close to the kids and that’s important to me. Why? Because I can truthfully say that I have never met a young person I couldn’t like.”

  Rod Eberly went to spring training with the Phillies in 1999, played the entire spring season, and then was assigned to the New York–Penn League affiliate in Batavia, New York. As happened with his brother Rick, Rod’s body was starting to break down. His knees hurt, and so did his shoulder. He played fairly well until the last month. He ended up hitting .220 and struck out three times in one game for the first time ever as a baseball player. “It was a humbling experience,” Rod said. Still, the Phillies weren’t ready to give up on him, and he was invited back for a second spring training.

  The atmosphere the next spring was intense. Knowing that this was probably his last chance, Rod kept slavish track of his statistics. He was hitting nearly .400 with two home runs and 17 RBIs. “I wasn’t the least concerned that I would be released,” he said. Then, with ten days left in spring training, Rod was met by a trainer when he arrived at the spring training complex. “He said, ‘The GM needs to see you,’” Rod said.

  What would play out was a familiar scene for the Eberly men. “The guy sat me down and told me, at this point, it was a numbers game and they were going to have to release me, basically because of my age—twenty-three at the time.

  “He said, ‘You are a really good ballplayer,’ and the only thing I said back was, ‘Thank you for the opportunity, but if I were that good of a player, you wouldn’t be letting me go,’” Rod said.

  “I was pretty devastated about that. I had worked to the point that I knew what to do. I was 220 pounds and really strong. I really felt good about everything. I was just floored by that.”

  Merl called Mike Arbuckle, who was working for the Phillies at the time and had a long friendship with Merl. Arbuckle told Merl that the organization was concerned that Rod would not be able to hit. Merl wasn’t buying it. “Mike, that’s all he’s ever done his whole life is hit,” Merl said. But there was no reversing the decision.

  Merl and Pat were in Florida at the time, visiting an old friend of the A’s program, George Bradley, who was working for the White Sox. Merl arranged a meeting between Rod and Bradley, who told the young man that if he stayed in shape he could come to the White Sox spring training the next year.

  Like he had done so many summers, Rod went back to Clarinda and played another summer with the A’s. He did well enough to attract the interest of an Independent League team in Louisiana. The pay was better than the pittance he had earned in the minors, so he went. But after playing about eight games, he hurt his back and finally decided to give up his dream. He played one more summer for the A’s.

  Every Eberly man had traveled essentially the same arc in his baseball career. They were forged in Clarinda, first the father, then the sons under his direction. They grew to love the game. They flourished, to the point that they were probably better than only a small fraction of those who put on a uniform and advanced to the major leagues. They signed professional contracts and had their shot. They never made it beyond a low level of minor league baseball, but could always say they had played professional baseball. Then each of the sons came to see the game as their father did—as a way to teach values beyond sport and to stay connected with their family and their town.

  From the time Merl took over as the A’s manager in 1961 through the 1997 season, the team’s record was 1,501–591, a winning percentage of .717. During its years as a college program, it was 1,219–507, a winning percentage of .706. As a player, Merl Eberly ranks only behind Von Hayes, who hit .511 in 1979. Merl’s best was .475 in 1969, when he was thirty-five years old.

  11

  Keeping

  PAT EBERLY APPROACHED the front door of Evelyn Herzberg’s modest ranch-style house on Glenn Miller Avenue with trepidation and a hunch. Evelyn’s husband had died only a month before, and she was still dragged low by grief. As it happened, Pat’s daughter Jill was married to Evelyn’s nephew Scott. Pat knew that Evelyn, who had no children of her own, might benefit from some company. She told Evelyn that a couple of Clarinda A’s players would be arriving for the summer in just two weeks and wondered if Evelyn would consider taking them in for a short period while she searched for a family that would keep them for the rest of the summer.

  Finding families to host players was, in many ways, as important to the A’s success as finding players. Families had to be willing to take in total strangers, young men who would have to blend in with their children, abide by their rules, and behave off the baseball field. This was one of many ways in which Pat was as indispensable to the program as Merl. She had lived her entire life in Clarinda, and she knew which families she could count on to offer the right environment. It was never about which family could provide a player with the nicest home or the most amenities. Pat knew that the players arriving in town were complicated—they were excellent athletes with all the urges of young men, yet at the same time they were away from home and not fully adults, feeling insecure and, for some, even quite homesick. That required a special kind of family that could almost instantly trust and nurture someone they might never see again after the season ended. Some families would serve as hosts for decades, and others for a half-dozen seasons; for a smaller number, one summer was enough. In the early days of the A’s as a collegiate team, some families resisted hosting black players, even those that had taken in foreign exchange students who were of color. Over the years, those issues went away. Like almost every town, Clarinda had its intolerant residents, but they were in the distinct minority.

  The families of Clarinda referred to hosting players over the summer as “keeping” them. The term conveys the broader context of their responsibility and how they viewed it. They were not providing mere lodging. They were keeping the young men in the broadest sense—treating them as they would their own daughters and sons. Keeping meant providing emotional support and modeling behavior. For many families, it also meant financial sacrifice, at times when they could least afford it. Once Pat had the host parent program established, keeping the summer players was as integral to the A’s viability as a program as Merl’s connections with coaches. By participating, the people of Clarinda were also keeping themselves and their town connected. Most in Clarinda did not see this as remarkable. “To us, this is a normal thing,” Evelyn said.

  The program had certainly grown from the summer when Pat and Merl had to keep a third of the team living in their basement. Somehow, Pat managed to feed them all, as well as attend the A’s games to run the concession stand. They had known that summer that this arrangement couldn’t last, and that was when Pat started to form the host parent program.

  She reached out to people like Larry and Shira Bridie, who owned Weil’s, the local clothing store, and later Jill and Mike Devoe, who had their own two young children but felt a powerful pull to help both the players and their town. Pat enlisted Jeff Clark, who went off to college and came back to his town to put down roots, to give back, and to pass on the notion of keeping to his children. Like Jill Devoe, Jeff Clark was first exposed to the A’s as a child. He would go to the games and run down foul balls and home runs. Each time he returned a baseball to the concession stand, Pat would give him a dime. As an adult, he stayed involved, helping rebuild the press box, putting a new roof on the dugouts, serving on the board of directors, helping out at games, and, foremost, keeping players.

  Pat had a hunch that Evelyn would be wonderful at keeping, in ways that would benefit the players and the widow herself. But Evelyn had to give Pat’s request some thought. What did she know about taking care of young men? She liked to cook and do craftwork, and she liked the Glenn Miller Festival and loved interacting with the Japanese tourists who were drawn to it. She also liked Pat and Merl, whom she had known for decades. She knew that if Pat was asking, there m
ust be a real need, so she agreed to do it—she took the leap. “I had room,” Evelyn said. “I was alone, and she was a friend. That’s probably mostly why, trying to do her a favor. But the favor was for me because I always said it was a year of sorrow but also a year of joy because of all these kids through the years.”

  Two young men she had never met were soon to become like the sons she never had. She was responsible for them—caring for them, watching out for them, cheering for them, and telling them what to do and what not to do. She had to quickly establish a set of house rules and expectations, all without the benefit of experience. It was the start of being a “mother” for the next twenty summers.

  Evelyn cooked for the players she was keeping and always made extra food for their teammates who stopped by. She tried to make it to their games so they would have at least one fan rooting for them. Although she had to adapt to this new responsibility, she was better at it than she first thought she might be. She learned the players’ rhythms and learned to just listen. Evelyn also developed a sense of humor that others had never seen in her. She would play jokes on her summer guests. One time she sewed the pants legs of one player’s jeans together, so that when he tried to hop into them, he fell to the floor. She short-sheeted their beds and put cellophane wrap on the toilet seat, which made nighttime trips to the bathroom hazardous. She played Scrabble, gin rummy, and other games with them. Deep and enduring bonds formed.

  Somehow Evelyn’s quaint approach worked, maybe even because it was quaint. These big, strong young men came to see her as, if not their mother, at least a favorite aunt. They knew her story too—that she had not had children and that they filled a void for her. They sent her presents and cards on Mother’s Day and at Christmas years after they had lived with her in Clarinda and played for the A’s.

  One of the players Evelyn hosted was Chuck Knoblauch. Outgoing on the baseball diamond, he was reserved around her in her home. With her limited frame of reference on baseball, she really had no idea she was keeping a young man who had been pegged as a can’t-miss major leaguer. “When I think of Evelyn, I can’t wipe the smile off my face,” Knoblauch said. “She was a prankster. She pulled all sorts of jokes on us. And she had us pick corn and green beans and make homemade ice cream.”

  The summer after he played in Clarinda, Knoblauch was named the best player in the Cape Cod League and also an All-American at Texas A&M. Within a few years, he was the starting second baseman for the Minnesota Twins. He became engaged and invited Evelyn to the wedding. She still keeps the invitation from him among her treasured cards, letters, and scrapbooks. Knoblauch also provided her with tickets when the Twins played in the World Series—a payoff she never expected when she answered Pat’s call.

  Evelyn also hosted Michael Strawberry, whose brother Darryl was one of the best players of his generation, and Patrick Dobson, the son of the actor Kevin Dobson, who starred in the television hit Kojak. Evelyn didn’t know that much about Darryl Strawberry, but Kojak was one of her favorite shows. When Kevin Dobson and his wife came to see their son play, they stayed at her house for over a week. She did the cooking, and he bought the groceries. “He did the cleaning up,” Evelyn said. “It was great. I was a guest in my own home.”

  Then there was Mike Humphrey, who played at Indiana University. He borrowed $384.24 from her to pay for his U-Haul. He paid her back only $100 with a money order. In his notes to her, he called her “Evvy Baby.” “You have been like a mother to me and I will always have a special place in my heart for you.” Another player, Justin Fitzgerald, signed a score sheet for her with: “last game of Scrabble.”

  Evelyn was well aware that some of her players were sneaking out at night or breaking Merl’s rules of behavior, but there were no serious incidents, and her players were often contrite. One note said:

  Evelyn, I’m sorry about last night. I am sorry I let you down and it will not happen again. I think the world of you and your hospitality. You’ve made me feel at home and I thank you for all you have done for me and Pete. You will be appreciated and respected by me and Pete. Thank you. Chris and Pete.

  Another, exhausted either from too much baseball or too much of something else, simply wrote, “I am not going to church. Please let me sleep. I am sorry but extremely tired.”

  Players came to rely on Evelyn as they would a parent. She loaned one of them pots, pans, and kitchen utensils for his return to college. When another player broke his jaw in a game, she drove him to Omaha to see a doctor. When her “boys” weren’t getting enough playing time, she would complain to Merl, just like a mother. When they played well, she would make a sign and put it on the front door to congratulate them, sometimes even attaching balloons.

  Not every experience was good. When one player broke her rules, she had to get Merl involved. The player’s father was a high-powered lawyer and tried to steamroll Merl to preserve his son’s status. He was no match for the coach, though, and the player was sent packing. Another player had a visiting girlfriend and stayed out well past the 1:00 A.M. curfew Evelyn had set. She was going to send him home as well, but Merl asked her if she would give the player a second chance and she did. “It wasn’t all peaches and cream,” Evelyn said.

  For Evelyn, though, the good far outweighed the bad. Clarinda families with children also saw the benefits of keeping a ballplayer for the summer, including the chance it gave their children to have an instant big brother and role model. And most of the time that was precisely how things worked out. Living in such a small town, people in Clarinda had relatively little exposure to people from other parts of the country, so keeping provided a form of mutual socialization—an opportunity to trade backgrounds, histories, and habits.

  Beth and Brian Rarick had been keeping players since the late 1990s. The experience helped draw their own son, Sam, out of his shyness, and for that, Beth Rarick could thank a pitcher from the Los Angeles area, Jake Hovis, who embraced the role of mentor. Hovis thought that was the least he could do. He did not feel close to his own family at the time; in fact, he told Beth, he had “never really had a family-type situation like he had with us.” A self-described “hot wire,” Hovis was coming from a place with a much faster pace, and he found himself feeling grateful that the Raricks and Clarinda slowed him down. “In California, you don’t have a second to breathe,” he said. “And the first time I was in Iowa, I could look up and see every star in the universe. That was just earthly. At that point in my life, I was very fortunate to have the Raricks. I don’t know if it was God or the Clarinda family, but I needed someone to take care of me. Anytime I struggled, they were there.”

  He delivered for them in the modest way they had hoped. He did his best to bring out the introverted Sam, and the effort paid off. By the next summer in Clarinda, Sam was a “chatterbox,” Hovis said. “I felt like I had a little brother and sister.”

  The Raricks gave Hovis quality time. They would wait to have dinner with him after the night’s game so that he would have a familial experience. “I love my family to death, but they gave me another side,” Hovis said of the Raricks. “I was not even their kid, and they were treating me like I am their son. They are asking me questions like they do care. They were genuine. That’s what I miss. Just the genuine people.”

  Hovis carried that experience with him. After Clarinda, he was more sincere with people. If he asked someone a question, now he really wanted to hear the answer. He said the people of Clarinda had an “open-arms lifestyle” that he tried to adopt as well. “If someone is struggling, just open up your arms and smile.” He is trying to practice Clarinda values living in California.

  “I still appreciate everything that happened,” he said. “Without those summers, I can’t say I would be here . . . I don’t want to know. If everyone went to play in Clarinda, this whole world would be a better place. You want to take that lifestyle and bring it back to everyone else. Everybody who has played there has a little bit of Clarinda in them.”

  Hovis was a pitche
r with good command and solid potential, but wasn’t drafted following his senior year at Concordia University. So he texted the Raricks: “When can I come visit you guys?” The Raricks did just what Jake Hovis had come to expect. “We found out he hadn’t been placed,” Beth said, “and we invited him to stay.” After a second summer in Clarinda, Hovis landed a spot in the Freedom Professional League in Arizona. It wasn’t the majors or affiliated baseball, but he was still getting paid to play.

  While the families worked to put the players at ease, sometimes it worked the other way around. When a player from Arlington, Virginia, jokingly asked the Raricks, “Now, which part of town should I not go into?” they knew it would be a low-maintenance summer with him. Clarinda might have had a rough side of town when Merl was growing up, but that notion was somewhat laughable given the small size of the town. “I told him you can pretty much go where you want,” Beth said. If there is a “good” side of town, the Raricks were on it, with a home alongside the seventh hole of the Clarinda Country Club. Players frustrated by baseball could take out some aggression banging golf balls if they needed to.

  Sometimes Beth and her husband had to be sports psychologists. Players who were not succeeding on the field brought their problems home with them, and for some the pressure made them want to leave. She told them they had choices: “You can stick it out. Maybe you should look at it as if I’m getting some workouts, some team experience, a new experience.” If they considered quitting, she would tell them, “We would hate to see you leave.”

  The host parents also could count on Merl weighing in. “If the team was down or the boys were having too much fun, then Merl would step in and you’d have the annual Merl Speech,” said Brian Rarick, a podiatrist. “He always warned them about the age of the girls, and the curfews.” There were times when Brian had to deliver the lecture to his players. “We usually have to give a little bit of ‘Hey, guys, it’s Clarinda, Iowa, not the city.’ It’s a small town, and we have our reputation.”