The Baseball Whisperer Read online

  At the time, there were three principal leagues for college players—one in Alaska, one on Cape Cod, and the Jayhawk League with teams mostly in Kansas. These collegiate leagues were well established and well funded, with connections to college coaches and professional scouts. The gulf between the teams in those leagues and the one Merl wanted to start, he learned, could hardly have been greater. “Merl was ready to give it up,” Nichols told the Omaha World-Herald. “It was financial problems more than anything else. They were scrounging, passing the hat around at games. You can imagine how much money they were getting. It wouldn’t even pay for balls. So we decided to get a bunch of fellows together and put the best team on the field that we could.”

  Knowing the team needed a board of directors and a real business plan, Merl invited a group of Clarinda men to the living room of his home on Lincoln Street to lay out his vision for them. One of those men was Richard Graham, his old teenage running buddy who, like Merl, had made something of himself with a good job at Lisle’s. Others included Monty Boswell, a local banker; Larry Bridie, who owned Weil’s clothing store; Millhone, the lawyer and former A’s player; and Scotty Kurtz’s brother Mike. “Merl told them what he had in mind and what he needed,” Mike Kurtz said. “The board was to oversee the raising of money, so he could spend more time managing the team and not soliciting for bats and balls. Merl was persuasive. He commanded the room.” Boswell, who said he was earning only $500 a month at the bank at the time, was amazed that Merl had come up with the money. “He envisioned the whole thing,” said Boswell.

  The men agreed to form a board of directors, and Millhone drew up legal documents of incorporation. Clarinda A’s baseball would be a legal entity. Boswell served as treasurer. “He could talk Eskimos into buying snowballs,” Boswell said. “He knew he had you if you liked baseball. This was something for the kids and family to do. He got businesses to support it. He used every angle you could. He had a doctorate in psychology.” Hobby Dobby!

  Merl started that version of the A’s with some of his old players, like Scotty Kurtz, and then recruited players from Iowa Western, Creighton University, the University of Nebraska, and Oral Roberts University. His formula worked: the A’s finished the year 44-21, winning the Iowa state championship. The A’s also qualified for the National Baseball Congress tournament in Wichita, a premier showcase for players, and they finished there with one win and two losses. Again, the indomitable Kurtz led the pitchers, with 140 strikeouts in 106 innings, while Noel Bogdanski, a slugging first baseman from Chicago, led the hitters with a phenomenal .451 average. Just making it to Wichita put the A’s ahead of other more established programs and made them aware of Merl and his boys. The next year the A’s defended their state title, finishing 47-17 and going 2-2 in Wichita. One of their players that year, Steve Macko, Merl’s first recruit from Texas, would go on to sign with Merl’s favorite team, the Chicago Cubs, and become the first A’s player to make it to the majors.

  That winter, Merl convinced the board that he needed to travel to the annual American Baseball Coaches Association convention, the largest national gathering of coaches, primarily on the college level. He said it would give him a chance to spread the word about his team, pick up information on how to make the A’s program better, and build relationships with coaches. The board agreed to cover his expenses, and Walt Pritchard, a board member and manager of the local Hy-Vee grocery store, drove Merl to St. Louis, where the convention was held that year. Through his work selling advertising for the Clarinda Herald-Journal, Merl knew Pritchard well: Hy-Vee was one of his largest accounts at the paper. For years Merl had persuaded Pritchard to buy one or two pages of advertising a week. This would be a constant pattern for Merl—mixing his passion for and management of the A’s with his real job as an ad salesman. Fortunately for him, he was good at both.

  Pritchard said that Merl, with his great size and easy manner, was a natural with the other coaches. Bob Uecker, the mediocre catcher for the Milwaukee Braves who had a .200 career batting average but who became a Hall of Fame broadcaster, was the featured speaker at the convention that year. Uecker, who was known for his humor, used to joke that the best way to catch a knuckleball was to pick it up when it stopped rolling.

  The big names of college coaching were there too, but few of them were familiar with Merl or Clarinda. Merl struck up a conversation with Tom Hinkle, a coach at a smaller school, Cal Poly–San Luis Obispo, and talked to him about his program. Merl told him of his own background as a professional player, his philosophy as a coach, and the A’s successes. He also sold Clarinda as a virtuous place with good values and a town that loved the game. Hinkle told Merl that he had one player he really thought could benefit from playing better competition, a kid with a great work ethic and high potential—a shortstop named Ozzie Smith.

  5

  Baseball Family

  OZZIE SMITH MIGHT not have been the best negotiator on his first professional contract, but his rapid rise to major league baseball proved to be a windfall for Merl and the A’s. He became central to the team’s identity, an exemplar of the kind of player a young man could become with enough effort and drive. Being able to point to Smith made recruiting easier for Merl Eberly. At the annual convention, coaches began to be drawn to the soft-spoken man with a humble bearing who could speak their language. After Smith’s rise to the majors, scouts routinely appeared in the stands at Clarinda’s Municipal Stadium. This was an era in baseball that predated cell phones, laptops, and the advanced metrics of Bill James, the guru of a revolutionary, data-driven approach. In 1978 the opinion of scouts mattered.

  The town was also fully supporting the team, with families signing up as house parents for the players to the point that Pat and Merl didn’t always need to host them themselves. Moreover, local businesses were willing to donate money to help maintain the program. Some would give $50, and others would give $500. Merl just kept asking until he had enough money for that year’s budget.

  He was as relentless as a fund-raiser as he had been as a baseball player, and he needed to be. The Clarinda A’s were competing against teams with triple their budget, and a couple of them were owned by millionaires who had no problem writing big checks. Their buses had fresh glossy paint, air conditioning, and, later, stereo music. They stayed in the best hotels the towns had to offer. One coach complained that there was no motel with a swimming pool in Clarinda where he and his team could stay. Merl, by contrast, didn’t concern himself with the amenities. He might return with the team on the Blue Goose at 4:00 A.M. from a trip to Hutchinson, Kansas, sleep for just a couple of hours, and then, with clipboard in hand, walk to work and make his rounds in the dual capacity of Clarinda Herald-Journal advertising salesman and A’s chief booster. He would write articles about the games for the newspaper and mention the A’s in his column, simply titled “Sports Shorts by ME.” Merl was a walking journalistic conflict of interest, but that never seemed to bother anyone much.

  Merl worked at the newspaper to feed his family and pay his bills, but he lived for coaching. Coaches are tribal. They have their own rituals and folkways, derivative of the military in many ways. The best coaches are a blend of teacher, salesman, and authority figure. They have to be able to deliver bad news to players who have an elevated opinion of their skills, they have to be able to manage egos, and they have to know how to motivate a player after failure. Jim Dietz, who coached at San Diego State and whose teams won more than 1,500 games, is by any measure a master coach. He was accustomed to quickly sizing up players and others in the world of baseball. From the moment he met Merl and saw his teams play at the National Baseball Congress World Series in Wichita, he knew he had found a man he could trust. There was his easy manner, his trusting eyes, and his easily detected passion for the game and for his hometown. “Merl came across as genuine the instant you were around him,” Dietz said. “Merl had the slow, Midwestern way of speaking. He never raised his voice much, and when he did you paid attention.

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bsp; “Sometimes you have to make judgments on people very quickly,” Dietz said. “As a coach, I’ve always had to make judgments on people. And it’s hard to do that. But the minute you met him, the minute you listened to him, you could sense—just like how animals know instinctively who is good and who is bad—Merl came off as genuine [as soon as] you were around him. A great man isn’t necessarily a rich man. To me, great is that you have been successful with your family, with your conviction, you are always taking into consideration the feelings of somebody first rather than your own feelings. And that’s how Merl was. To me, that’s a great person.”

  Dietz also admired the fact that Merl took his team’s weakness—its remote location and chronic underfunding—and turned it into a strength. “He tried to instill in those kids that just because you don’t have a lot doesn’t mean you can’t succeed.” Merl and the people of Clarinda, Dietz felt, “influenced young men’s lives more than they will ever know.” The combination of the Eberlys and the town made Clarinda an ideal place for Dietz to send players. “I wanted our players to get a chance to enjoy a small-town atmosphere. And see how other people live in the United States,” he said. His players always had the same reaction when he told them where he wanted them to play that summer: where is Clarinda?

  Summer ball to Dietz was more about player development than winning. “You have to teach how to win and how to lose. You do it by being consistent with your personality. The thing I liked about Merl was that he had really strict rules of behavior, like no alcohol or drugs and that people had to be responsible for their actions. If he did have a problem with a kid, he didn’t have any problem sending him home.” Because of his appreciation for the A’s program, Dietz tried to send Merl some of his best players. One of them was a young left-handed pitcher named Buddy Black, a player with a reputation for combining high character with high skills. “Buddy is a very special person,” Dietz said. “I wanted him in a good environment. I knew that Clarinda was a fair program. I told Merl I wouldn’t send him anybody who couldn’t help him. I did that as a favor to Bud and a favor to Merl.”

  In that same era of college baseball, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Augie Garrido, who was just making his way into the ranks of Division 1 coaches, also started sending players to Clarinda. At the time he was the baseball coach at Cal State–Fullerton, a program that he would build into a national champion. Garrido had a gregarious personality and was a natural recruiter and teacher. As his teams became winners, the crowds at their games grew. One student who showed up for games wasn’t quite good enough to make the team but would later prove plenty good enough to play baseball in the movies. Kevin Costner would star in Bull Durham, the story of a career minor leaguer never quite up to making “The Show,” and Field of Dreams, in which an Iowa farmer listens to a mysterious voice (“If you build it, they will come”), plows under his corn, and builds a baseball field so that Shoeless Joe Jackson can come back and play the game he loved. Garrido saw what Merl had built as a nonfiction version of Field of Dreams.

  Baseball is its own small world. The connection Merl made with Garrido in Alaska would eventually lead to Garrido sending players to Clarinda for the summer. He knew he could entrust his players to Merl. When players came back talking about their experience, he knew that Merl had built something special. “I not only listened to them talk in a positive way but also came to recognize they were becoming more mature as a result of the experience,” Garrido said. “They had a better grip of being on their own, making good choices for themselves on and off the field. They were more responsible and accountable for the choices they made. They had a stronger attitude and greater respect for the game of baseball. Their work ethic grew. It seemed to me they became not only better baseball players but also better people. The environment in Clarinda, the city made up of the people, made up of the team, led by Merl, supported by everyone—he was the leader, but it took all of that to embrace and inspire the players to be better baseball players and better people. It isn’t any one thing. It is a combination of all things.”

  At the time, coaches like Garrido counted on summer teams to help their players reach full potential. They didn’t use data analytics and advanced metrics to track player statistics, and even the best schools didn’t have strength coaches and nutritionists to monitor development and health. Players played baseball, and to get better they played even more. Since Merl packed the A’s schedule with up to seventy games in a summer, players played essentially every day from the moment they arrived in Clarinda until their final game in August. They lived the grind of travel along the interstates and smaller highways of the Midwest, but they also learned the value of consistent play and commitment.

  “Merl recruited with the endorsement of the players who played for him,” Garrido said. “Players who played there came back and told coaches what a great experience they had. When my players came back and explained all that, I didn’t hesitate to send my best player there. He helped the player help himself to fulfill his destiny as a player and person. Now it starts with the truth, ends up being respect, and develops a lifelong relationship. Merl was a master at that. What he did was he inspired people. He gave people hope.”

  Gary Pullins, the coach at Brigham Young University at the time, did most of his business with Merl by phone. Merl would call and ask if Pullins had any players who would “feel comfortable” in Clarinda. Pullins knew he had to send top prospects because otherwise their summer would be a season of frustration as they tried to compete against some of the best in college baseball. After one or two phone calls, Merl would send a summer contract for one of the BYU players, and sometimes he would simply send Pullins a blank contract. Pullins said he was sometimes reluctant to send players to Clarinda because he was afraid they couldn’t compete. He took a chance on one pitcher, Matt Young, and soon realized he had made a mistake. “He was over his head, and I had made a poor assessment and sent him where he shouldn’t have been yet. But Merl gave him a chance to play and treated him as well as he treated Ozzie Smith or Von Hayes.”

  Pullins and Merl had that level of trust in each other. Merl had a great pitch, talking up the virtues of summer in the Midwest, the “breadbasket of America,” and sometimes he would send a picture of the team’s bus. But then, unlike a lot of summer coaches, he would also send Pullins progress reports on his players.

  Pullins finally met Merl at the coaches’ convention in Miami in the late 1970s, and he found out that meeting Merl meant meeting Pat as well. “It was a duo,” Pullins said. Pat gave him confidence that the players would be well cared for off the field, and he quickly found out that she ran most aspects of the team that did not involve each day’s game. “She probably did 90 percent of the things off the field, 10 percent on the field,” Pullins said. “I can’t think of any other field coach whose wife was as involved with the community and the team and the kids as Pat. That played big with me. Merl could have been the commercial; Pat is the program.”

  Baseball has a fraternal quality. Guys are thrown together and told they are a team, with the hope that they actually evolve into one. Summer ball is even more challenging because players come from different schools and different parts of the country, and they know they will be together only for a couple of months. They also feel extraordinary pressure to perform. This is their chance to be discovered, especially for players who don’t come from big-time baseball schools. A player might get only one or two shots at showing a scout enough to call his name in to a major league team. In summer ball, there are also no guarantees of playing time; with players having to compete with each other, jealousies can form quickly. It is an extraordinary test of a coach to have his summer players think of themselves as a team, not as independent contractors bent on putting up individual numbers. So when college coaches think they have found a good summer program, they stick with it.

  Duane Banks coached at the University of Iowa—Tedore’s alma mater—for twenty-eight years. Once he met Merl, he knew he had fo
und someone he could trust. “I just liked him because of the passion he had for the game,” Banks said. “You visit with him, it just seemed like he was spitting out baseballs.” Banks knew that Merl struggled to keep the A’s afloat and that other programs offered more amenities and more alluring locations. But he also knew that for one of his best young pitchers, Cal Eldred, a small-town Iowa boy just like Merl once was, Clarinda was a perfect place. Merl had a way of calming pitchers with simple advice: Trust your stuff. Throw your best pitch. “He came back a better pitcher,” Banks said. “He really liked Merl. He just thought Merl and Pat were ‘my second parents.’ That is a great tribute coming from anyone.”

  Merl’s style was not to try to ingratiate himself with the coaches so much as to make a personal connection, like the good salesman that he was. He also knew the value of spending time with coaches—picking up the phone to catch up or having them come sit on his porch to talk baseball and life. “He told it like it is,” said Bob Warn, the former coach at Indiana State, who sent twenty-nine players to the major leagues and won 1,131 games. “He did not hesitate to let you know if he disagreed. He would give you his opinion. As soon as people were with him for a small length of time, you knew you could trust him. He was hardworking. He would work on the field himself. He would break his neck to raise money to keep the program afloat.”