The Baseball Whisperer

by Michael Tackett

  Merl’s bond with Rick was especially strong. He taught Rick how to hunt when he was barely five years old, but he always told his son to pursue the sport with a purpose beyond killing. He taught him to respect the land on which he hunted and to always find and remove his prey. Hunting also taught patience and focus, as well as the virtues of solitude only found in nature. Merl had dedicated his life to the proposition that his children would never struggle as he did and never head down the path to ruin that had nearly consumed him. He taught his kids the value of work. Rick and his sister Julie would both push the lawn mower, an old rotary blade model. Rick would shovel sidewalks and once unloaded a train car of old newspapers for 25¢ an hour.

  Julie said her father was a “stickler for rules in all aspects of our lives.” One day she left school fifteen minutes early to be with her mother and cousin for lunch, with her mother’s permission and a note for an excused absence when she returned to school. Julie forgot, however, to sign out, and the school rule was that students could not leave early if they did not do so. Pat was fine with it, but Merl was not. He made her go back and take her punishment. She had to walk to school, a mile away, an hour early each morning until she had served her eight hours of detention for her lone high school offense. She did not resent her father for making her do it; she respected him for it.

  He was unyielding. On Saturday mornings Merl would sound reveille from the bottom of the stairs to wake the kids for chores. The girls were not allowed to date until they were sixteen. Then they had an 11:00 P.M. curfew, and to Merl that did not mean 11:01. “He was strict,” Joy said. “We knew our boundaries.”

  He was just as unyielding in his approach to baseball, not to show players how much he was in charge but rather to show them the value of discipline. “He utilized baseball as a catalyst to give back, to teach life lessons,” Joy said. “It was his platform to teach kids about life. You will have disappointment. You have to work hard for what you have. Nothing is free in life. You’ve got to earn it. [Those are] the lessons he taught us as well.”

  There was no ambiguity in his ways. He had a temper, was very opinionated, and was not a person, Joy said, to hold back on anything. “He didn’t make it easy for us at times,” said Rick, a man who is economical with his words and rather introverted for one who became a coach himself. One day Merl took Rick down to Campbell’s hardware store and bought Rick a mower on a monthly installment plan. Rick had a dozen yards to mow, and he paid his father back that first summer.

  His father imbued Rick and the other children with a work ethic, respect for other people, and an understanding that the customer is always right. There were fun times too, as when Merl carried Rick on his shoulders when he was a child while covering a sporting event for the newspaper. The kids also loved piling into the station wagon to go see Merl play for the town team, and they expected their dad to hit a home run almost every game. When Rick was older and occasionally got into some kind of trouble, he remembered the advice his father had given him: “If you end up in jail, don’t waste your call on me.” Merl warned the youngest, Rodney, “If you come home with a tattoo or alcohol on your breath, don’t bother.”

  Rick’s professional career, like his father’s, lasted just one year. He had shown great promise during his junior year at Texas Wesleyan: in one week alone he hit six home runs and six doubles and batted in twenty-one runs. Scouts were taking notice. Being drafted after his junior year could mean a sizable signing bonus and a path that might take him even further than his father in baseball. Then, with one violent swing of the bat, Rick felt his knee pop out. In a cast down to his ankle for six weeks, he missed the rest of the season. His hopes for a professional career weren’t over, but they were deferred, and his expectations had been reduced. To restore his game, he returned to Clarinda to play for the A’s that summer, when his fluid swing came back. But in his senior year he mainly served as his team’s designated hitter.

  Still, Rick had proved he was a professional-caliber hitter, and he was invited to a tryout with the San Diego Padres, where Ozzie Smith was now playing shortstop. The day before the major league draft, representatives from the Toronto Blue Jays called Rick and told him they would be selecting him in the later rounds. He was thrilled because, as a senior, particularly one recovering from a serious injury, he knew his opportunities were limited. But then the Blue Jays didn’t draft him after all. He was crestfallen. Soon his college coach called, though, and said the Blue Jays would sign him as an undrafted free agent assigned to the team’s Class A minor league affiliate in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. Rick said he signed for “basically a plane trip and the opportunity.” He had only been to Canada on fishing trips. As it turned out, he didn’t like the town, the playing conditions, or the cold. The whole league was in mountainous areas. Many of his teammates were young Latinos, seventeen or eighteen years old, from the Dominican Republic, and he had trouble communicating with them and relating to them. “For the first time I was uncomfortable playing the game,” he said.

  He was still having troubles with his knee, and now his shoulder began to bother him as well. It was difficult to get the ball across the diamond from third to first. One night he dove for a ball and partially dislocated his shoulder. He faced the choice of so many minor leaguers who get hurt: do you tell your coach and risk losing your spot, or do you try to play through the pain? He remembered the story of his father getting beaned and bloodied in a minor league game in Nebraska, then refusing to leave the game for treatment. “I was pretty well brought up that injuries are part of athletics,” Rick said. “You aren’t going to let that beat you.” He tried to keep playing. “If you weren’t out there, someone else was going to be,” he said. “I was playing hurt most of the time. I was never 100 percent.”

  He couldn’t throw well the rest of the season, but he hit .276 and led the team in RBIs. For the Blue Jays, it wasn’t good enough. Assessments by major league teams are bloodless, and the talent pools are deep. Why take a chance on a guy who has had serious injuries—even if he can really hit—when there are dozens like him to choose from? Rick’s manager called him into his office and told him he was being given his release.

  The game that had been so much a part of Rick Eberly’s life had now brought him low. He didn’t think it was fair, but he knew that nobody ever promised him that it would be. He had been so close. What would have happened if his knee hadn’t given out? He might have had a chance to play with Ozzie again. As it was, he was consigned to the same fate as his father.

  Rick took the Blue Jays’ decision hard, and he was more bitter than his father had been when released by the White Sox. He went far away, to Louisiana to work in the oil fields. “I just think I needed to get away,” Rick said, “and find myself again. It was a pretty rough crowd in the oil field, but there were some good people too.” He spent three years working in Louisiana and “sowed some wild oats.” He followed the A’s during the summers, and after a time he realized that he was missing baseball, even with all the pain that it had caused him.

  Baseball, Rick realized, meant more to him than simply the long-shot possibility of wearing a professional uniform. He called his mother and asked if she thought Merl would be upset if he quit his job and came home. Rick knew that Merl didn’t tolerate quitting. Rick said he missed seeing his younger siblings grow up. Merl and Pat had bought a shoe store, and Pat told Rick he could come help her run it.

  But Rick found the job hopelessly boring. Like his father, Rick’s passion was baseball. He started to play for the A’s again and also helped his father coach. They found comfort and pleasure in the game’s natural rhythms. “It’s something that stays with you when you do it that long and that hard,” Rick said. “It’s just a love for the game, the people you meet. It’s a fraternity, probably like no other.”

  Fortunately for Rick, Merl’s reputation as a coach was such that he often received job inquiries from colleges. When Tarkio College, forty miles to the south in Missouri, contac
ted him, Merl saw an opportunity, not for himself, but for his son, and arranged for Rick to get an interview. When the Eberly men arrived on campus, they saw the potential players, a lot of kids with beards and bandanas, a stark contrast to what Merl demanded of the A’s. Merl asked whether they were ready to play ball or go to war. Dick Phillips, the school admissions director, talked to both Eberlys, but Merl did most of the communicating about what kind of program his son would run. Players would be clean-cut, play hard, and respect the game, he promised Phillips.

  After Rick took the job, he found little in the condition of the field to inspire confidence that this aspiration could be met. The infield at Tarkio was pitiable: it had no grass. Rick wanted to upgrade it so badly that he went to the local bank and took out a personal loan to cover the cost. His father, who knew his son couldn’t afford to take on that debt, was not pleased. But Pat challenged her husband, saying, “At whose knee did he learn that if you want something badly enough, you are willing to make some sacrifices?” Merl loaned his oldest son enough money to pay off the bank loan, then extended him credit at a much lower rate of interest.

  The year before Rick took the job, Tarkio’s record had been one win and twenty-eight losses. During his first year, they improved their record to 10-15. Then they won three straight conference championships. Rick Eberly had found his calling in coaching baseball.

  Like Scotty Kurtz and Merl before him, Rick also continued to play for the A’s. The league permitted non-amateurs to be on the roster, and Rick kept himself in good enough shape that he could still keep up with the college players, especially with a bat in his hand. He continued to play for his hometown well into his thirties.

  One of his teammates, Livin, could easily see in Rick’s approach to the game just how much Merl had passed on to his son. From the moment he arrived in Clarinda, Livin had sensed Merl’s devotion to the game. The fact that it was such a family affair only added to the appeal of playing for the A’s.

  “Merl loved baseball,” Livin said. “That was it. He loved kids. He loved watching guys learn the game. And he loved the town. He loved what it did for the town. Bringing in kids and letting idiots like me see what Clarinda and the Midwest had to offer. That’s why it’s so easy for me to send kids there. You come back enriched. You learn so much more than the game of baseball.”

  Merl didn’t have a star system on the A’s. He treated the worst player as well as he treated the best. He knew that players, parents, and coaches had trusted him when they sent their sons to play for him. “Merl always felt the responsibility that went along with that,” Livin said.

  Just as he had done with his own children, Merl made his players understand that they would become what they worked for, both on and off the field. In his first summer in Clarinda, Livin baled hay by day and pitched by night. “That eliminated the glamour part of the game real quick,” Livin said. He did well enough to attract interest from professional scouts and came back to Clarinda for a second summer. Livin’s job that summer was to help sell ads for the newspaper—that is, until he wrecked Merl’s car. Merl was angry at Livin but said very little. Livin had a knot on his head from the accident so large that he could hardly put his hat on that night. But he was scheduled to pitch, and he knew he couldn’t face Merl if he didn’t take his turn in the rotation. “He said, ‘How are you doing? Go get loose,’” Livin said. “I couldn’t see the plate. But you rarely said no to Merl.”

  Facing great competition, Livin’s talent blossomed that summer in Clarinda, and his mental toughness grew as much as his physical tools. He pitched 75 innings, striking out 58, with an ERA of 3.96. He did so well that he made it to the Astros draft list, played four years in the minors, and reached Double A before turning to a career in coaching.

  Many years later, Livin had a player who was a prospect with much higher potential than he’d had himself. Andrew Cashner was a big, rangy kid whose fastball could reach the upper nineties. He was a raw talent, though, and while he was a good kid, he also had a bit of a wild side off the field. Livin could have sent Cashner anywhere. He chose to send him to Merl. “That was the easiest thing in the world,” Livin said. “I thought it would be a great fit. I was always cautious who I sent. I want them to be good people. I feel like I always owed that to the Eberlys.”

  The lessons Livin learned from Merl transcended what happened on the diamond. During a trip to Hutchinson, Kansas, Livin and several of his teammates were at a Pizza Hut, wearing their uniforms, for a postgame dinner. They were of legal drinking age, and they had ordered several pitchers of beer. They would tease each other by saying, “There’s Merl at the door,” knowing that would inspire fear. They kept making the same joke, and one player doused himself with beer. It was a great running gag until the man with the broad shoulders and the look that could kill walked over and said softly: “How are you boys doing?”

  Merl and Pat had come for pizza too. “I want to see you boys in the morning,” he said before leaving the restaurant, never raising his voice. The next morning Livin and the other players walked into Merl’s motel room and saw five bus tickets sitting on the bed. Merl looked them straight in the eye and said: “You have a decision to make right now.”

  The dramatic gesture had its intended effect. Merl had that kind of impact on his players. They never wanted to disappoint him. “I felt like I had just let down the pope,” Livin said. “And how was I going to explain this to my parents?”

  Merl knew that he hadn’t lived a perfect life himself, and he knew that these were college-age men old enough to legally buy a drink. At the same time, he always emphasized that the players were representatives of the program and of the town wherever they traveled. Merl could tell that Livin and his teammates understood why he had those rules and how genuinely sorry they were. Their baseball careers, in many respects, hung in the balance.

  “He called us all back after the game and said, ‘I believe you guys deserve a second chance.’” He told them they had let him down and endangered the integrity of the program. “It really dawned on me how that guy meant it,” Livin said. “For that second chance I am forever indebted. Whether he was bluffing or not, I don’t know. To me, he was dead set on it.”

  Dave Baggott, another player of that era, could relate. He arrived in Clarinda from his college team at Long Beach State, a self-described “punk” from California “who looked at life from a different perspective.” When he arrived, Baggott’s campus cool outfit of camo pants, a pink oxford button-down, and a brown tweed sport coat was not exactly the image Merl wanted his players to project, and he let Baggott know. “When I first arrived in town, my read was, ‘Does my college coach hate me?’” Baggott wrote later in the A’s newsletter, Dugout News. “Don’t get me wrong. For many of us ballplayers, Clarinda will probably be the smallest town we will ever visit in our lives. We are just as amazed by you and your lifestyle as you are with ours. To say it was a culture shock was an understatement.”

  As the summer went on, Baggott, like so many other players, came to like his surroundings. Rick Eberly taught him to fish at Cecil Sunderman’s pond. Baggott’s summer job was baling hay, until he found out he was allergic to it—the hay, not the work, though maybe a little bit of both. After a day of taking a decongestant to stop his sneezing, Baggott could barely play that night. “Merl asked me what was wrong. I explained the situation. He promptly had me put on a jacket (it was only 90 degrees that night) and run laps around the ballpark for the remainder of the game—about four innings. I don’t know if I sweated it out, but I never let Merl know if I took even an aspirin for the rest of the summer.”

  Later in the season, he would need much more than aspirin. As the team arrived for the NBC tournament in Wichita, Baggott and the others were anticipating the opportunity to play in front of dozens of professional scouts. But Baggott felt miserable: he had contracted a severe virus that affected his brain. He had to spend the first six days of the tournament in isolation at the hotel, and he lost ten p
ounds. Finally, the medication that doctors gave him started to work, and he told Merl he was ready to play. Merl was dubious but put him in the game, knowing how much it meant to players to have this kind of showcase.

  Baggott was weakened, and his thinking was hazy, and his uniform was suddenly baggy on his frame. In his first at-bat, he drew a walk, but was soon picked off first base. Later, he let a routine fly ball go over his head, resulting in an inside-the-park home run. Merl took him out of the game in the middle of an inning, a profound embarrassment. In the moment, Baggott was furious. But over time he came to see the situation in a much different light. “Here’s a guy who knew how sick I was, who knew how weak I had become,” Baggott said, “and yet he still gave me the chance in the most important tournament for a college player next to the College World Series. I know that I had no business suiting up, but Merl knew how important it was for me.”

  Overall, Baggott’s time in Clarinda paid off. That summer he hit .291 with only 22 strikeouts in 141 at-bats, to go along with 23 stolen bases. Based on that season and his college play, Baggott signed a professional contract and played for two years before starting a career as a coach. After that, he became part of the group that owns the Ogden Raptors in Ogden, Utah, where he is now the one providing the small-town atmosphere for baseball fans.

  Merl was as special to the people of Clarinda as he was to his players. The attention he’d brought to the town had enhanced its sense of identity, and he did it all on his own time for no compensation. When General Mills, the makers of Wheaties, sponsored a national contest to put a local hero on a box of cereal, Merl was the town’s obvious nominee. “We collected the box tops and sent them in,” said Venita Muller, who helped coordinate the campaign. “We set out empty Wheaties boxes and asked people to join in on this. I would collect them and send them in. I don’t think we got close, but it was fun doing it. And the paper picked it up and put an article in that said everybody should eat their Wheaties. He is very worthy of having his face on the Wheaties box.” A company representative even called Muller to ask her why entries for a person from a small town in Iowa were coming from people who said they lived so far from there. Muller explained about the A’s and the college players coming from all over to play baseball in Clarinda.