The Baseball Whisperer Read online

  His plane landed at Eppley Airfield in Omaha, and he saw a volunteer for the Clarinda A’s baseball team waiting for him at the gate. They shook hands and headed to the car. They drove east, then south to Clarinda, eighty-five miles away. Smith was struck by the flatness of the land, the height of the corn, and what seemed like the endless distance between farms and small towns. It was hard for him to comprehend the gulf between the world he was about to enter, a town that by the mid-1970s had few black families, and the one he had left behind, where there essentially were no whites.

  When they drove into Clarinda almost two hours later, Smith read the wooden sign that greeted them: WHERE THE WORK ETHIC STILL WORKS. They drove along Sixteenth Street to Washington Street, then turned left to head to the dorms at Iowa Western Community College. Smith dropped off his bags, changed into his baseball clothes, and headed toward Municipal Stadium two blocks away.

  The stadium had the look and feel of baseball from another era, with its wooden fences and old-fashioned press box atop the grandstand, yet it was quite an improvement on the primitive diamond that Merl’s old high school coach, John Tedore, had laid out some twenty years before.

  Baseball had remained as popular in Clarinda as Merl and Tedore hoped it would be, and by the time Smith arrived the people of Clarinda identified themselves with the A’s as much as they had with Glenn Miller, their hometown hero, in an earlier era. They would pack the stands by the hundreds on summer nights resounding with the sounds of the game and buzz of cicadas.

  When Smith walked onto the field, many of his teammates were already running, playing pepper, or taking batting practice. He saw a large man—easily four inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than the new arrival from California—with square shoulders and forearms that suggested he could do real damage with a bat. His voice, though, was measured and calm. Merl Eberly greeted him and told Smith to go out to shortstop to take some ground balls.

  Eberly, even with Hinkle’s recommendation, had doubts about Smith, who was small compared to most of his other players, many of whom had come from big-name Division 1 schools like Rice and the University of Southern California. “Let’s see what you’ve got,” Eberly said to him as he grabbed his fungo bat and a bucket of balls.

  Smith could read Merl’s face. “I know what he’s thinking,” Smith said. “‘Give me fifteen or twenty minutes, I’ve seen them come, I’ve seen them go. I will wear him out. I will wear him out. He’s only 150 pounds. He will be back on a bus or a plane.’ Twenty-five or thirty minutes later, he’s still out there banging them, trying to figure out how he’s going to break me. Then he found out I wasn’t your normal, run-of-the-mill kid. Guys like me were always told, ‘You can’t, you can’t, you can’t, you won’t, you won’t, you won’t.’”

  Merl hit a few at medium speed, and Smith handled each one with ease. Eberly, a left-handed batter, started to hit the balls harder and harder, deeper in the hole at shortstop, over the bag at second base, sometimes trying to create a bad hop. Smith didn’t miss a single one. Smith knew he was blessed with exceptional hand-eye coordination, and his lateral quickness made fielding seem almost effortless. After thirty minutes in the Iowa heat and humidity, both Eberly and Smith were drenched. Finally, Smith called out to Eberly, “Coach, don’t you realize you can’t get one past me?”

  Merl had found his everyday shortstop.

  After practice, Smith headed back to his dorm room at the junior college, a small, spare space that had the feel of a military barracks. It was not exactly San Luis Obispo, which sits on the base of a mountain range to the east and is just minutes from Pacific Ocean beach to the west. He had a hot plate to warm food, mainly beans and wieners and canned ravioli, a bed, and that was about it. He didn’t really care. He was here to play baseball.

  Merl knew that Clarinda had a lot to offer players, things they couldn’t necessarily touch or feel or spend. At the same time, he wasn’t naive about the limits of the rural town’s appeal to a young college man, or the potential for a black man to feel isolated in a white world. He persuaded the people in town to provide summer jobs for the players so they would have some spending money and, just as important, so their time would be filled. He had some concerns about placing Smith. Clarinda wasn’t known for racial animus—in fact, its history suggested the opposite—but Merl knew that tensions existed. So it was with some wariness that he approached Bob Warren, who ran a successful construction company, and asked about placing Smith there to work on a crew for the summer. Warren was a booster of the A’s program who always tried to take one or two players if he had enough work to go around.

  “Merl came to Dad and me one day and said, ‘I got this kid that’s coming from LA and a good ballplayer, and the only problem is he’s black,’” Warren’s son Bill, who took over the business from his father, recalled. “‘Do you have a problem hiring a black kid?’ Dad said no, and it just started there. This was the first time we ever had a black person working for us,” Warren said. “I thought, He’s coming from the big city. I hope this works out. Within a week, we knew it was going to be fine. I was kind of worried about how the rest of the crew would react to it. We talked to them about it before it happened, and I got this one guy who worked for us for thirty years, Howard, and he was the one I was worried about. He could be a real redneck.”

  Howard Maxwell and Ozzie Smith were thrown together on a crew. Maxwell had worked construction for years, and his prospects for upward mobility were few. He tested Smith with a few small-bore insults. Smith came right back at him, and it was soon clear that there was a decided mismatch in Smith’s favor. Soon Maxwell and Smith were working together fine, though Maxwell, whose nickname was “Kink” because of his kinky blond hair, used to joke that he made Ozzie ride in the back of the truck. “They were exact opposites,” Warren said.

  “Howard didn’t graduate high school. All he had ever done was work. We had to sit down and have a talk with him. We told him you’ve got to watch your mouth. There is rough language on the construction site. But you could tell when they started bantering back and forth that it would be okay. Ozzie could shut him down in a second.”

  Ozzie found himself bonding quickly with Maxwell, a man who, he said, “was like a cartoon character. Hair all over the place. Had the look of an Einstein. And just funny.”

  It was hard work, pouring concrete, driving a backhoe, and running a jackhammer. The sight of Smith holding the beast of a machine as it ripped through pavement and concrete, with its incessant knifing and thunderous pounding, stays with Warren to this day. He laughed at the memory of Smith mastering the powerful tool. “It doesn’t beat you,” Warren said. “You beat it. You’ve got to hold that thing just right because it is so heavy that you either go forward, right, or left. After you lift that heavy jackhammer for an hour, you are pooped. And if you fight it, it’s even worse. I know we had a few laughs the first time we put him on there.” It took Ozzie a few days, but he caught on. He held the handles of the machine as it jutted up and down, and he joked that his hands and arms were still shaking at night when he was trying to play baseball. “How do you expect me to do this all day and try to hit the ball at night?” Smith said.

  Smith took on all the hard work without complaint, earning about $5 an hour. The other player working for Warren Construction was Paul Desjarlais, one of his college teammates who, it turned out, didn’t have Smith’s work ethic, Warren said. “Work wasn’t his thing. He was more into the social life.” There is a picture of the two of them from that time, Desjarlais, shirtless and smiling on the front of a backhoe, looking carefree, and Smith, sitting in the cab and wearing a hat, both of them looking quite out of context.

  Otherwise, Smith fit right in. He didn’t have the cockiness of a lot of athletes. He was likable and gracious and hardworking, and those were attributes the people of Clarinda readily embraced.

  “He let a lot of people get close to him,” Warren said. “So other people let him get close to them.” Warren said
Smith’s intelligence was obvious, and he was easy to talk to about any number of subjects. “He talked about what he had at home. We knew his family wasn’t wealthy. He talked about how poor they were and how he got his speed by throwing the baseball over the roof and running to the other side to catch it.”

  Smith said that the summer in Clarinda taught him responsibility, how to live on his own, pay bills, make decisions on his own. “So I grew as an adult and from the goodness of people,” Smith said. “Coming to a situation like this as an African American kid and watching how open people were to me becoming part of the community and how they opened their arms taught me that there were some good people in the world, that, given the environment I had come from, it is not that harsh everywhere you go.”

  Smith wanted to share some portion of that experience with his mother, Marvella, back in Los Angeles. The summer had given him his first taste of fresh Iowa sweet corn, which tastes almost like dessert. Smith was so fond of this newfound delicacy that he asked if he could ship a box of it home to his mother in California. Warren’s mother was so touched by the request that she paid for the shipping and sent the corn on its way.

  “It was a weird feeling at first,” Smith said about living in a nearly all-white world. “Anytime you are in a situation like that, it can be uncomfortable. But knowing the Eberlys and the people here made it feel right and made me feel welcome.” He embraced Clarinda, even the characters like Howard, and the town returned the affection. “It was almost like finding yourself in Mayberry,” Smith said of the mythical town that served as the setting for The Andy Griffith Show. “People around here didn’t lock their doors, and they’d leave their keys in their cars.”

  Warren, the owner of the construction company, made a promise to his young worker who ran the jackhammer. “If you ever make it to the big leagues and come back to the A’s banquet, I will pick you up in a limo,” he said.

  Smith soon became a fan favorite as well. When he ran to his position at shortstop to start the game, he would do a backflip and the crowd would go wild. No other baseball player they had seen had ever done that. But when they saw how he could go after ground balls, they realized that he wasn’t being showy with his gymnastics. It was all just his way of getting mentally ready. “He was this scrawny black kid,” Bob Warren said. “Just looking at him, you thought, What’s all the big hype? Until you saw him put on a glove and run. After a few days, you could see he would do just fine.”

  In the year Ozzie Smith arrived in Clarinda, 1975, the United States was still emerging from the turbulent 1960s as blacks and women struggled to gain equal footing with white men. The year would mark the end of the Vietnam War and the start of a partnership between two young computer wizards, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who called their venture “Micro-Soft.” Steven Tyler was leading a newly popular band, Aerosmith, which competed with Black Sabbath for rankings on Billboard magazine’s famous charts. The most popular movies were epic dramas, Jaws and Towering Inferno, and there was a lamentable rise in the popularity of double-knit polyester clothing. The country was entering a recession, with almost one in ten Americans out of work. Gasoline was 44¢ a gallon. Late in the year, in Cypress, California, Tiger Woods was born. And a governor from Georgia, Jimmy Carter, started coming to Iowa in a long-shot campaign for president.

  None of the nation’s cultural crosscurrents had particular resonance in Clarinda, a deeply conservative place that organ-ized parades and July Fourth fireworks, not riots and protests. That summer the focus was on baseball and Municipal Stadium, where Merl was building one of the best summer teams in the country. Ozzie Smith was only one of the vital components. Merl’s time networking with college coaches at their annual convention had paid off. Players from previous years had gone back to their schools with praise for him and the whole Clarinda experience. Coaches felt good about sending their players to Clarinda, with Merl acting as their surrogate.

  It was a long road from Clarinda to Hutchinson, Kansas, and the A’s were almost forced to bond as a team. In addition to Ozzie Smith, there was Danny Gans, a smooth-fielding second baseman who was a strong hitter. Gans had other gifts as well. He made the long rides on the “Blue Goose,” the team bus, go much quicker with his spot-on impersonations of famous people. He could sing too, and he and Smith would dance in the aisle doing their best rendition of Diana Ross and the Supremes. Another member of the team was Bob Cerv Jr., who looked the part of a big leaguer. He was strong and quick and could hit with power, much like his father, Bob Cerv Sr., who had spent a decade in the majors and lived with Yankee teammates Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris during the 1961 season, when those two had their magnificent chase of Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. Gary Thweatt, a rocket-fast player on a scholarship at the University of Oklahoma, ran the outfield, and Terry Unruh from Oral Roberts University shared time on the mound with Scotty Kurtz, the durable left-hander and local favorite.

  Some of the players who arrived from California and Texas that year, just as the disco era was dawning, wore flared pants, loud shirts, and long hair—until, that is, they played for Merl. He had a test for hair length. If a player’s hat fell off while he was running the bases, it meant the hat wasn’t snug because the hair was too long. If a player wasn’t sure if his hair was too long, Merl had an easy answer. He sent him to the local barber, who already had Merl’s specifications. The proposition was simple: if you don’t cut your hair, you don’t play. Players also had to be clean­shaven, and Merl had a test for beards too. He would swipe it with a credit card, and if it made the wrong sound, Merl sent his player for a razor. Merl didn’t like his players drinking either, though he knew that some of them would sneak out to have a few beers. They had just better hope Merl didn’t catch them. He also wanted his players to go to church, so they were offered a free Sunday breakfast if they went to services.

  Not everyone heeded his commands. Bill Young, a strongly built third baseman, griped for several weeks about a lack of playing time and questioned just how much Merl knew about baseball. He was feeling the pressure of the competition and seeing the limits of his talent. When he challenged Merl, one of the Eberly daughters ran to the concession stand to alert Pat. “Come quick, Dad’s going to get killed.” Pat went to the bleachers and saw her forty-one-year-old husband squaring off with a twenty-year-old player.

  Merl had listened to the last criticism he was going to take from this kid. Merl told Young to meet him under the bleachers at Municipal Stadium. When he showed up, Merl looked him dead in the eye and said, “You want a piece of me? You haven’t stopped complaining. If you are so tough, let’s see what you’ve got.”

  It was the kind of physical challenge that had marked Merl’s life. He had hoped that his fighting days were over, but this player simply had to be confronted. At the same time, he himself had lost control. He was squaring off with a player. If a fight ensued, the stakes were great. Would any coach send a player to a team where the coach couldn’t keep his composure or handle the athletes? Would Young’s family bring charges? It was all in the balance as Merl waited for an answer, taking the chance that he would forever after be cast as a man who had never lost his capacity for rage.

  Young stood there, but then looked at his coach and quickly melted. Tears formed in his eyes, and he asked Merl for a second chance. Merl, whose life had been defined by second chances, readily agreed.

  Merl had built this team with a grand ambition uncharacteristic of someone whose idea of travel was a long bus ride into Kansas. He wanted the A’s to travel to Alaska to play the teams there, many of which were regarded as the premier summer ball teams. The setting—playing games under the midnight sun—was alluring for players, and the scouts flocked there. A team that couldn’t compete against the teams in Alaska stood little chance of thriving at the NBC national tournament in Wichita. The cost was daunting, almost $20,000—twice the amount Merl had requested to start the team, and well beyond the $12,000 budget for that year. He went to C. E. Nichols
, a local optometrist, and other members of the A’s board. If they wanted to help their town, he said, they needed to help the team, and this was the kind of exposure that would do both. As Merl scanned the faces of the board members, whose life stories he knew just as they knew his, he locked eyes with each one. The salesman was about to close the deal. They bought his pitch and agreed to raise the money for the trip.

  “You can’t get rated unless you get to the big boys,” Nichols told the Omaha World-Herald. “Plus we didn’t know what we had in terms of talent. It was the only way we could set a gauge of our program. So the feeling of the board was to send them.”

  It turned out that the expenses weren’t quite as steep as they had feared. The host teams agreed to pay for travel and meals between Omaha and Anchorage. They were to play four games each at Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Kenai, all against teams ranked in the NBC’s top ten. Merl was responsible for the twenty-five players and the batboy, his son Ryan.

  They stopped in Denver, then Seattle, before arriving in Alaska. “We arrived in the middle of the night, only to find it was not dark,” Merl said, “something we found hard to adjust to when trying to sleep.” Commerce in Alaska was different too. The McDonald’s charged 99¢ for a hamburger, not 39¢ like the McDonald’s back home. The team stayed in the Gold Rush Hotel, which Merl said was a jumping joint with plenty to tempt his young college players. “We got along pretty well, but as the saying goes, what you don’t know can’t hurt you,” Merl said. “I have to admit finding our infielder tied up and nearly nude on the elevator when the door opened in the lobby is a lot funnier today than it was then.” Merl never learned what actually happened.