The Baseball Whisperer Page 20

  Instead of giving up, Hayes was motivated by his first brief experience in Clarinda. Determined to show that he could play with the A’s, he worked hard during the fall and winter to prepare for his college season. The work paid off. After playing well enough at St. Mary’s to be drafted by the Indians, he turned them down and opted instead to return to Clarinda, where he quickly evolved from a good to a great college player and his confidence continued to rise. Hayes would once again turn down the Indians when they offered him a better contract in order to help Merl and the A’s at the National Baseball Congress World Series in Wichita. He hit well above .500 in the tournament.

  At that point in his career, rather than see his stock go down, Hayes had a lot of baseball options, and Merl had helped him through it. Merl had never pressed Hayes to stay with the team when he could have signed a professional contract. He just laid out the young man’s options and helped him gain clarity, and Hayes would leave Clarinda that second time with even more respect for his coach. “For me,” Hayes said, “it was just his presence, his fairness, the way he treated everybody, whether it was his son Rick, who played on the team, or anyone else.”

  Hayes finally signed with the Indians in 1979, and during his first season in Cleveland the team traveled to Minnesota to play the Twins. Hayes, who was starting in right field, looked into the stands and there were Merl and Pat Eberly to cheer him on. “It was a pretty special experience,” Hayes said. “My parents were back in California, so to have your surrogate parents there was pretty special.”

  As he progressed in major league baseball, Hayes found himself almost every year back in Clarinda to help his old coach, the team, and the town with raising money. They needed him, and he was there to help. He would also call Merl on occasion just to talk baseball and life.

  After the 1986 season, even with his career-best statistics to that point, Hayes really needed Merl and Clarinda as he dealt with his father’s death. He traveled to Iowa, where he decided to buy a piece of hunting ground a few miles outside of town, with Merl as a minor partner. He hadn’t grown up as a hunter and really didn’t know much about it. Once again, Merl became Hayes’s coach and teacher. Merl talked to him about respect for both the land and the animals they were stalking, and Hayes learned the peace that comes from spending time in nature, with no distractions, just walking and talking with a friend.

  Hayes would spend a few weeks each year in Iowa, where he was recognized everywhere and treated as a pleasant combination of celebrity and friend. Clarinda was about as far away from the Philadelphia fan experience as he could get. At first, he bought the land so that Merl could enjoy it with his sons and grandsons it was only later, when his own life had its troubles, that he came to see it as a place to call home.

  Hayes credited Merl and the people of Clarinda with launching his professional career and felt an obligation and sense of loyalty to them long after his playing days were over. When the Phillies traded him in 1993, effectively ending his career, it was even more important that he could rely on other points of connection in his life to help get him through it, and Clarinda was one of those places. “It evolved to more than a player giving back, into more of a union between a player and a city,” Hayes said. “I feel like [Clarinda] is a second home. I never gave up on baseball, but there comes a time when baseball basically lets you go. I never gave up loving the game.”

  After his father’s death, Hayes eventually came to see his relationship with Merl as akin to that of a father and son. The annual banquet, the hunting trips, and the dinners with Pat and Merl and members of the Eberly clan all gave him a sense of belonging. The Eberly girls were his close friends too, and Hayes became something of a fourth brother to them. Hayes gained strength from the values that Merl and Pat exhibited, reflecting a kind of religious faith that, as he put it, they “didn’t wear on their sleeves” but rather lived by example. The Eberlys were always there for him, even if he just needed someone to talk to. Today Hayes tells his friends that Iowa is his home and he is an Iowa resident. They don’t always believe him.

  After his professional career ended, Hayes knocked around in a variety of businesses. One of them was trying to sell boats in Florida. “One thing I learned about the boating industry, it’s tough to sell boats,” he told MLB.com.

  He was married and soon would have two children. He introduced his wife Stephanie, an actress, and his kids to the Eberlys, and for a while they too were part of the extended family. Their family photo appeared in the A’s newsletter, Dugout News. In addition to trying to sell boats, Hayes explored ways to leverage his status as a former big leaguer in other occupations. He met with mixed success, however, and never really found anything that compared to his passion for baseball.

  After more than a decade of marriage, Hayes and his wife went through an acrimonious divorce that left him financially and emotionally scarred. He drifted. Whatever his difficulty, though, Hayes always knew where he could go when he needed support. He would travel to Clarinda and enter the back door—like all the other members of the family—at 225 East Lincoln Street and know that he’d find people there he could lean on. Merl would have a strong handshake for him, Pat would deliver a warm hug, and Hayes would feel his troubles start to melt away, at least temporarily.

  “They were there to listen but not be judgmental,” Hayes said. “They were very careful about being critical with their advice. They would always take my side. Their concerns were more for what was happening to me as a person in those tough times. I can’t tell you what that meant to me.” Sometimes Merl and Pat would risk disagreeing with Hayes and tell him to consider both sides of the story. That was part of their love for him too.

  In few places did Hayes feel as welcome as he did in the Eberly home, where he could eat at the kitchen table or plop down in a recliner and watch a game, sipping iced tea, talking with Merl or Pat or one of the Eberly children, who always seemed to be streaming through their childhood home. “He had a special relationship with my dad and mom, and they always kept him grounded and down to earth,” Julie said. “I think that time in Clarinda became sort of a refuge for him away from the limelight and all the pressure that came with it, a place where he could come, feel comfortable, and just be one of the guys. People in the community have accepted him as one of their own and give him his space. He has become just one more ‘Eberly’ at the dinner table.”

  Which would happen frequently. When Hayes needed to get away to do some thinking, sometimes he would get in the car and drive almost all night just to be in Clarinda. “They always had a place for me to stay until I got situated in the area,” Hayes said. “They were always accepting.”

  Even after Hayes built a hunting cabin on his land, Merl and Pat would insist that he stay in town with them. He probably would have had a similar invitation at dozens of houses in town. The people of Clarinda were proud of their association with Hayes and appreciated that he had come back when he was a major league star. Now that he was no longer a celebrity, they embraced him all the same.

  The Eberlys’ home was the place that brought Hayes peace and renewal, a sense that he could start again. He could relax there and not have to be Von Hayes, professional baseball player. It was that way in town as well. “How he has kept in contact shows what Merl did for him,” said John Woolson, whose family owned the Clarinda Herald-Journal when Merl worked there. “It was a real influence his whole life. It didn’t develop baseball in him. It developed life in him.”

  13

  The Blue Goose

  WHEN RYAN EBERLY heard the loud pop from the rear of the bus, he knew there was trouble. His team was riding aboard “Blue Goose IV,” the A’s bucket of bolts of a bus, in the early morning hours of June 2, 2008, returning from a three-day road trip through Junction City, Kansas, and Topeka, 180 miles from Clarinda. They were ten miles south of St. Joseph, Missouri, on Interstate 29, a little more than an hour from home.

  Sometimes Ryan felt like he had spent years of his life on the
many versions of the bus, first as a batboy who got handed up and down the rows by the brawny players, then as a player himself who honed his game to the point that he was signed as an infielder by the New York Yankees, and now as the head coach and the person responsible for the twenty-six young men on board. When the sound of the blown tire rang out, at first he thought his biggest challenge would be finding someone to fix a flat after midnight in rural Missouri. He had been through this so many times before.

  The various incarnations of the Blue Goose, starting with the original 1946 model donated by a local doctor, Bill Kuehn, in 1974, had broken down so frequently that Ryan and his family had come to accept it as just part of every summer. They joked about being on a first-name basis with the tow truck drivers on the Kansas Turnpike. “There was a feeling about each trip we took that going somewhere in the Blue Goose was no worry, but getting home problem free was something else,” Merl wrote in the A’s newsletter.

  Most of the time the team had a driver, but there were times in the early days when Merl let players drive if they told him they had experience. One of the best player-drivers was Ron Rooker, who had driven trucks and thought buses were easy by comparison. On one trip to South Dakota, the bus broke down just as the team was reaching the motel parking lot. Rooker had forgotten his toolbox, and Merl thought he would have to pay a huge mechanic’s bill, but Rooker told him not to worry. Merl went to take a nap in his room, but was woken up by a player telling him that Rooker had all sorts of engine parts on the ground with only a screwdriver and a pair of pliers for tools. “Coach, don’t worry about it—I can handle it,” Rooker said. And he did, all before pitching the A’s to a victory that night.

  The A’s tried to make the most of the breakdowns, including one time in Emporia, Kansas, where the Blue Goose had stopped running near a restaurant that was offering “one steak supper at regular price, receive the second one free.” While they were waiting for the mechanic, Merl asked if the restaurant offer could be applied to his thirty sweaty baseball players, who were more accustomed to roadside fast food after a game. The waitress thought about it for a while, then said yes, the offer stood. The A’s filed into the restaurant for one of their better dinners of the summer.

  On another trip in the 1970s to Rapid City, South Dakota, a group of young women drove alongside the bus and started flirting with the players, who all rushed to the right side of the bus. One of the women took off her top, prompting a lot more yelling, and Merl covered the eyes of his young son Rodney. Merl thought he had finally persuaded the young women to leave, but when they got to the hotel they found them there already. Merl could tell his players what to do, but these young women did not feel they had to listen to him. “We’re just looking for a little fun. No hard feelings, Pop,” one of them said to Merl.

  “Several of the guys told me not to worry about it and go on to bed and they would handle it for me—I guess they thought this was my first road trip,” Merl said. “After turning down the many volunteers who offered to keep an eye on the girls and the rest of the players, I finally made one last effort to break the girls’ blockade of the motel by inviting them to come over to the restaurant to eat with us and I would introduce each of the players but they had to introduce themselves too.

  “Only two gals showed up, thank goodness. After a small bribe (tip) to the waitress, she agreed to slow our service way down (close to curfew) and the girls decided to leave after they realized I might keep the team there all night if necessary—plus I now had their names and they became uneasy when I asked if their parents knew where they were.”

  Another time two women who police said had been drinking heavily plowed into the side of the bus with a sickening thud. The crash did more damage to the car, and the Blue Goose was able to make it to the game that night. “That 1946 model was built like a tank,” Merl said. The women in the car weren’t as fortunate, especially when police saw all the beer cans inside.

  Of course there were the stories about how Ozzie Smith and Danny Gans would make the miles go faster by pretending to be the Supremes, with Ozzie doing his best Diana Ross impression. Gans would dazzle his teammates with impressions of the famous and was so adept at it that he would be known in Las Vegas as “the Man of Many Voices.” Gans stayed close to the Eberlys and the A’s until his death in 2009 and was one of the team’s most consistent donors. In fact, it was his contribution that enabled the A’s to buy Blue Goose IV, a 1983-model New Jersey Transit bus.

  Over the years the various versions of the bus either lacked air conditioning or had it but it often wasn’t functioning. All lacked toilets, and none had modern conveniences like a WiFi connection. All of the buses were very old when the A’s purchased them and christened them as “new”—that is, new to the A’s. As Merl did so often, he made the decidedly downscale transportation a positive part of team lore, starting with the daffy name, the Blue Goose. For the most part, the players put up with the old buses without much complaining, even with all the stiff backs and sore necks that came with riding on them. This “new” version of the Blue Goose had been purchased in 2003, and its amenities included an automatic transmission, power steering, and air conditioning.

  In all those years, the problems with the Blue Goose had presented more annoyance than emergency. But in the darkness of the highway that night in rural Missouri, that would change. All that the A’s had been would come into sharp focus when it was suddenly at risk.

  It was about 12:30 A.M., and most of the players were dozing. Ryan was in his coach’s seat near the front of the bus so he could help keep the driver, Charlie Hughes, awake and be a second set of eyes on the road. Michael Ghutzman was among the players sitting near the rear. He was the third in his family to come to Clarinda to play for the A’s; his father Butch considered a summer in Clarinda, learning to love the game without amenities, an essential component of a ballplayer’s development. After his playing days ended, Michael would become a lawyer in Texas, but meanwhile, he was in Clarinda to pursue his baseball dreams.

  For some reason that evening, he stayed awake while all his teammates slept. He heard the rupture of the tire on the rear driver’s side—a loud popping sound like the report of a gunshot—and then, to his alarm, he saw sparks flying up from the shredded tire. He called to the front of the bus to alert Charlie and Ryan, who seemed almost indifferent. After all, they had lived through just about every malfunction a bus could have—something wrong with the engine, leaks of all manner of fluids, flat tires, running low on oil and gas. It would take a lot more than a flat tire to get them excited.

  They told Ghutzman that it was okay, that the correct thing to do was to keep going to burn the retread off the tire. That didn’t seem right to Ghutzman, who feared that the sparks would quickly ignite, possibly even reach the fuel tank. “Ryan and Charlie decided to ignore my plea, and the bus kept on rolling,” Ghutzman said.

  In the excitement, his teammates had woken up and were now “huddled around the rear windows watching the action,” Ghutzman said. Soon they became even more alarmed. “The sparks intensified and flames burst up towards the window. This development unified my teammates, who now collectively demanded the bus be stopped,” Ghutzman said.

  As Ryan remembers it, once the players said they saw sparks and small flames, Charlie eased the bus to the side of the road. Ryan said he knew his one responsibility was to get the players off safely. “At the time I was scared to death for the kids,” he said. “We got them all off the bus.”

  Watching his players get safely off the bus, Ryan couldn’t help but think about his own days as a player, back when the A’s were a constant presence in his life. It started by watching his father play, then his older brother. Players like Ozzie Smith and Von Hayes had become close friends, as well as scores of other former players and coaches. Each summer had brought him twenty new “brothers,” most of them as sports-minded as he was. Being around them had made him want to chase the dream of being a major leaguer too.

&
nbsp; Ryan had been an outstanding athlete in high school, playing four sports. While he was very good in football, there was little doubt how he would spend each summer—playing baseball, clearly his favorite sport. He had seen his brother Rick get his shot, and he wanted to take his own. Merl never pushed him; Ryan pushed himself hard enough and was never quite satisfied. “You are where you need to be,” Merl told his son. “Give it time.” Then one summer night in Nevada, Missouri, when he was a high school senior, he proved to be a little ahead of his time. The A’s starting shortstop got sick, and Ryan found himself in the starting lineup. From that point on, he knew he had to outwork other players to prove himself. He was from a small town in Iowa with brutal winters, not some year-round baseball climate like so many other heavily recruited players.

  Although he played in college and did well, Ryan wasn’t drafted, and he thought he would never get the same chance as his father and big brother. He took a coaching job in a town thirty miles west of Clarinda. One night when he came home, Merl handed him a sheet of paper with a phone number on it. His call had come after all, from the New York Yankees. They needed middle infielders, and Ryan had the right pedigree. In two days, he was to report to the Rookie League in Tampa, Florida.

  At twenty-three, he was the old man of the group. For some reason, he wasn’t getting to play much, and the disappointment hit him hard. “I just didn’t understand,” Ryan said. “It was very disappointing.” Baseball seemed ready to crush the dream of another Eberly. But Ryan was told to stay in good shape and come back for spring training. He got to see players from other major league teams and size himself up against the talent. He thought he was hitting well. Maybe this would happen for him? Then his playing time dropped, and coaches threw him catcher’s gear to catch bullpens for pitchers who were rehabilitating from injuries. Ryan now knew his time would be short.