The Baseball Whisperer

by Michael Tackett

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Frontispiece

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Changed Lives

  A Place to Grow

  “Come Out or Get Out”

  Where the Work Ethic Still Works

  Baseball Family

  National Champions

  Photos

  Merl’s Rules

  No Bright Lights

  Opportunity

  Stepping Off the Field

  Keeping

  Renewal

  The Blue Goose

  Heading Home

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Michael Tackett

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Tackett, Michael.

  Title: The Baseball Whisperer: a small-town coach who shaped Big League dreams / Michael Tackett.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015037778 | ISBN 9780544387645 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780544386396 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Eberly, Merl. | Baseball coaches—United States—Biography. | Baseball—Iowa—Clarinda.

  Classification: LCC GV865.E3 T33 2016 | DDC 796.357092–dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037778

  Frontispiece photograph courtesy of Nodaway Valley Historical Museum Archives, Clarinda, Iowa

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Cover photograph © David Peterson

  v1.0616

  For Julie, Kate, and especially Lee,

  the player who refused to give up

  Foreword

  MERL EBERLY CREATED a real-life Field of Dreams. From his small town of Clarinda, Iowa, he built a national baseball powerhouse that produced three dozen major leaguers, including a Hall of Famer, and more than three hundred players who signed professional contracts. He helped to develop thousands of others, not just to become better players but also better people. He did it with the help of the people of his hometown, his tireless and relentlessly optimistic wife and partner, Pat, and the family-like community that baseball can be. He worked on his dream for more than fifty years, never asking anything in return and never receiving a dime for his labors. He did it to provide opportunity, to teach life lessons, and to stay connected to the game he loved. A coach had rescued him, and Merl spent his adulthood doing the same for others.

  For many players, college summer ball represents the final chance to get a shot at playing professionally. They play with wooden bats to replicate the experience of pro ball and hope a scout will be sitting in the stands on the night they are at their best. The schedules are intense, sixty games over two months, and the bus rides between towns can be five or six hours long. Teams are located in hamlets such as Butler, Pennsylvania; New Market, Virginia; St. Joseph, Missouri; and Liberal, Kansas. They provide the towns with a sense of purpose and belonging, and they also deliver a low-cost source of entertainment. Host families open their homes to players, providing surrogate parenting, transportation, and cheerleading along with free room and board. In Clarinda, Merl Eberly also tried to find summer jobs for the players, whether it was running a jackhammer, sweeping factory floors, or painting the outfield fence.

  Clarinda, a town of five thousand people located in the southwestern corner of the state, two hours from anywhere, is one of the smallest of those small places with a major college summer team. I know because my family lived it.

  Our son made it to the college ranks, only to be cut during his sophomore year. He was devastated, yet refused to give up, writing to one hundred summer teams to ask for a chance. Only one of them said yes: the Clarinda A’s. It was during that summer that I learned a wonderful story about baseball and an even better one about life.

  The Baseball Whisperer is the tale of a man, a town, and a team. It is the story of Merl Eberly, whose life was touched by a coach when he was a teenager headed for trouble. Instead, he became a standout athlete, playing four sports. His best was baseball, and he got his shot at the pros.

  But this story is about much more than baseball. It is a narrative about a small-town America that people think lives only in myth. Players come to Clarinda from all over the country to find out how good they are on the field and what kind of men they will become. Eberly dedicated his life to providing opportunity for thousands of young men, all chasing the same dream he had harbored. He and the people of Clarinda changed lives. They did it without a glamorous setting or a lavishly funded program. They did it with their sweat and their hearts.

  Merl Eberly, the quiet hero next door, was able to build a network of college coaches and pro scouts and then attract players from some of the highest-caliber collegiate baseball programs. These players come from manicured fields and fancy clubhouses to Municipal Stadium, where cornfields line the right-field fence, local businesses buy billboard ads in the outfield, and the county fair livestock pens sit across the street.

  The players who make the trip learn about more than baseball, and that too was part of Eberly’s plan. He wanted to help young players become better men, learn the value of discipline and the selflessness of team play. He was stern. He demanded 100 percent effort, and when he didn’t get it, he would require punishing runs along the town’s bypass or endless loops in the outfield. Eberly admired George Patton and John Wayne and shared some traits with both men. He had standards and did not make exceptions for players who considered themselves above the team. While he was tough, he was never physically abusive and didn’t resort to profanity to make his point. Players also came to learn that he was demanding for their sake, not to feed his own ego. They discovered a softness and kindness beneath the tough façade. He found a way to tell players to trust their skills as he built their confidence, along with a lifelong kinship. “It’s not about can we make them a better baseball player,” Merl said. “It’s about can we make them a better person.” Some of the most famous coaches in college baseball became his disciples.

  The town of Clarinda is a fitting place for an open embrace from people like Merl Eberly. Clarinda first opened its arms to slaves fleeing Missouri, and then to more than a dozen homeless children who were transported from Eastern cities to the Midwest in the Orphan Train Movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Clarinda is a place where values and commitment matter: for instance, the city council rejected a Wal-Mart for fear that it would change the town’s character by driving local merchants out of business.

  The families and the players they host for the summers create enduring relationships. Some players have met their bride in Clarinda and also made their home there. Many write faithfully every year—even those who went on to the majors—sending holiday greetings and birthday cards to their “moms” and “dads.”

  Merl Eberly was the heartbeat of Clarinda and a baseball whisperer, little known outside his town except to a circle of coaches, scouts, and the players and families who spread his legend. Players coming to get their shot left with much more, schooled not only in the game by Eberly but also in decency by the town collectively. In a sport that is dominated by money and cynicism and often treats players as mere commodities, Merl Eberly stood in opposition, forming citizen-athletes who carried a moral compass that he had instilled in them. He could h
ave done it to make money, like those running dozens of other teams around the country. Instead, he invoked one rule for Clarinda management and coaches: nobody got paid. All funds went toward the players and the program.

  Merl Eberly coached for more than four decades and served as his team’s general manager until his death in June 2011. The players who passed through Clarinda went on to become fixtures on SportsCenter and magazine covers, and they populate major league rosters and World Series play to this day.

  I arrived in Clarinda, Iowa, like most people, driving along Glenn Miller Avenue, past the museum dedicated to the town’s most famous son, the renowned bandleader. My destination, Municipal Stadium, was less than a mile away. I was going there to see Eberly. Our son, reeling from being released by his college team only a few weeks before, was in the middle of an athletic and personal trial and renewal. He had written Merl and Pat Eberly, laying out his desire and asking for a chance. Merl was skeptical of a player who had been released. But Pat reread the letter and asked, “Isn’t this just the kind of player we want here?”

  The experience was restorative, both on the field and off. Our son’s host family, Jill and Mike Devoe, who lived ten miles outside of Clarinda in a town of five hundred people, opened their home and their hearts to him, a kid who had grown up in metropolitan Washington, DC. Clarinda showed him a part of the country and an aspect of humanity that he had never seen. On the field, he proved he could compete on an even higher level. Upon his return to school, he made the team and became one of its top pitchers. More important, his faith in people was renewed.

  The Baseball Whisperer recounts part of a journey that some parents make with their children all over the United States. It starts with that first baseball glove before Little League and goes on through travel teams and high school teams, the pyramid narrowing with each step. Some players move to the college ranks, still hoping that their days on the field won’t end yet. Playing in the summer, with wooden bats like the pros, they try to prove to scouts and coaches that they have what it takes.

  Summer baseball programs offer an internship in life, one that pays in ways other than money. Clarinda is one of the smallest towns with such a successful program, and it works because the people of Clarinda represent a set of American values that we tend to think exist only in our nostalgia-driven imaginations.

  In a time of increased specialization in sports, with travel leagues starting at ever-earlier ages, private coaches, and intense schedules, the program sustained for so many years by Merl and Pat Eberly still thrives because it honors the essence of the game and the best traits that players bring to a team.

  When I met Merl and Pat Eberly and saw firsthand what they had built, when I watched a game at that stadium, with silos in the distance and corn as high as the right-field fence, I was convinced that they had created something that went well beyond baseball.

  1

  Changed Lives

  WHEN PAT EBERLY woke up that morning and looked out at the gray skies and misty rain, she was alone for the first time in fifty-seven years. She had known this day was coming for at least a couple of years, though that didn’t really make it any easier. Merl, whom she had known since elementary school, the father of their six children, had died in this room in their home at 225 East Lincoln Street, and the void brought a singular kind of pain. The cancer that had been diagnosed in 2007 had finally, four years later, sapped his strength and ability to fight it. Though Merl never liked losing, this battle had been unwinnable.

  When Pat rose from the bed, each step around the room brought another memory. She had moved the bed she had shared with her husband to the north wall from the west, where it had been for half a century, just enough of a change to make it bearable to stay in the room. She looked at the miniature grandfather clock on the wall, the one that a former player, Mike Kurtz, had given them, made from a cherry tree cut down on Kurtz’s farm in Oregon, Missouri. The pendulum of the clock was still swinging, but the hands had stopped at the time Merl’s body was taken from the house.

  On the landing of the second floor outside the bedroom, Merl would do calisthenics first thing each morning, a series of jumping jacks, push-ups, and sit-ups. Heading down the steps, she could hear the groans of the old oak stairs, born of all those years of him running up and down for exercise or listening for one of the kids to come home at night. She would later decide to hang the large portrait of Merl at the bottom of the stairs. Her children questioned the decision, but came to agree that it was the best place for it because that was where Merl would stand to call up to them, mimicking “reveille” or shouting “Time to do chores” or “Quiet down up there.”

  When Pat turned into the dining room, it was like walking into a museum of their life together, a time dominated by their love of baseball and family. She stood there, looking at their life’s work in the dozens of photos hanging on each wall. There were pictures of the men who had become major league baseball players, like Hall of Fame shortstop Ozzie Smith, Philadelphia Phillies star Von Hayes and Buddy Black, an All-Star left-handed pitcher who went on to be manager of the San Diego Padres. Smith’s place on the wall was special, and one striking color photograph in particular underscored how deep their relationship was. It showed Smith midway through his signature backflip at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, a display of athleticism that had endeared him to fans and his teammates. The lighting, the focus, and the contrast were all perfect, and it looked like a photo from a magazine. In fact, that is what it was. The photo was scheduled for the cover of Sports Illustrated to note Smith’s entry into the Hall of Fame, but never appeared because Ted Williams had died that week. The editors chose to put Williams on the cover instead. The photo was signed by Smith, one of only two copies.

  Most of the photographs were inscribed to “Merl and Mrs. E.” The players had come during college summers from across the country to a place most had never heard of, Clarinda, Iowa, to play for a man whose reputation had been spread through word of mouth by players, coaches, and scouts, a whispered kind of fame.

  Another wall was reserved for photos of the family, featuring the three sons wearing the uniforms of three different professional teams, posed as players do for baseball cards, and their three daughters, including an exhausted Jill breaking the tape after winning a race just as her father had taught her to finish—with no effort left to give.

  Enough reflecting, Pat thought, and promptly got busy, the only way she knew how to be and the only way she was going to get through this day. She went through the checklist in her head. She had always been the detail person in her partnership with Merl. She wanted her husband’s body dressed in his gray suit and his favorite baseball-dotted tie. For the floral arrangement for the casket, she chose roses. Merl had sent her roses each year for their anniversary, one for every year of their marriage. The previous October he had sent a total of fifty-six. For this day she wanted one red rose to represent her, six white ones for their children, eleven pink ones for the grandchildren, and five yellow baby roses for the great-grandchildren. She even made a seating chart for special guests at the funeral service, then laughed to herself about her obsessiveness.

  Rick, their oldest son, had been up since 5:30 after a sleepless night. He drove in the dawn’s light to the family timber hunting ground, about five miles from his boyhood home. The orange sunrise began to pour up from the broad horizon, the way it does in the middle of the country. He walked the fence line to gather himself, saw clouds forming, and hoped there would be no rain. The woods had been a special place for him and his father; for more than a half-century, they had bonded there while hunting pheasant or deer or fishing nearby. They could talk the whole time or not say a word, and the experience was almost the same. They were only twenty-two years apart, so their relationship was particularly close. A rooster pheasant crowed in the distance, announcing the morning and reminding Rick he had to head back.

  The family had decided to hold a private burial before t
he funeral so that the service could be a celebration of Merl’s life. A limousine was parked on the east side of the house to lead a procession of cars to the cemetery, behind a police escort. As the family gathered in the caravan, Joy, the fourth of the six children, still couldn’t really take in the fact that she would never hear that voice again, the one saying, “There’s my baby girl,” or, “Hey, kiddo,” whenever she saw him. Even worse, she would never feel the warmth and strength of the bear hugs Merl gave her, with those huge hands, hands that always made her feel safe. They were also the hands that administered punishment, but embraces far outweighed spankings. When she held them one last time, she didn’t want to let go.

  Joy’s three brothers and Merl’s six oldest grandsons raised the casket into the hearse, each wanting to make sure he had a hand in lifting Merl’s body. When they arrived at the gravesite, rain started to fall more steadily. “Tears from heaven,” Jill said. The minister read a passage from the Bible. Pat and her six children sat in chairs near other family members and a few close friends, including Smith, Hayes, and Jose Alvarez, another alumnus of the Clarinda A’s who went on to star in the major leagues, stood under a tent. They touched the casket before it was lowered, then returned to the cars to drive to the church.

  They entered the side door of St. John’s Lutheran Church and headed to the basement to regroup. Pat had thought they would have the service in the family church, Westminster Presbyterian, which had a capacity of just over two hundred, but her children finally persuaded her that it would be much too small. Their baseball family was too large. It was good advice. The larger church was packed with mourners, who filled the sanctuary’s choir loft, the adjoining chapel, and the balcony; in fact, a video hookup was needed in the basement to accommodate the overflow crowd.