The Baseball Whisperer

by Michael Tackett

  BOB WAITE’S COACH at Indiana University, Larry Smith, was as spare with words as he was with praise. He simply called his outfielder in and told him in no uncertain terms where he would be spending his summer of 1981. Playing baseball in Clarinda, Iowa. Waite had no clue where Clarinda was; on reflection, he decided it was probably better that he didn’t. He just piled his gear into his car and drove ten hours from his home in Plymouth, Michigan. When he arrived at the Clarinda city limits, his shoulders slumped. This was his vision of the middle of nowhere.

  Waite had high hopes for that summer, after his junior year, when his value as a player would be at its peak and he’d have the greatest chance of being drafted by a major league team. While he had put up strong numbers at Indiana, he knew that summer ball was where scouts might see him playing against even higher-level competition. As he drove along Sixteenth Street (now Glenn Miller Avenue), he saw his dreams fading away. How could he possibly be seen by anyone in this town, which barely had stoplights? “What did I get myself into?” he muttered to himself.

  He turned right onto Lincoln Street, pulled up to Merl and Pat’s house, and received their signature parental greeting. He felt as if he were visiting an aunt and uncle. He met a couple of teammates, but still felt wary, wondering if he could somehow reverse this mistake. He was looking for his big opportunity, and he couldn’t see it happening in such a small town.

  Merl dropped him off with his host family for the summer, Jim and Carolyn Young. This was another first for Waite—living with people he had never met. The Youngs were warm and gracious and introduced their “summer son” to their children. Waite was trying to process his situation, and nothing seemed certain. “There were just a lot of questions on your mind,” Waite said.

  His outlook didn’t improve when he drove up to Municipal Stadium for the A’s first workout that summer. He was accustomed to stadiums in the Big Ten, grand facilities that were nicer than a lot of minor league parks. This field, from a distance, looked like some county fairgrounds diamond hardly fit for a high school game. When Waite walked onto the field, though, he noticed how well groomed it was, the grass cut just so, the infield dirt well raked, the mound in a perfect little hill. About twenty of his teammates had arrived, and as he watched them warm up, he started to get a different feeling. These guys, Mark Williamson, Mike Nipper, Alan Ascherl, and the others, could obviously play. After that first practice, Waite realized that he would have to fight for a spot in the lineup.

  Summer ball teams are always complicated. Players come in from around the country and are expected to somehow come together even though their interests are often in conflict. They might be competing with each other for playing time or a place in the batting order. In the case of the A’s that summer, there were players from California, Texas, Michigan, and many other states. Each of them had individual goals. They wanted to play baseball at the professional level, and this was a test of their ability. Merl knew that, but he also knew that he had a team goal and that somehow he had to convince his players to put their team first. It wasn’t always an easy sell.

  The season did not start out well. This team was not as talented as some of the recent national powerhouses that Merl had assembled. Williamson and Nipper were clearly professional prospects, as was Keith Mucha, who had hit twenty-one home runs for the A’s the previous summer, but it would be a steep climb when they played Hutchinson or Liberal, teams that were stacked with top-tier Division 1 talent.

  One night Hutchinson was pounding the A’s at a game in Clarinda, beating the home team so bad that Merl didn’t really want to waste another pitcher. Dave Snow, the cocky manager of the Broncos and a college coach from Long Beach State in California, had been complaining loudly all night about the field, the town, and the poor state of the A’s program. Snow’s star first baseman, Eric Hargrove, who played at Stanford, stepped to the plate and Mike Humphry, a freshman pitcher, was on the mound for the A’s. Humphry plunked Hargrove, unintentionally, and Snow started railing about “Podunk” this and “rinky-dink” that. Finally, it was more than Merl could take. Snow was indicting his hometown, his neighbors, and all the people who worked so hard to make the A’s the quality program it had become. Merl thought that Snow, with his big job as a coach, might be looking down on the summer coach from Clarinda.

  Merl for years had tried to repress his anger. He had been in too many fights in his life. Still, the sight of Snow mocking him, his team, and his town set Merl off. He stormed toward Snow, towering over him, menacing and intimidating. How tough are you now, Snow? Merl grabbed Snow in a headlock and soon had him on the ground. Within seconds, his A’s, with their blue uniforms and red trim, were punching out any Hutchinson player they could find. “That’s when you knew he was behind you 100 percent,” said Ascherl, the catcher who, with mask on, head-butted several Hutchinson players. There was a lot of blood, and more than twenty minutes passed before the police arrived. Snow was just happy that Merl didn’t rearrange his face.

  After the game, Merl was not happy with his team, despite his own substantial role in triggering the trouble. He told them they had lost control of the game and that was why the fight had broken out. Even though it was past eleven that night, he ordered the A’s to do seventeen laps, one for each run by which they had lost the game.

  It was one of three brawls that year. In another one, during a home game, Ascherl told the umpire, a Clarinda resident, to duck, and his pitcher hurled a ninety-five-mile-per-hour fastball past the batter’s head. When the ball shattered a piece of plywood stuck in the backstop, sending an unmistakable message to the opposing hitters to not dig in, another fight ensued.

  But each brawl seemed to bring this team of individual egos closer together. They learned to enjoy the long bus rides on the Blue Goose, even without air conditioning and with the frequent breakdowns that would leave them stranded for hours on a Kansas highway. Different players shared driving duties when their regular driver, Darwin Buch, was not available. Merl didn’t require a chauffeur’s license. You just had to know how to drive with a manual transmission. Players trusted their teammates behind the wheel. They also trusted them on the field, and the natural friction of trying to earn playing time eventually gave way to the team concept that Merl was working to instill. He didn’t want players to think about individual statistics. He wanted them to be able to move a runner along with a productive out, or deliver a sacrifice bunt. The players spent time with each other at Clarinda’s small restaurants. They looked for different teammates to sit with on the long bus rides. They shared motel rooms, typically four players sharing two double beds. “We had bonded,” Waite said. “We had come together. We had each other’s backs.” His wariness of his teammates had long since faded away. Now he couldn’t believe how close they all were as friends. “I was improving,” Waite said. “The competition was great.”

  For Mucha, Merl was a calming presence, a man who “had the patience of an oyster.” Merl also could help players when they were struggling. “If you were in a slump, he would try to teach you by doing something you had never done before,” Mucha said. “Instead of regular batting practice, he would throw it real slow and you would have to wait and really concentrate. He would throw the pitch in a certain area and say, ‘Hit this pitch there,’ and he was very specific. It wasn’t just bulk pitch after pitch. He wanted you to make each pitch count and be specific. It really built your confidence and took your mind off whatever problem you were having.”

  Merl took the players hand-fishing on the Nodaway, just as he had done as a young man, trying to teach the kids from the city a little bit about rural life. One of them, David Oliva from Los Angeles, considered himself a pretty good fisherman. “How tough could it be? You bait the hook, send it to the bottom, and wait for the big one,” Oliva said. When he got to Merl’s house, he was surprised to see that there were no fishing poles or tackle in sight. Merl explained that they would be using their hands to catch the fish. “I thought I was pretty toug
h, and I played it off like it wasn’t a problem,” Oliva said. But as they walked closer to the river Merl told the players that they might encounter a muskrat or some other creature that could have a sharp bite. They came to the river, where Merl stopped at a log in the middle and reached his hand into a hole, telling Oliva this was a good spot to start. “Not wanting to seem like too much of a city kid, I reached into the hole,” Oliva said. “My hand hit the fish, and I think I jumped back three feet.” After everyone stopped laughing, Merl reached into the hole and pulled out the fish. Merl had hooked Oliva, and the other players too, on hand-fishing.

  The wins started to pile up, and Waite had long since changed his opinion of the middle of nowhere. Now he loved staying at the roadside motels and stretching his $5-a-day meal money at truck stops. The A’s had again qualified for the National Baseball Congress World Series in Wichita, and the players who had arrived in Clarinda worrying about whether any scouts would see them were now nervous about playing in front of so many of them. They could see them sitting three or four rows deep behind home plate. “There were a lot of nerves,” Waite said. “You wanted to do so well because you wanted to get to that next level.”

  The field, as usual, was stacked with high-performing teams, including two from Alaska as well as Hutchinson and Liberal from Kansas. Teams from Alaska had won the tournament eight out of the last ten years. For the A’s, victory had really been a matter of just making it to Wichita.

  The A’s won their opening game, defeating Wellington, Kansas, 9–0, behind Jeff Peterson’s strong pitching. Then they beat Seguin, Texas, 10–7, and pounded Liberal, 19–10. “After the third win, we knew we had something going,” Waite said. “We were very confident and close-knit . . . and we were very superstitious. We went through the same regimen every day.” In the next match, against Hutchinson, “Podunk” came up big. Mucha, who had joined the team late after summer school, hit a home run in his first at-bat. He smiled at Snow—his college coach—as he rounded the bases.

  Merl’s confidence was growing too. “Clarinda has as good a shot as anyone for the Friday night finals,” he told the Clarinda Herald-Journal. “I think the extra work that we are putting in is paying off. Several practices have been centered around base stealing, pick offs and plenty of hitting and the results are showing up.”

  Tournament play was different for the A’s, especially at the nationals. Merl wanted his players loose yet focused. He held team meetings each day to go over scouting reports and approaches to individual teams. He talked about having the right motivation for winning. Stay in the moment, he told them. Don’t look ahead. As permitted under tournament rules, he had brought on former A’s players—Jack Shupe, who had played in the Yankees organization and was teaching in a nearby town, and Rich Chiles, who had recently been released by the Minnesota Twins. The players, after their first two wins, started getting superstitious. On their limited per diem, they dined on chili dogs at Coney Island, two or three meals a day. They passed time bowling at the Rose Bowl. They sat around the hotel and watched the same soap opera, General Hospital. Merl even changed his rules and allowed guys to go swimming at the motel on a game day. Over the years, Merl and Pat had befriended Alice Steventon, the manager of the Howard Johnson’s motel, and she knew Merl wouldn’t let things get out of hand.

  Hundreds of people from Clarinda made the trip too, many of them wearing the team’s signature powder blue. They were consistently the loudest cheering section at the stadium. The A’s gave them reason to cheer, knocking off Hutchinson—a team that in coming years would have Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Rafael Palmeiro, and Pete Incaviglia, future big league stars, on its roster—and then Liberal, followed by Kenai, Alaska. The A’s won six straight games in the double elimination tournament, including three by relief pitcher Chuck Matthews, a quiet freshman right-hander from Texas Wesleyan. Then they faced Liberal again, with a chance to capture the title.

  “We’re still going, six down and one big one to go,” Merl told his hometown paper. “It’s a great feeling to be in the final game, but a different one though, to be around a bunch of guys that want to win it bad. We have several injuries right now but they are playing hurt. The hustle, the defensive plays and running we have seen is the best they played all year. Our bullpen is rested and we’re going to run like crazy, hit, collide and do what we have all along.”

  To his players, Merl was calm and direct. He talked only about the next game, even knowing that if they won, the national title would come to Clarinda. “He concentrated on winning the first game,” Mucha said. “We knew what we had done. Some of the older guys like Jack Shupe and Rich Chiles talked to us, what this would mean to Merl, and to the people of Clarinda.”

  Chiles, clinging to the hope that one of the scouts might see that he still had big league talent, had tried to counsel the younger players to relax. As they shagged flies that Merl hit soaring into the outfield, he noticed that his teammates were pressing, as though a scout was watching their every move. So when Chiles caught a ball, he took it and threw it into the stands over the backstop and then looked at his teammates. “You guys got tight asses,” he said, laughing, and breaking some of the tension.

  Merl felt like he had lived his life for this moment in the late summer of 1981. He was sharing it with his old friend Milan Shaw, who was in his first year as one of the A’s coaches. The two old friends would scout the teams they were to play next, sometimes well into the early hours of the morning. Merl had stature at the tournament now, and the other coaches, scouts, and even some opposing players would seek him out to talk baseball. “People knew you everywhere you would go if you were with Merl,” Mucha said. “He wasn’t really treated as a celebrity, but he was well respected, and he was humble. He was proud of his family and proud of his boys, and we were all his boys.” And Merl’s boys were doing quite well. They now just needed to defeat the Liberal Beejays one last time to win the championship.

  It was steamy and hot at Lawrence-Dumont Stadium in Wichita, Kansas, and Merl’s A’s were in the championship game of the National Baseball Congress tournament against the team from Liberal, Kansas, their rival and a perennial national power. There were more people in the stands than lived in the entire town of Clarinda. Major League scouts were there, and so were local television and newspaper reporters. In most years, Merl considered the team’s goals met if they merely qualified for the national tournament. Now the A’s were in a position to win it all. So much was riding on this game—all the dreams of those in his small Iowa town going up against the giants in college baseball, with their money and prestige. No Iowa team had ever won a national championship.

  Bob Lutz, the sports columnist for the Wichita Eagle who had been covering the tournament since 1976 and would go on to write about it for more than three decades, was sitting in the press box near Darwin Buch, the bus driver, who doubled as the A’s official scorer. “It was a very tense game and a very raucous atmosphere,” Lutz said. He could tell how nervous Buch was and how much this game meant not only to the team but to the town, with its hundreds of fans sitting along the first-base line. Lutz had seen the team’s iconic blue bus pulling into Lawrence-Dumont Stadium and the A’s, with their blue uniforms, getting off, always ready to play. The little town had made an impression on Lutz, who said the A’s were “definitely one of the power players” in the field. “You could always count on Clarinda having two or three guys on their team who would have a really good chance to make it to the majors.”

  The A’s battled all night with Liberal and eventually tied the game 7–7 on Mucha’s run-scoring single. Merl went to Matthews, again, in relief in the fourth inning, and he continued to pitch splendidly, giving up just three hits and no earned runs and taking the A’s to the bottom of the eleventh, still tied 7–7. After two quick outs, Merl looked down his bench for options. He stopped at Rusty Pontious, all five foot seven inches of him, and calmly said: “It’s your time.”

  Pontious was an utterly unlikely
choice for a pinch hitter. The reserve second baseman had not had an at-bat in the entire tournament. But on another level, he made perfect sense. Pontious had played at Iowa Western Community College in Clarinda and had grown up in nearby Shenandoah. If the A’s, the underdog team, were going to win this game, Merl figured, then maybe the little guy from Iowa was the right choice. Pontious, nervous, grabbed his metal bat and took his place in the batter’s box.

  Waite walked to the on-deck circle. He had confidence in Pontious. He was more worried about himself because if Rusty got on, it would be up to him to drive him in. “We never questioned Merl,” Mucha said. “I can tell you flat out you never thought of questioning him.”

  Liberal pitcher Bob Gunnerson delivered the first pitch, a fastball, and Pontious seemed to relax. Coaches had always told him, Let the game come to you, so that was what he was thinking. He saw several more pitches and realized that he was tracking the ball well. He worked the count to 3-2.

  Gunnerson, a left-hander, stared him down from the mound, started his windup, and delivered the pitch. Pontious could tell by the spin that it was an off-speed pitch low and away, but close enough to a strike to swing at. He did what Merl had told his hitters to do, as simple as it sounds: See the ball, hit the ball. He swung hard and could hear the sound of the metal making contact. The ball screamed down the right-field line. It was fair! Pontious, a four-sport athlete in high school, ran as hard as he could. He rounded second and saw Merl in the third-base coach’s box with his arms up, signaling for Rusty to stop. He stood on second base, with a stand-up double, and a grin that seemed to span the stadium.

  Waite tried to get calm, saying to himself, Now it’s my time. Merl walked halfway from the coach’s box to home plate, tapped one fist on top of the other, and smiled at Waite, calming his hitter. Waite said to himself, I’ve got to get a hit, or at least get it to the outfield grass, because Rusty has some wheels. Waite, a left-handed batter, was worried about matching up with a left-handed pitcher. Telling himself he would try to hit the ball to the opposite field, he smoked a ground ball at Liberal shortstop Greg Steen, deep into the hole. As soon as he made contact, Waite said, “I knew I had to run like I had never run before.”