The Baseball Whisperer

by Michael Tackett

  He returned after a few days of healing and took his place behind the plate. He finished out the season hitting .281, with a home run, three doubles, and two triples. He had done well enough, especially defensively, to earn an invitation to the White Sox major league spring training in 1958 in Hollywood, Florida. Just as important to him, he received the second half of his bonus. Against big-league-caliber pitching, however, the power that had been so much of his appeal as a prospect in Clarinda continued to elude him in Florida. Merl was released before opening day.

  4

  Where the Work Ethic Still Works

  MERL RETURNED TO Clarinda with a new level of stature and credibility. Though he played only one season, he forever would be known in town as a man who had played “pro ball.” In the baseball world, he carried that credential like an Ivy League degree. It helped him get a job as a delivery man, and he and Pat started to put down roots in the place they would never want to leave. He wasn’t bitter about being released by the White Sox. He’d had his shot. He still had both the desire and the talent to keep playing sports—baseball in the summer and basketball in the winter. It was as though he was trying to recapture his misspent time as a teenager. For Pat, all the hours that sports took Merl away from the family was an accommodation that she was willing to accept. Whenever possible, they just made it a family affair, kids in tow. Most of those extra hours were spent on a baseball diamond.

  The Merchants joined a statewide league in 1957 and played a twelve-game schedule. With the fan base growing in Clarinda each season, the city agreed to install lights at the field in 1958. The Merchants improved with each season. In 1959, to give the team a more professional ring, the name was changed to the Clarinda Athletics when the Clarinda Athletic Club was formed to support a basketball team and a football team. The A’s ended 1959 with a 22-4 record, winning the Interstate League championship.

  Merl was back in his hometown, behind the plate, where he would be for decades to come, playing hundreds of games, squatting uncounted thousands of times as a catcher. He was also consistently among the leaders in all hitting categories, and no one could match his power. Merl was joined on the team by Jim Millhone, another graduate of Clarinda High School, who had become a lawyer; Virgil Briggs, whom Merl had recruited from a nearby small town and helped to get a job; and Milan Shaw, a University of Nebraska baseball star who had come to town to teach at Clarinda High School.

  “The team was just locals, and I was single,” Shaw said. “Merl and Pat kind of took me under their wing. Merl was Mr. Everything. Town team football, basketball, and baseball. I was a catcher, and that was the only position I ever knew how to play. Merl was a catcher, but he could play any position, so we would have two or three ball games every Sunday.”

  Briggs had grown up on a farm outside of New Market, about ten miles east of Clarinda. After graduating from Gravity High School, he married his high school sweetheart and played baseball for his town team. He met Merl during a scrimmage against the Merchants, and they talked afterwards about baseball. Merl asked him if he would play for Clarinda, and Briggs said he didn’t think he was good enough. Merl, who had an eye for talent, could see that Briggs could pitch and essentially play any position, so he offered the prospect of hooking Briggs up with a job. “Merl said there was going to be an opening at Lange’s Dairy to haul milk, so I came over and took a job and moved to Clarinda in 1960,” Briggs said. “I took to Merl right away. He was very polite and all business. When you played for Merl, there was no monkey business.” When Merl yelled “Hobby Dobby” to his teammates, they knew it was time to hustle and focus, as silly as the exhortation was. “He was honest,” said Briggs. “If you were doing something wrong, he was on you. I liked that. I would have trusted him with anything.”

  The A’s would travel to St. Joseph, Missouri, eighty miles to the south, or to Offutt Air Force Base, about the same distance to the northwest into Nebraska. They played mostly on weekends, driving for hours, but playing the game they loved. Merl and Pat often turned the road trips into family jaunts, piling their children into the station wagon to go watch Dad play ball. He rarely disappointed. “We thought he was Babe Ruth,” Jill said. “He was always hitting home runs.”

  A few of the players were good enough to be professionals, but most of them were not—or they could do one thing really well, like hit the ball a country mile. Delmar Haley, a squat, barrel-chested farm boy, was one of those guys. The most intimidating slugger in the area, he played for one of the A’s opponents. His teammates used to joke that Haley was so bowlegged that “a pig could run through his legs.” There were no outfield fences, so the players designed their defense to try to hold Haley to a double, no matter how far he hit it. Duane Ridnour took up shortstop in medium center field, and second baseman Jerry Jennings stood in shallow center. Merrill Heard moved from third to deep short. Jim Ossian picked a spot in deep left field where “there were the fewest cow pies.” Cal Hamilton was positioned in the musk thistles in deep left center in the “unlikely event Haley sliced one,” said Ossian. “Predictably, Delmar uncorked one beyond the musk thistles.

  “Three perfect relays later, and he had only a 550-foot double to show for his effort.”

  The A’s were winning, and they had the town behind them too. Baseball was good for the community and good for business. Hundreds of people would go to the game, then have a meal at a local restaurant or shop at a store. The people of Clarinda took pride in beating their small-town rivals, and the team that Merl led gave them a lot of opportunity to gloat: after he took over as the manager of the A’s in 1961, they finished that year 28-8. It would be the first of thirty-six seasons that he led the team. The next year the A’s won the Nodaway Valley League title with a record of 30-4. Even as he managed the team, Merl continued to be a steady presence behind the plate and secure in his spot as the cleanup hitter. The power that had eluded him in Holdrege was ever present in Clarinda—he consistently led his team in home runs.

  The A’s were also becoming a destination opponent for barnstorming teams. In 1964, Merl led the A’s in a game against the Kansas City Monarchs. Their pitcher, Satchel Paige, perhaps the most legendary Negro League player, was introduced to the crowd of five hundred people who had come to watch the local team play against the successor to the old Negro League champions. The Monarchs jumped to an 8–0 lead, but Merl paced the comeback with four doubles and four RBIs, and the A’s won, 9–8.

  It wouldn’t be long before many of the original team members began to get too old to play. In addition, they had families, and their wives, unlike the ever-tolerant Pat, did not want their husbands spending all of their weekends barnstorming the Midwest playing baseball. They wanted them home, helping with their children and doing chores. Merl had to be constantly on the lookout for new, and younger, talent. For her part, Pat was always thankful that her father had exposed her to sports, particularly baseball. She knew that if her marriage and family were to work, she needed to love the game too.

  A good friend and former player, Jerry Hill, told Merl about a young pitcher from Oregon, Missouri, named Scotty Kurtz, a left-hander with a rising fastball and a sharp-breaking curve. He was just graduating from his high school and wanted to play in college. He was looking for good competition. Kurtz, who stood only five-foot-nine, grew up on a farm about an hour south of Clarinda. He had thick forearms, a well-muscled back, and strength that came from lifting hay bales, not barbells. He was farm-strong. With his father and older brother Mike, also a baseball player, Kurtz drove to Clarinda to meet with Merl, who agreed to give him a spot.

  In his first time on the mound, against a team from Tarkio, Missouri, Kurtz struck out twenty batters, and the A’s won, 2–1. “The sound the glove made when Scotty was pitching was different,” John Lisle said. “There was some real heat.” That night the Kurtzes went to Merl’s house to grab a postgame meal before the hourlong drive back home.

  On game days Kurtz would work in the fields in the morning, d
rive to Clarinda for a 7:30 P.M. game, then return home afterwards. He loved the game and the competition. With Kurtz, the A’s started winning an even larger share of their games, and they recruited a couple more strong players. Merl then started to look beyond the local area for teams with bigger reputations. He wanted to prove that his crew from Clarinda could play with almost any other in their semipro league. In the case of the A’s, the term “semipro” was misleading because the players rarely got paid and usually were given only gas money, if they were lucky.

  Throwing to Merl and seeing how he called a game and ran the team, Kurtz found himself improving as a pitcher. “He loved baseball and he was good at it,” Kurtz said. “As a catcher, as a manager, he wanted it done the right way. No goofin’ around. Everybody had to have their hair short, their shoes shined, and Merl better not catch you loafing.” Hobby Dobby! Crowds for A’s games grew larger, and the team was the talk of the town.

  Kurtz went to college in nearby Maryville, Missouri, and played baseball there. At one game a scout had come to see an opposing pitcher. He left putting in a bid for Scotty Kurtz to get drafted. In the summer of 1969, the New York Mets—the team that would become known as the “Miracle Mets” when they won the World Series that year—selected Kurtz as their fourth pick in the twentieth round.

  Kurtz almost couldn’t believe it. His dream had come true. He was the opposite, though, of a cocky ballplayer. He had almost every tool a pitcher could possess, yet he summed up his potential by simply saying, “They thought I could throw the double-play ball.”

  That summer of 1969 the war continued to rage in Vietnam, and the draft was still in effect. Kurtz was worried that he might be tapped, so he sought a spot in the National Guard to fulfill his service obligation. In 1970 the Mets assigned him to their Midwest League affiliate in Danville, Illinois, and Kurtz began his professional baseball career. Although shuttling back and forth between Illinois and his Guard unit in California wore him down, he made four appearances in his first two weeks in Danville and in one of them struck out 13 batters. Most players are filled with doubt, as Merl was, when they get their first taste of professional baseball, and Kurtz too had wondered if he could do it. But after his initial outings, the humble man from Oregon, Missouri, said, “I thought I was on the same level” as the other pros in his league. In 41 innings, he struck out 45 batters.

  Kurtz played for two weeks, then flew from Chicago to Fort Ord in California for training. He would be there for sixteen weeks. “That pretty well did my baseball career in,” Kurtz said. The Mets organization wasn’t so sure. Whitey Herzog, who went on to fame as the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, was the director of the minor league operation at the time. Herzog, according to Kurtz’s brother Mike, said the Mets’ best right-hander was Tom Seaver, a future Hall of Famer and three-time Cy Young Award winner. The best left-hander, he said, might well be Scotty Kurtz. He was invited to spring training with the big league club, and Mike Kurtz went down to watch his brother pitch. “You could hear the ball when Tom Seaver was throwing,” Mike said. The day before the Mets broke camp and headed north, Scotty Kurtz was to get his chance to throw against major league hitters in front of manager Rube Walker. It rained all that day, though, and Kurtz didn’t get that chance.

  He decided that he couldn’t continue to juggle his National Guard duties and baseball, and he wasn’t fond of the lifestyle either. Fast living wasn’t for him. “I didn’t have the right heart and attitude to go on and play baseball,” he said. “I would have felt more regret if I hadn’t tried it. I wasn’t bitter. I still wanted to play some at that level. It’s quite difficult. Every day it is a job, and you have to produce and stay healthy.” His father disagreed, thinking his son had major league stuff, but the son was unmoved. So Kurtz asked the Mets for his release and decided to move to Clarinda, which had been good to him. It was where he met his future wife, who had been teaching in Guatemala. Kurtz went back to Merl and said he still wanted to play for the A’s.

  Merl helped Kurtz get a job at the Lisle Corporation, where he worked for the next four decades. He pitched nine more seasons for the A’s, recording extraordinary statistics: in 1971, for instance, he had a record of 11-3 in 112⅓ innings, with 200 strikeouts and an ERA of 1.44. In that same year, Merl, at age thirty-six, and using his thirty-six-inch Mickey Mantle Model Louisville Slugger, still hit .300, down from .384 in 1970 when he was the only member of the A’s to play in every game.

  Merl kept testing the limits of the A’s to see just how good they were and who they could beat. He had gathered his team for a talk and noted, as they sprawled out on the grass, that for the most part they were only playing local teams. So they started to travel farther away, well into Kansas and even Colorado. “Why play the Indians if you can play the Chiefs?” Merl said. Piling into their cars and station wagons, players set out on the weekends for these long road trips, often leaving behind wives, children, and obligations. “Although we didn’t realize it at the time, he was revealing [to] us a vision—a vision of things to come,” said Allan Bench, son of Bill, who had helped lay out the original field.

  Scotty Kurtz had shown Merl the value of youth and talent and what that could mean for his team. “Scotty showed Merl that the younger, prospect-caliber pitcher could make the team endure,” Mike Kurtz said. “We had won something like thirty games without a loss in the old Nodaway Valley League,” Merl said. “We thought we were pretty good. Then we went on a trip and played Hays, Colorado Springs, and Boulder.” That was one of the A’s longest road trips—six hundred miles to Boulder, Colorado, where the A’s, still mostly men in their late twenties and thirties, took on the Boulder Collegians, a team of top college players. The A’s faced Boulder pitcher Burt Hooton of the University of Texas, a three-time All-American who had just appeared for the Longhorns in the College World Series in Omaha. The A’s were no match for Hooton, who would go on to pitch for the Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers. “We learned in a hurry that we weren’t good enough to compete at that level,” Merl said. “We didn’t win a game the whole trip. When we returned 0-7, I told people here that those teams had too much for a team manned basically with area players.”

  If the A’s were going to continue as a team and play at the most competitive level they could manage, they needed to change. Local players alone were not enough. At the same time, Merl realized, having a team was important to his town; he had seen over and over that baseball provided extraordinary opportunity, and not just for sports. He began to fashion a plan to both change and preserve the A’s. Seeing a team like the Boulder Collegians gave Merl the idea that maybe Clarinda could have its own version of a team made up primarily of college players. He would step off the field and stop playing but would still manage the team. In his last season for the A’s, Merl hit .353, a year that also saw Kurtz strike out 124 batters in 87 innings.

  Merl had been helping to coach the baseball team at Iowa Western Community College (formerly Clarinda Junior College). That gave him initial exposure to the world of college coaches and the process of recruiting college players. One of those players, Pete Filipic, also a catcher, would help provide the bridge between the town team Merl had started and the one he was now trying to build. Merl’s pitch to Filipic was simple. If Filipic would let Merl coach him for two years and throughout the summer, Merl could prepare him to play Division 1 baseball.

  Terry Bond had seen Merl do that for many others, including himself. Bond had grown up in Clarinda and was a tremendous athlete who started out in a nearby college on a football scholarship. He wasn’t happy there, though, and Merl and another coach, Walt Stanton, persuaded him to transfer to Iowa Western, where he could compete in both track and baseball on a full scholarship. Bond also got to play for the A’s in the summer. That was when he learned how Merl went about developing his players.

  Merl ran a demanding practice. He would wait until dusk for a fly ball drill and then hit the balls above the lights so they would be as difficult to see as
possible. Players had to catch three in a row. Merl ran fielding drills with the command “ground up,” meaning that a player’s starting position had to be with knees flexed, hips back, and glove on the ground. He taught players to run on their toes so that their eyes weren’t bouncing around when they tried to follow the ball. Everyone learned how to hit to all fields and how to bunt, even the cleanup hitter. He used isometric exercises with bungee cords on the fence to help players build arm strength and had them do push-ups in a circle; Merl often put the shyest player in the middle to try to develop a sense of leadership in him. “He was the most fundamentally sound baseball person I ever knew,” Bond said. “He was always more of a mentor than coach.”

  Merl’s success with the A’s and with recruiting players to Iowa Western helped form his thinking about how to transform the A’s into a collegiate team. He put together an ambitious plan, including a budget for uniforms, equipment, and travel. To make it work he thought they would need $10,000; in 1973 that was a sizable amount of money, more than most houses cost in Clarinda. Merl approached C. E. Nichols, the local optometrist, and told him about the plan and its potential benefits for the community. Merl was a passionate salesman. He told Nichols that the team would draw people to the town and that on the road they would be goodwill ambassadors. Future pros would play at Municipal Stadium! Still, he thought Nichols might just laugh him out of his office, but Nichols listened intently. Sensing Merl’s fire and commitment, Nichols told him that he would have an answer for him soon. To Merl’s surprise, the very next day Nichols said he had pledges from other local business-people totaling the entire $10,000.