The Baseball Whisperer Page 4
The players tested Merl and his rules. Some of them brought beer into the barracks where they stayed in Kenai, but Ryan, the batboy, saw it and told his father. When Merl went to check, the players denied having any beer. Eight-year-old Ryan proceeded to show Merl where the stash was being kept, thus earning the nickname “Ryan the Rat.”
The A’s were playing teams not only with long-standing reputations as powerhouses but with budgets of $150,000 to $200,000. The A’s first opponent was the Fairbanks Goldpanners, at the time the NBC’s number-one-ranked team. Merl’s boys beat them three out of four, losing the last game in extra innings. Then the A’s traveled to Anchorage to take on the number-three team—they won four out of five against the Anchorage Bucs. Augie Garrido, the college coach who hadn’t been impressed by Smith in high school, was managing the Anchorage team that summer. Before the final game, Garrido joked with Merl at the conference at home plate: “You better let me win one or they will run me out of town.” Garrido also gained a new appreciation that summer for Ozzie Smith.
In Fairbanks, the A’s played in the annual “Midnight Sun” game before 7,500 fans. The A’s jumped to an early lead, and most of the home team supporters had left by the seventh inning. The A’s then challenged Kenai, ranked number six nationally. After enjoying the sight of a glacier on the way to Kenai, the A’s stayed in a spartan army barracks there. Kenai was essentially a town carved out of wilderness, and its field was like nothing Merl had ever seen. “On the first night we arrived at the park only to see dump trucks unloading dirt at first base—I don’t mean one load but several, and it just seemed to disappear. It was our first sight and experience of Tundra Turf,” referring to a then-new artificial grass. “It was finally playable,” Merl said, “and we won.” Their pitching was depleted, though, and the A’s would lose three out of five to Kenai. Still, they were the first team to travel to Alaska and leave with a winning record.
It was in one of the final games against Kenai that Merl saw in Smith the potential to be a big league shortstop. An opposing hitter smoked a liner that hit the pitcher’s mound. “It’s headed for center field, and we’re sitting on the bench thinking, ‘Well, that’s the ball game,’” Merl said.
“All of a sudden, we realized that Ozzie had come up with the ball behind second base, and he’s stepping on the bag to force the runner. It was an unbelievable play just getting to the ball. A ball that hits the mound like that and skips is going pretty good. But the play wasn’t even close at second. How he got there, I still don’t know.”
After a long journey, the A’s arrived home to good news. Their Alaska swing had been noticed by the folks who compiled the NBC rankings and the Clarinda A’s were the new number-one team in the country. The team went to the north steps of the Page County Courthouse, where the mayor and other officials, along with their home fans, were waiting for a welcome-home ceremony. “There was little doubt in anyone’s mind . . . that our program had arrived,” Merl said.
“When I first heard the news, I was pleased, elated . . . all the things that are associated with being No. 1,” Merl told the Omaha World-Herald. “Here we were, a little town in southwestern Iowa. Everybody asked where Clarinda was whenever we went anywhere. They don’t anymore.”
Paul Dees, president of the NBC that year, went to Clarinda after the season. He said, “Clarinda should be proud of the A’s for what they did in Alaska. No other team had ever won a series from the Alaskans on their home ground. The Alaska teams hardly ever lose four or five games a month, let alone in one series with one team.”
The victories continued to pile up. By late July, the A’s were 51-8. The first Blue Goose, which was donated to the team the year before by a local doctor, Bill Kuehn, was churning through thousands of miles of Midwest highways, almost always with Darwin Buch at the wheel. “We’ve had strong teams before, players who could put the ball out of the park,” Merl said. “But from the standpoint of slugging, running, fielding—the complete ballplayers—this is the strongest.” As a team, they were hitting .312, while limiting their opponents to .217.
When it was time for the NBC tournament in Wichita that summer, Clarinda’s prowess was no longer a secret. As Bill Hodge wrote in the Wichita Eagle-Beacon: “Clarinda where? That’s what people used to say about the southwest Iowa community of 6,000 when its residents would venture forth to the big towns outside their own state. No more. The Clarinda Iowa A’s are rated as the nation’s number one nonprofessional team.”
Somehow Scotty Kurtz, now in his mid-thirties, was still throwing hard with his strong left arm, and he and Unruh from Oral Roberts led the pitching. Unruh was 11-1 in 94 innings, with 88 strikeouts and an ERA of 2.01. Kurtz was 8-0, with 79 strikeouts in 65 innings and a phenomenal ERA of 0.97. But the A’s fell short of making it to the nationals: losing in the regional tournament in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, they finished the year at 60-10.
Though Smith was a great fielder, he was not even among the top five hitters on the A’s that year. Nevertheless, he had developed into a more complete player. He hit with occasional power, and playing every day had brought his talent into full bloom. The summer strengthened him as a person too, and his bond with Merl and his family grew stronger by the day. Smith spent a great deal of time at the Eberlys’ home, getting to know their children as well as the couple. He ate meals there—including Merl’s homemade ice cream—and sat in the family room and watched television with the family. He saw in Merl traits he longed for in a male role model. Merl was strict, but kind. He showed great affection for his family and his players, and he was a great competitor. When Smith left Clarinda after the first summer, he knew he wanted to stay connected to the Eberlys, and he did.
Smith could see in some of the players from the old town team, men like Scotty Kurtz, just how Merl used baseball to establish unshakable personal connections. Kurtz thought nothing of working all day at the Lisle Corporation and then going to pitch for the A’s at night. “For most of us who come here and become part of the program, Merl becomes either an extension of your father or he becomes that total father figure, that disciplinarian, that person who lays down the rules and you’ve got to abide by those rules, and if you don’t abide by those rules, you can’t be a part of this,” Smith said. That discipline made players own up to their responsibilities to the team and to the town. Merl also understood that Smith had found what he was looking for—the chance to see where he stood in the world of baseball and determine whether he had a chance to be a professional. “I believed I could compete,” Smith said. “It was all about getting the opportunity.”
When Smith returned to Cal Poly–San Luis Obispo, he was no longer a skinny kid with some talent. He was starting to hit, he could steal bases, and his defense was peerless. Professional teams started to take notice. After his junior year, Smith was drafted by the Detroit Tigers in the eighth round. One of his first calls was to Merl, seeking his summer coach’s advice. The Tigers were offering Smith an $8,500 bonus. Smith wanted $10,000. He was so close to earning his degree, and he thought he could earn at least that much in a job outside of baseball. Merl told him it wouldn’t hurt to ask. The Tigers said they didn’t have more to offer, and Smith turned them down. Instead, he spent another summer with Merl and the A’s.
The team was building quite a reputation at that point, and Merl found that coaches were eager to talk to him about sending players to the cornfields. He now had to make hard choices about selecting players rather than worrying about having nine players who wouldn’t get embarrassed, as in the early days. He and Pat made one significant change in the program that would bring the town in more as partners. The dorms at the junior college weren’t really suitable for the players for an entire summer. So Pat and Merl decided that they would ask families in town to take the players in, provide them with meals and a nurturing environment, and give them a real taste of Midwestern hospitality. Pat had some trouble at first getting enough families to participate, so in the early years she and Merl ho
sted seven players in their basement, in addition to their five children still living at home. They believed in making room for more.
Ozzie Smith’s host “mother” during his second summer was Anabel Lisle, whose family had founded the most successful business in the history of the town. Smith spent a lot of his free time, though, at the Eberlys’ house. Pat recalled his penchant for sitting on the front porch and polishing his shoes. He blended in easily with the Eberly children, especially Julie and Rick, the older of the siblings. “He seemed like family,” Pat said.
Danny Gans’s performance on the field was even better than his impromptu impressions that made the bus trips bearable. Gans hit .391 for the year and put himself in a position to be drafted the next summer. He would play a single season in the minors for the White Sox, his career ended by a serious injury to his Achilles tendon. He would go on to become a professional using his other talents—on Broadway and as a headliner in Las Vegas, where he earned the Entertainer of the Year Award twelve times. He also had roles in movies, including one as the third baseman in the movie Bull Durham.
In 1976, Merl had created the toughest schedule yet for the A’s—all chiefs, no Indians—and they went on to a record of 65-13. For the first time in team history, they placed third in the NBC national tournament, where Smith won the Sportsmanship Award.
Merl’s son Rick Eberly, a taciturn kid who could hit like his dad in his playing prime, was positioned at third base next to Smith. Eberly was playing for the A’s after his first year in junior college, and he was intimidated by the competition. He struggled at the plate—rare for a son of Merl—but he was learning more about what it took to play the game at this level by watching Smith. “His work ethic was unbelievable,” Rick Eberly said. “Nobody compared to the time he would spend on his art, and that was fielding. Dad hit him one hundred a night—that was pretty regular. It carried over to some of us. We would put more time in. He was just a leader the way he did things. He wasn’t a great hitter, but he would hit .300. He saved more runs than most people ever drive in.”
Just four years removed from being seen as a kid with limited potential, Smith returned to California for school this time as an almost certain pro prospect. He was drafted in the fourth round by the San Diego Padres, higher than the year before, but he was offered less money because he had lost the leverage that college juniors have—namely, the prospect of choosing school over signing a professional contract.
“Being the good businessman I am, I signed for $5,000,” Smith said, laughing, “and a bus ticket to Walla Walla, Washington,” where he had his first minor league assignment with the Walla Walla Padres, a Single A affiliate. After only sixty-six games there, he was called up to San Diego, where he played for two years before being traded to St. Louis. He remained in the majors for the next eighteen years.
3
“Come Out or Get Out”
MERL EBERLY CROUCHED behind the aged wooden grandstand at the Clarinda High School football field and hurled insults and rocks at the players who had turned out for practice that crisp fall afternoon. He had a great arm and great aim. He was with three of his friends, and this was their idea of fun. They had become experts at wasting time. Trying more to annoy the players than to hurt them, they were clearly looking for attention, and it wasn’t long before they got it. The new coach, John Tedore, a jut-jawed World War II hero and former University of Iowa quarterback, saw them out of the corner of his eye and lit out toward them in a full sprint. Merl’s gutless sidekicks took off down the street as fast as they could, but Merl just stood there. Sometimes the second chance comes at a moment you least expect it.
Tedore sized him up quickly, just as he did with men in the military and on the football field. Merl had an athlete’s body, six-foot-two and 190 pounds. With his ink-black hair, slicked over to the side, he was a handsome young man. He also had a pair of dark eyes that conveyed sadness. Tedore got close to him, pulled his shoulders back, thrust out his chest, and gave Merl a challenge: “Come out or get out.”
Tedore, who had led men in combat, easily won over the wayward teenager. Merl had been looking for a long time for someone to see something other than no good in him. He was a high school dropout deluding himself by thinking that he and his buddies had become men because they had jobs, drank, and did pretty much as they pleased. “There were five or six of us, running around, trying to be big men,” Merl said. “We were earning our money, being our own bosses. We’d come down to watch practice and mostly to pick on our friends.”
They were no match for Tedore, who was a type they had only seen in the movies, a man who battled the Nazis in Italy and France. His unit, a forerunner of U.S. Army Special Forces, specialized in dangerous night raids. The black boot polish on their faces earned them the name “Black Devils” from the Nazis, and the label took hold. They were in battle almost constantly, attacking machine gun nests, conducting dangerous, tip-of-the-spear kind of raids. In a letter home to his parents, published in the Waterloo Courier on June 22, 1944, Tedore wrote:
We walked and fought all the way, mostly through the mountains and at times it got pretty rough. For four days and nights, we weren’t able to sleep because we had the Germans running pretty fast, and since they were doing that, I could see why we kept after them. I was glad in a way because we were able to get finished quicker. Our forces were the first troops into Rome, and I guess that will be something to be proud about.
In Tedore’s unit, 400 men died and 2,000 were wounded. Tedore spent 254 days in combat, and 235 days on the front, by the end of the war. He never sustained a serious injury and earned a Bronze Star. In 2015 Tedore and other members of his unit were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award the U.S. Congress can deliver. Past recipients have included General Douglas MacArthur, the Tuskegee Airmen, and Winston Churchill.
Tedore’s heroics did not stop in Italy. He returned from war to quarterback the University of Iowa Hawkeyes and was cocaptain of the baseball team. A natural leader, he chose teaching as his profession. When he arrived in Clarinda, his reputation had preceded him, giving him instant stature in the small town. He was what most folks in Clarinda would call a “man’s man.” He was a strict teacher in the classroom and on the football field, imposing a military-style discipline on his teams and riding his players hard. Those who didn’t give full effort soon found themselves doing laps on the cinder track that encircled the field, which for some reason measured only four hundred yards around instead of the standard quarter-mile. He also didn’t hesitate to punch a player in the chest or slap his helmet with an open palm, inspiring that strange blend of fear and admiration common among football coaches of that era. His players lived for his validation.
When he encountered Merl at the fence that day, Tedore could see in the teenager’s face that he wanted something but didn’t seem to know how to ask. He talked to another coach, Al Gray, who knew about Merl’s past. Gray told him that the young man was from a broken home, his family was poor, and he was rudderless. Merl had been told by his grandparents that he would have to go back to school if he was going to live with them.
Merl was struck by the attention Tedore showed him, even if it seemed negative. Tedore was the type of man who had been absent from Merl’s life, a role model who was strong and principled. So, after more than two years of being out of school, Merl decided to re-enroll. He was now behind kids with whom he had started elementary school, when his life was less filled with conflict and contradiction. He would be entering school as a sophomore while his original classmates were starting their senior year. Within a couple of days, he went to Tedore and asked for a chance to make the football team. He found it an easy sell. Tedore was sympathetic to Merl, and it didn’t take long for the coach to see the athletic and human potential in the young man who had been the team’s tormentor. Merl stayed in school this time, in large part because “coaches had such a big impact on me with their discipline. I liked it when I went back.”
Merl would lay his lanky frame flat out along the riverbank, his strong right arm feeling for a hole where a flathead catfish might be swimming. He read the banks of the river well and knew the locations of the natural cavities formed by tree roots and rocks. If the hole was too big, there might be a beaver or some other creature inside. If a catfish was there, though, he would know soon enough by the sting of its strong bite on his hand. If he could hang tough and get ahold of the fish by latching his fingers onto the gill and mouth, he would have his catch. He thrilled to the rush of pulling it from the water. Sometimes he’d haul in one weighing forty pounds, though twenty was more the norm. It was all a matter of feel. He didn’t need a line, a pole, or bait, which was good, because he couldn’t afford any of it.
He often walked the mile from Clarinda to the river with his teenage friends Richard Graham and Wayne Johnson, all of them like latter-day Huck Finns. Rather than noodling themselves, Graham and Johnson more often served as lookouts, scouting up and down the river, watching for a county sheriff. Merl was the one with the physical skill and courage. When he succeeded, which was often, they would take the fish back to Clarinda, and a friend at the A&W Drive-In would fry it for them—a gourmet meal by their standards. The fact that noodling was illegal in Iowa only added to the allure.