The Baseball Whisperer Page 6
Then it was time for baseball, the sport that quickly became his favorite. Like many in Iowa, Merl was a fan of the Chicago Cubs, having listened to them on the radio. He had played some sandlot ball over the years, but nothing formal. His father had helped coach a town team in the 1930s, but there is no evidence that he had any role in passing the game on to his son. Clarinda High had abandoned its baseball program years before, but Tedore was determined to get one started again. He sized Merl up quickly as a catcher, with his large body, strong arm, and ability to lead. He liked the relentless way Merl played, never giving up on a play in football and running out every ball in baseball. “He was a dream player as far as I was concerned,” Tedore said.
First, they had to have a field. Tedore, with Vern Woodward and Bill Bench, bought a book that showed how to lay out a diamond. They decided on an open patch of land just east of the county fairgrounds that had been used for farm demonstrations and walking cattle. Borrowing a tractor from Tony Jennings, a local gas station owner, the three men went to work. They put ninety feet between the bases and built up a pitcher’s mound sixty feet, six inches from home plate. There were no outfield fences. When they finished, Clarinda had its Municipal Stadium and the national pastime could return to Clarinda High School.
Merl instantly showed his skill behind the plate and as a left-handed hitter with power. If there had been fences, Merl would have been hitting the ball over them. He started to do better in school too. Sports had focused him, and Tedore had guided him. Merl no longer looked to drinking for an escape. Now that someone had seen potential in him and had been willing to give him a chance, Merl was starting to see himself in a different light. This was an era of bobby socks, Chubby Checker, and The Ed Sullivan Show on television, at least for those families that could afford a TV. It was a time when many thought that what was good for General Motors was good for the country. The Soviet Union was emerging as an enemy, and there was a war in Korea. Merl’s family “liked Ike.”
Clarinda at that time had the trappings of other small towns, with a Woolworth’s five-and-dime, a J. C. Penney department store, and two movie theaters downtown—the Rialto, where you could watch two motion pictures for a dime on Saturday afternoon, and the Clarinda Theater, where The Glenn Miller Story premiered with Jimmy Stewart in attendance. Kids went skating at Grimes Rollerdome. They ate ice cream at the Frosty Shoppe on Sixteenth and Grant or grabbed a hamburger at the Dew Drop Inn, one of many places that claimed to have invented the pressed meat sandwich. On Saturday night, folks would flock to Lottie Bailey’s popcorn stand, located under the stairway that led to a dentist’s office. Along with the A&W Drive-In, there were several other restaurants where kids could pass the time—when they weren’t driving around with no place to go.
The high school kids met at the Cardinal Canteen, a place to dance, eat, listen to music, flirt, and fall in love. The Canteen was an especially hot spot after home football or basketball games on weekend nights. Students served on the board of the Canteen and worked at the front desk. One Friday night, it was Pat Heil’s turn.
Pat was in many ways Merl’s opposite. She was a joiner, a member of clubs, an honor roll student, and the daughter of a prosperous local jeweler. Outwardly social and popular, she was an attractive cheerleader and bound for college when that wasn’t common for small-town women. That night a former boyfriend kept coming up and asking if he could take her home. She repeatedly told him no, but he wouldn’t relent.
This was a moment for which Merl had been waiting a long time. Remembering Pat from their grade school days, he’d had his eyes on her since he returned to Clarinda. He stood before the former boyfriend, glowered at him, and said, “She’s going with me.”
Pat didn’t know quite what to think, though she was impressed by the gallantry. She had known Merl from sports and from classes and was struck by his good looks, but had never thought of him as a love interest. She agreed to let Merl drive her home. Merl later told her that he knew that night that she was the woman he wanted to marry. Pat wasn’t thinking nearly that far ahead, but she did allow that he could call her and they would go out on a date.
Though Merl was a year older, Pat was ahead of him in school because of the time he had lost when he dropped out. They were not a match in other ways as well. Pat’s parents were concerned about their future because of the differences in their backgrounds and wondered if those differences could be reconciled if the relationship became serious. Pat was an only child who had served as both daughter and “son” to her father, who exposed her to sports along with dance and piano recitals. She would be forever grateful that her dad had introduced her to the joys of baseball.
They dated the rest of Pat’s senior year. Then she said her good-byes to Merl in the late summer of 1954 and headed off that fall to Iowa State University in Ames to study home economics. He went back to Clarinda High School.
At school, just weeks into her first semester, Pat realized that she was pregnant. She was startled, and a little afraid. She called her parents and arranged to come home. She then contacted Merl, who was home for lunch, to tell him the news. “That’s it, we’re getting married,” he said with a certitude that didn’t square with the difficult road ahead. Merl’s father had moved back to Clarinda to work as a mason and carpenter for a local builder. He thought his son’s path was clear-cut: quit school, get a job, and support your family. But Pat’s father strongly disagreed and said it was more important for Merl to get an education beyond high school. His view prevailed.
The wedding ceremony took place on Wednesday, October 6, 1954, with only their parents and two friends, Charlie Warner and Joanne Foster as their best man and maid of honor, in attendance—as though they could keep the marriage a secret in a small town. Merl tried to hide his wedding band the next day at football practice by putting tape over it. He didn’t fool Coach Tedore.
“What did you do, Eberly?” Tedore asked. “Did you hurt your hand?”
When she looked back on that time decades later—two young kids from different sides of the tracks, thrust into a marriage by accident rather than design—Pat said, “There wasn’t anybody who gave us a chance in hell of making it. Our backgrounds were so different.” Six months later, Julie Kae Eberly was born. Merl and Pat created an apartment in the basement of Pat’s family home, and they started their life together. Pat tried to adapt. She knew how to cook only French toast and cornmeal mush, a favorite of her grandfather. She had never done much ironing or cleaning; her mother had always done that. Merl took temporary jobs, doing some construction.
After he graduated, Merl enrolled at Clarinda Junior College on a basketball scholarship, studying education, and working nights at Kearney Company, a small toolmaker, to earn money to support the family. Pat had enrolled as well, and she also took a part-time job at the Clarinda Herald-Journal, writing mainly social news. After a year, though, she decided to leave school, thinking it was “more important for him to get his second year than it was for me.” She took a job as a secretary to the principal at Clarinda High School, but her time there lasted just one semester. When school officials discovered she was pregnant with her second child, they dismissed her, saying they didn’t employ expectant mothers.
Merl also continued to play baseball, now for the newly constituted town team, the Clarinda Merchants. Baseball had come early to Clarinda; in 1910 its team became one of six charter members of the professional MINK League, named for teams from Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. That league folded after the 1913 season, only to be reborn years later, in the late twentieth century, as a collegiate league. Clarinda also had semipro-caliber town teams into the 1940s, including the one coached by Merl’s father. The Depression and World War II drained both energy and talent, though, and the teams disbanded.
After John Tedore led the construction of a real baseball diamond for the high school in 1954, the idea of a new town team began to take hold. Interest in baseball was high, as the National Football League and
the National Basketball Association were in their nascent phases and television was for the privileged few. Baseball was still the game to listen to or watch in person. Fans in Iowa were divided between their love of the Chicago Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals, and they never tired of listening to the broadcasts of Harry Caray, then the colorful Cards announcer, or Jack Brickhouse, the more boosterish voice of the Cubs, whom Caray would later replace. Other small towns in the area, all within a forty-mile radius, had teams, so there was ready-made competition and rivalry. Organizers solicited donations from local businesses, whose names would be stitched onto the backs of players’ uniforms for a team they named the Clarinda Merchants. The starting catcher and cleanup hitter in the Merchants’ inaugural game in May 1955 was Merl Eberly, fresh from Clarinda High School; they won their franchise opener, 9–5, over Shenandoah, their rival from eighteen miles away.
Merl, as the best player, also took a leadership role on the team. He went with Pat’s father, Al Heil, to Kansas City, where the jeweler had a contact in the wholesale business, to buy uniforms. Merl stood by while Heil negotiated the price of the jerseys and pants. The price went down, but he wasn’t satisfied. “I suppose you will also throw in the catcher’s equipment?” he said. When the salesman balked, Heil started to walk out of the store.
Suddenly the catcher’s gear was part of the deal. Merl was impressed by the experience; it taught him a lesson in both sales and persistence. Pat’s father was one of many in Clarinda who gave Merl a second chance. “I don’t think Merl could have prospered in a different environment,” said John Lisle, whose family started the Lisle Corporation. “These small towns are pretty nurturing.”
Like a lot of town teams in the Midwest, the Merchants traveled to other towns twenty to forty miles away to play, mostly on weekends. They played country hardball, without fancy equipment. Hundreds of people would come watch them play at Municipal Stadium, about the same time that the country was warming to Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. There is no recollection among Merl’s family that his father or mother ever saw him play more than a few organized games.
On the field, Merl was an outstanding player and known throughout the area for his power as a hitter and his ability as a catcher. The Des Moines Register noted at the time that while Eberly was a standout athlete who had been contacted by the Baltimore Orioles, he had “recently acquired a problem”—he had gotten married. Nevertheless, during one game in the summer of 1956 in nearby Stanton, Merl had a particularly good game, and that proved fortuitous. Sometimes baseball opportunity can come down to the one game where the player performs at just the right time. Watching Merl that night was Max Patkin, who gained fame performing as a clown at stadiums around the country while also serving as a bird dog scout (essentially a freelancer). Patkin called in his assessment of Merl to the Chicago White Sox.
When a White Sox representative called Merl the following February, he thought it must be a joke. Merl was rude to the caller, to the point that the caller said, “If you’re not interested, we’ll just forget it.” The scout again mentioned the game in Stanton and Patkin, and then Merl knew this wasn’t a prank. When he was offered a bonus of $1,000—$500 up front and $500 if he finished the year—and $300 a month to play for the team’s Class D franchise in Holdrege, Nebraska, he could hardly believe what he was hearing. “Pro ball called, and Pat and I thought we were going to get rich,” Merl said.
The young man from Clarinda was being given a shot at the major leagues. After graduating from junior college with his teacher’s certificate, he drove the five hours west, well before there was an interstate to take him there, leaving Pat and two young children behind, to chase his dream.
But because Pat’s father died unexpectedly of a heart attack in May, she decided to stay behind and help her grieving mother. As it turned out, Merl was the one having trouble being alone. He and a teammate were sleeping in what was essentially an old coal bin with two twin beds and two dressers—hardly enough room to move—and he was not happy. He called Pat and said if she wouldn’t come join him, then he might as well come home. “I told her she needed to come to me because I couldn’t enjoy what I was doing without family,” Merl said. Pat decided to be with her new husband, so she packed her car with her daughter Julie and infant son Rick and drove the 260 miles into Nebraska. Before that, she had never driven farther west than Shenandoah, only 18 miles away.
The Clarinda Herald-Journal took note of the trip. “Mrs. Merl Eberly and children Julie Kae and Ricky J. left early this afternoon for Holdrege, Neb., where she will join her husband for the next six weeks. Merl is playing with the farm team of the Chicago White Sox.”
Once his family had joined him, Merl was happy. He was getting paid to play baseball and had a shot at making it to the major leagues. He found out, though, that $300 a month consumed “just about everything I made” after paying rent and buying food. Holdrege was even smaller than Clarinda and was by far the smallest town with a team in the Class D Nebraska League. The infield skin at Holdrege Fairgrounds Park was described as the worst in the league because of all the sand and gravel mixed into the dirt, and there was no grass in the outfield. The team scheduled most of its games on Saturday afternoons to save on electricity and avoid competition with “shopping night” in Holdrege. “The thing I remember most was just how hot it was,” Merl said. “The places most of us stayed there was just one window fan, maybe one air conditioning unit. Every day we prayed for rain but it never came. It was a small town, real laid-back, and they supported the team pretty well . . . Back then, entertainment like that is what people did.”
Even in this new mix of people and players, Merl blended right in, winning over the confidence of pitchers and of his manager, Frank Parenti, who was starting his tenth year as a minor league manager and his first and last at Holdrege. Parenti was five-foot-six, a spitfire of a man who fiercely defended his players. The Sox had new grandstands that year and sold 557 advance season tickets. Local businesses sponsored promotion nights, and a popular one was to award a case of Coca-Cola to players who stole a base. The Holdrege White Sox were a running team that year.
“We drank a lot of Coke that summer,” Merl said.
Merl’s best friend on the team was Jim Wasem, the only other married player. Wasem was fast—ten seconds flat in the 100-yard dash—a strong hitter, and a slick-fielding third baseman. “He could flat out run,” Merl said. Wasem would go on to lead the league in batting with a .366 (he says .372) average, starting the season a torrid 12-for-12. He also led the league in stolen bases, and cases of Coke were stacked to the ceiling in his apartment, which made him popular among teammates. Most of the other players were younger than Merl, who, at twenty-two, was something of an old man on the team. “All of us guys were making $300 or $350 a month, and we thought we were millionaires,” Merl said. The competition on the field in Nebraska League games “was pretty fierce, but it definitely wasn’t first-class.” Neither were the accommodations. “We dressed and showered in an old armory and wore hand-me-down uniforms.”
Wasem and Merl also had in common a love of hunting and fishing, and on the rare off days they would go out together, talking mainly about baseball and basketball. They went frog “gigging” in the sandhills of Nebraska, whacking their prey with a bat or a broomstick. Back in town they would prepare fried frog legs; one time they invited over Parenti, a city guy from Chicago, who thought he was eating chicken. It was the last time Parenti would eat frog legs. Another time when they went fishing their boat began to sink and Merl had to jump into the water. Soaked, he rode back home in the car with Wasem in his skivvies. As it turned out, Pat, home alone with the two kids, had locked the door of their apartment, which was located on the second floor above a bank. Merl was worried he would have to explain to police what he was doing, and it was also past the players’ curfew. Pat eventually let him inside.
On the field, Wasem said Merl was “a big man, a strong man with a good strong arm, and nothing got by him.
” Yet, while Eberly was a great power hitter in Clarinda, Wasem said he “lacked confidence” about hitting in the pros. Nevertheless, his catching remained superb. Phil Groth, who grew up around Des Moines, was one of Holdrege’s best pitchers that year. The Sox had signed him that summer in Omaha, where he had pitched for Iowa State in the College World Series. In twelve games for the Sox, the left-hander had a record of 9-3, with 98 strikeouts in 88 innings. Groth had studied pitching for several years and eventually was able to add several miles an hour to a fastball that complemented what had been a major-league-caliber curveball since high school. He didn’t have expert coaching, videos, or expensive lessons. Instead, he studied still photographs of Warren Spahn, one of the finest left-handed pitchers in baseball, and worked to mimic his mechanics.
“I pitched to a lot of catchers over the years,” Groth said. “I enjoyed pitching to Merl as much as anybody. He gave such a good target. When he first got to Holdrege, he said, ‘Phil, you probably know a lot more about how to pitch and what to throw when. You just throw it and I will do everything I can to stop it.’” Merl gained Groth’s confidence. “He was always so much in the game, and such a fun guy to be with. When he spoke you could believe in him. When he said something, that is what he was going to do.”
Merl was doing well, though not hitting with the power he had shown before, when he dug in at the plate on a hot night in July. As the pitcher stared down at him, Merl fixed his eyes on the pitcher’s arm slot, trying to pick up the ball as soon as possible. It came toward him, a fastball that got away.
There were so many young pitchers at this low level of the minors who could throw ninety miles an hour yet had no idea where the ball was going. The pitch smashed into Merl’s right cheek, crushing his sinuses and leveling him like a knockout punch. You could hear the ball hit bone in the stands. He was bleeding and barely coherent but stumbled to first base and somehow managed to stay in the game. He came back the next inning to catch, and only when he looked up at the umpire, who saw that he was still bleeding, was he forced to leave. Parenti pleaded with him to go to the hospital, but Merl balked at the idea; he ended up going in only for a brief exam and some medications. He refused to stay because he knew it could cost him the other $500 of his bonus and his family needed the money. That night teammates stayed with him until the sun came up, playing pinochle, so that he could stay upright and avoid blood clots.