The Baseball Whisperer Read online

  The Bridies were important to the program on almost every level. They were among the first host parents and one of Merl’s more reliable donors in town. “Most people knew when Merl was walking in, he wanted a check,” Larry Bridie said. They also spoke up for Merl and the A’s with other business owners and prospective host families. The players, Shira said, “really become part of your family. We looked forward each year, wondering who we would get. We opened our homes and our hearts. This is a nice way to live.”

  The time they spent in Clarinda was also a life internship for the players, akin to being on a cultural exchange program. Most of them had never been on a farm or driven a tractor—or even a truck for that matter. “The small-town atmosphere is different,” Brenda Samuelson said. “There’s no filter. They see it as it is, and most of them embrace it and just can’t really believe it. Even the little things. We have an old beat-up pickup truck. Everyone has learned to drive a manual transmission.”

  Lloyd Muller, Venita’s husband, would ask Pat every summer if any of the players would like to work on his farm, making hay bales, weeding soybeans, and digging post holes. (The family joked that the players were earning a PhD—a Post Hole Digging degree.) Merl approved of sending players to the Mullers: the work made them farm-strong. Venita would drive into town to pick them up if they needed a ride, then take them to the game if they worked through the afternoon.

  “At first, it was kind of a trickle,” she said. “They were city boys and coming out on the farm. They just didn’t know. Then they discovered that the main meal at the farm is served at noon, so I did a lot of cooking.” When that word spread, they had no trouble attracting workers. When the players arrived at the baseball field each night, they would taunt their teammates:

  “What did you have for lunch today?”

  “A sandwich.”

  “Well, we had steak and potatoes and corn and watermelon.” After lunch, the players would watch soap operas like All My Children or go into the yard to play Wiffle ball.

  It was the players working for the Mullers who convinced Merl to break his tradition of having only boys serve as batboys for the A’s. They could tell that Venita and Lloyd’s daughter Andrea was a gifted athlete. According to Venita, “One noon when the boys were there, they said to Andrea, ‘You can be our batboy.’ I said, ‘No, Merl only uses boys.’” That night when she went to the game, though, she saw her daughter carrying balls and bats on the field.

  Venita also kept a player from New Orleans, but farm life was too much of a shock for him. He didn’t like the smells, and he didn’t like the work in the hot sun. He tried gardening for Venita, but was frightened several times by snakes. He preferred watching soap operas. “At my house, the kids all had jobs,” she said. “We didn’t sit around and watch TV, and I walked into the living room and turned off the TV, and I said, ‘Larry, if you don’t get outside and get ambitious and get things done, you’re not going to amount to a hill of beans.’” He stayed just two weeks. But Venita was wrong about him, at least in one sense. The next year she opened a letter from him that included a newspaper article reporting that he had been drafted by the pros. “We got a good chuckle over that,” she said.

  Annette Nelson’s family had five hundred acres and raised cattle, hogs, beans, and corn. Any player lucky enough to live with her for the summer got his fill of good country cooking. Annette was so adept at chicken fried steak that she made it for the team’s annual Hall of Fame Banquet in the winter, which drew hundreds of people. Not surprisingly, Annette’s home was known to players as “the food house.” Over the years she kept more than forty players and always seemed to find room if Pat was in a bind. She kept boys because of her friendship with Pat and her fealty to the town. “I feel like I enjoy the summers having the boys. It makes me feel younger,” said seventy-five-year-old Annette. “I tell them, ‘When you come here, it’s like staying with Grandma.’ I just fully enjoy the atmosphere, being around the boys, going to the ballpark and helping where I can. I can’t imagine a summer of not having that.”

  The keeping done by the people of Clarinda also had a powerful effect on the college coaches who sent players there. It created an environment where the players knew that people cared about them, and in turn they cared about the community. “Players felt an important part of that and came back with a sense of responsibility,” said Augie Garrido, the University of Texas coach. “It was the entire environment. It isn’t any one thing. It is a combination of all things.”

  That spirit was embodied by Evelyn Herzberg and by host parents like Jeff Clark, a lifelong Clarinda resident. He and his family hosted dozens of players over the years, and each summer he gave the players the same speech. “I have three rules. The first is that you will respect my wife and children. The second is, what is mine is yours. The third is, no spittoons in the house.”

  Clark admired Merl, both for the way he conducted his life and for the obvious closeness of his family. When Clark took on a task for the A’s, he did so wanting Merl’s validation for a job well done. He also wanted his own children to see how enriching it could be to give to others. After the A’s games, Clark liked to sit next to Merl by the clubhouse and drink in his wisdom about baseball and life. “He was always coaching,” Clark said. “Not only a coach on the field but off the field.”

  Like Clark, Jill Devoe inherited the tradition of keeping players. She recalled her father saying, when she was twelve, that they were going to remodel the basement because that summer they were going to host an A’s player—the memory of whom she could summon with great clarity decades later. “Jeff Franks . . . he got drafted that season. Catcher,” she said. It was the start of having many brothers for the summer. She had been part of the A’s for so long that she seemed to know no other way. “Foremost, it’s the opportunity to develop relationships with people outside of Clarinda,” she said. “It’s the ability to expose the kids to different lifestyles. Even as an adult, I understand what it can bring to our lives as well as helping out others.

  “As a child, it was fun. Big brothers play catch with you and do things with you. Just brought a whole different element to the summer. They had talks with me about guys and how to behave like a lady and what I should want out of life. My parents would have died if they would have known.” Appropriately enough, players whom she had kept later called her for advice on relationships and life as though they were calling their own mother.

  When Jill and Mike Devoe married, they knew that one day they too would host players—or at least Jill knew they would. Her parents continued to keep players until she was in college, and Jill and Mike decided to keep the tradition going in 1999, when their son, Jared, had just turned three. Mike, who worked at the local prison and had a stereotyped view of twenty­-year-old males, was skeptical at first about having college-age men living in his house. “I had to twist his arm hard behind his back to get him to do it,” Jill said. “He was like . . . ‘Why would we want to do that?’” But Mike was a baseball fan, though he’d never had a chance to play as a child because he was needed to work on the family farm. Eventually he agreed, and he and Jill became another generation of keepers.

  The Devoes lived about ten miles outside of Clarinda, in New Market, a town of only about five hundred people that, among other things, took pride in its grand July Fourth fireworks display, which could easily be seen from the stands at Municipal Stadium. By comparison, Clarinda was a “big city.” The players who stayed with the Devoes were almost certainly coming to the smallest town they would ever live in, but the way the Devoes approached their responsibility made these players quickly feel at home. They either had their own bedroom or shared space with another player in the basement. (The Devoes usually kept two players a season.) Jill and Mike were both classic Midwesterners—friendly, outgoing, giving, and very matter-of-fact. From years of experience, they knew how to draw a player out. Jill was also a prolific cook and highly organized, so their players always knew exactly where their n
ext meal was coming from. Players could also count on seeing them at Municipal Stadium on game nights, and on the occasional road trip as well, particularly to Wichita.

  The Devoes continued to keep players even when demands on their time were increasing. Their son Jared grew to the size of an NFL lineman and earned a scholarship to play football at South Dakota State. He was recruited heavily and had to be available for visits and tryout camps on the weekends. Their daughter Allie was an athlete as well and played travel softball during the summer. Jill and Mike found themselves shuttling from one event to the next. The “slow” pace of life in Clarinda was accelerating for some families. Still, the Devoes and others trying to keep up with their own families continued to serve as keepers, mainly because none of them could say no to Pat Eberly. “She keeps on you until you say yes,” Jill said.

  The Devoes continued to help in other ways as well. Mike served on the A’s board of directors, and Jill served on the women’s auxiliary. Mike said that the A’s survived over the years in large part because of the “circles” that Merl created among the people in town, his baseball family, and his own family, fueled by their strong desire to keep the program going.

  Jay Moses served the A’s in more ways than most. He hosted players, served on the board of directors, and ran J’s Pizza & Steakhouse, the most popular eating establishment in town, located across the street from the Page County Courthouse. Players who stayed with him during the summer could eat at the restaurant for free. He had worked at the place since he was twelve years old and bought it on contract when he was only twenty-one. For more than thirty years it had been the most popular gathering spot in town. Jay had built a grand home across the street from Clarinda High School, and word would spread among players that his house was the best among host parents, complete with its own gym.

  Jay had seen Clarinda from many sides. He had been a rather indifferent student at Clarinda High School but was the embodiment of the town motto: “Where the work ethic still works.” He became both one of the town’s most successful businessmen and one of the A’s most important boosters. But he did more than write checks. He also did the hard work of maintaining the field, painting, and fixing fences, as well as carry out the time-consuming duties related to board meetings.

  “I was born and raised here,” he said, laughing. “I couldn’t get away anywhere else.” He didn’t want to. “It’s the way people treat you here. People are friendly and you get a lot of compliments. They let you know.”

  If a single family embodied the essence of Clarinda, it would probably be the Lisles. They founded a company, the Lisle Corporation (“the innovator in specialty tools since 1903”), on the eastern edge of town. Lisle’s first product was a horse-powered water-well-drilling machine. The product line evolved and endured, even as the company dealt with competitors that paid their workers less and did not have comparable safety standards. Starting a job at Lisle could mean having a job for your whole working life. Scotty Kurtz had worked there more than forty years, ever since Merl brokered the connection. Mike Kurtz had worked there more than three decades. Richard Graham, Merl’s childhood friend, worked there too. Lisle Corporation provided good jobs at good wages and somehow managed to win the battle against economic globalization.

  John Lisle, who ran the company for several decades, exemplified the community pride that separated Clarinda from so many other places. An amateur historian, he had traced Clarinda’s roots back 150 years or more. His personal archive of historical documents and artifacts showed how the town had changed—the businesses that had come and gone, like Grimes Rollerdome, the Frosty Shoppe, and Jed’s Café—and how it had stayed the same, as evidenced by institutions like the county courthouse and his own family business. He had been witness to Clarinda’s facility for “keeping,” particularly with respect to Merl. “I don’t think Merl could have prospered in a different environment,” Lisle said, seated in his large, well-kept office at the factory. “These small towns are pretty nurturing. You grow up in one of these towns, specifically Clarinda, people know who you are. ‘You play baseball.’ It’s always been a good atmosphere that way.”

  Bob Lutz, the sports columnist for the Wichita Eagle, was always impressed by the number of people from Clarinda who made the drive to attend the NBC tournament, many of them wearing the team’s powder-blue colors. They decorated their cars, held posters in the stands, and cheered their “boys.” “They must have different water up there,” Lutz said. “Everybody I knew who was associated with Clarinda was one of the nicest people you can be.”

  12

  Renewal

  WHEN VON HAYES retired from baseball in 1993, it wasn’t really by choice. He had been hit by a pitch by Tom Browning of the Cincinnati Reds on June 14, 1991, that broke his arm, and he would always feel like the injury never had a chance to heal. He returned to the lineup in September, and the Phillies traded him at the end of the season to the California Angels. Though he was on the downward plane of his career, he felt he had a few more good years left. He just needed another chance. But few baseball careers end well; almost all players are cut from a team or their contract is not renewed, and Hayes was no exception. As he put it at the time, “I don’t feel like I left baseball, I feel like baseball had left me.”

  From early in his career, when the Philadelphia Phillies traded five players to get Hayes from the Cleveland Indians in 1982, Hayes had been burdened by outsized expectations. Fans didn’t evaluate the trade in a sophisticated way. They simply thought that anyone good enough to be traded for five guys must be a superstar. His nickname—not one he treasured—was “5-for-1.” He was joining a team with one of the best major leaguers of all time, third baseman Mike Schmidt, and Hayes was supposed to help Philadelphia win another World Series.

  It’s never easy to succeed in Philadelphia or be popular with its fans, who, after all, are the kind who threw snowballs at Santa Claus during a Philadelphia Eagles game. When J. D. Drew refused to sign a deal with the Phillies after they drafted him in 1997, then later returned to Veterans Stadium to play as a St. Louis Cardinal, the fans tried to pelt him with D batteries. They were as unforgiving as any in baseball, and the City of Brotherly Love never really fell for Hayes. Sometimes it was Hayes who did little to draw the fan love. He had an occasionally brooding manner and would slam his helmet after striking out. But even when Hayes did the near-impossible—hitting three home runs in one game, and in another game becoming the first player in major league history to hit two home runs in the first inning—fans seemed to want more from him.

  In his first three years with the Phillies, Hayes was a reliable major league starter, but not the superstar he had been projected to be. When the 1986 season started, Hayes felt confident that he could finally make that leap. He was told that season that he would be moving from outfield to first base—the position he played at Clarinda—and he felt good about that. But only days before he left for spring training in Clearwater, he learned that his father, the man who had taught him the game as a kid, was suffering from an incurable form of cancer. “Before I had left California for spring training I told Dad that I was heading for an MVP season,” Hayes told Peter Pascarelli, the baseball writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I guess I was trying to give him some incentive to keep going . . . but the illness took him.” Hayes went back to be with his family and missed out on some of the critical time just before the regular season started. He would begin the year with eleven hits in his first eighty at-bats.

  Nevertheless, he worked his way out of the slump. As Pascarelli wrote, Hayes retooled his swing, returning to the more simplified approach he had used in college at St. Mary’s and during the summers in Clarinda. Hayes would go on to have his best year as a professional, even if it was not the joyful time he had hoped to share with his father. He had career highs in hits, home runs, doubles, RBIs, and runs scored. He batted third in the Phillies lineup. “If there is any justice, he will finish high in the National League’s MVP voting,
” Pascarelli wrote. St. Louis manager Whitey Herzog said that Hayes had gone from “being a good player to being one helluva player.”

  Hayes would finish the season hitting .305, with 98 runs batted in, 19 home runs, and 46 doubles. He finished eighth in the balloting for the National League’s Most Valuable Player, an honor won by his teammate Mike Schmidt.

  At the time Hayes was a bachelor, and he felt an emotional void after his father’s death, even with his success on the field. After the season ended and he no longer had baseball to fill the time, he knew where he could turn. He called Merl Eberly in Clarinda.

  Reconnecting with Merl brought him back to the summer of 1978, when he took his first trip on an airplane, traveling from California to Iowa. During his first year in college, Hayes had grown four inches, and he was making the transition from shortstop to first base. He needed a summer program where he could learn the position. Some of his older teammates at St. Mary’s recommended that he go to Clarinda, where they had played and had great experiences. His college coach, Miles McAfee, also thought it was a good idea. Hayes was lacking in confidence when he arrived in Clarinda, though, and when he saw the A’s starting first baseman, Tony Camara, he felt even worse. Some of the players were there from USC, San Diego State, Nebraska, and other power programs. Hayes lasted two weeks before deciding that it could end up being a long summer on the bench. He asked Merl for his release. “We’ll let you go home because we don’t really need you this year, but we would like for you to think of us in the future,” Merl said, almost as a courtesy.