Merl Eberly came out of high school in Clarinda, Iowa—population around 5,000—determined to make baseball his career. He got his chance, signed by the Chicago White Sox in 1957 and sent for seasoning to the minor-league farm team in Holdrege, Nebraska, where he lasted 43 games, batting .281. He was cut by the White Sox the next year.
So home he went, back to Iowa, where he worked a little, played a little semi-pro ball, and thought about what he wanted to do. Coach, he decided. Manage. Teach others to love and play the game with the dedication he felt. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he decided to do something serious about this ambition. So he began to lead the Clarinda A’s, a summer team that gathered and brought to Iowa young players from around the country.
In some ways, Eberly was not a great success. In his almost 40 years of managing the A’s, he produced only around three dozens major leaguers, not all of whom remember him fondly—or even remember him much at all. He advanced deep into the college-league tournaments on several occasions, but his team was not the powerhouse of Florida, Arizona, or California college-league teams.
In other ways, however, Eberly’s accomplishments can be measured by the fact that he lured to Iowa such young unpolished talent as Von Hayes, and Bud Black. "Corn" was the only thought Ozzie Smith had when he arrived in the early 1970s, although he grew to love Clarinda and its coach, Merl Eberly.
Or so at least reports Michael Tackett in his new book, The Baseball Whisperer. An editor in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, Tackett never met Eberly, who died in 2011. But Tackett’s son had gone out to play for the man in what he told his father was a "magical summer" with the Clarinda A’s. The boy went on to win a spot on his college baseball team and now works in the front office of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Tackett is not happy with the current state of baseball and what he believes are its over-wealthy, over-pampered players. And so he decided to write up the life of Merl Eberly—partly as a gift to his son, partly as a curmudgeon’s lament about the decline of culture, and partly as an attempt to gin up in himself that nostalgic, autumnal mood that baseball lovers are supposed to have. To find the golden-tinged, half-sad light that’s supposed to angle like a last sunset across all baseball writing, from The Boys of Summer to Field of Dreams (another Iowa story).
Sports Illustrated’s Peter King, the dean of contemporary football reporters, recently bemoaned the inability of the Football Hall of Fame to do what the Baseball Hall of Fame seems to do so effortlessly: make its annual induction weekends "gauzy and warm and fuzzy and nostalgic, all in one." The cause may be the sheer incompetence of the football commissioner’s office. The Hall of Fame game this year was cancelled, despite its live-TV scheduling, because the groundskeepers had so fouled up the field with a bad paint job that the turf was like a gravel pit. But more of the cause may be that the careers of football players are so short (and, as King notes, "many former players have long-term health problems).
Great baseball players, by contrast, tend to have careers half again as long, with a graceful arc in the rise and decline of their statistics as they age (or, at least, they did before the generation of performance-enhancing-druggies skewed the right side of the parabola). And the key to baseball is the sheer amount of time it encompasses—as a sport (the oldest and best recorded professional game in America) and as a showcase for careers that feel as long as Rabbit Maranville’s or as short as Sandy Koufax’s.
Even within the game, baseball time passes oddly. Back in 1976, an American philosopher named Roland Garrett published a curious little essay called "The Metaphysics of Baseball"—a text worth hunting down, if you don’t know it. Treating space and time as the proper subjects of metaphysics, he notes how strangely space is organized by the game (baseball being one of the few games in which the team on defense is the team with the ball) and how strangely time passes within baseball, measured in outs.
Baseball, in other words, is a game of failure. It’s a sport in which a glorious season sees a batter put out for two-thirds of his at-bats—and a god-like season shows us a player failing 60 percent of the time. For all that the highlight reels of sports-shows have tried to turn baseball into a game of discrete victorious moments, like football, it’s a actually a game of the long arc and the slow flow of time across it.
Michael Tackett understands this at some points in The Baseball Whisperer. Of course, at other points, he tries to make Merl Eberly seem like a human highlight reel. But generally Tackett grasps that his subject is noteworthy for the length of time he spent coaching baseball, teaching its fundamentals, raising the money needed to keep the team going, and somehow convincing his Clarinda, Iowa, neighbors to house and feed the young men he brought to town, contributing their spare bedrooms and the extension leaves of their dining-room tables to the project of college-summer-league baseball.
Tackett does not shy away from the distaste the boys began to have for Eberly’s stern discipline in the 1980s, culminating in a player revolt in the 1990s. But on the whole, Tackett thinks Eberly was right—right to instill discipline, right to be stern, right to teach love of the game and hard work as the only enduring things they could take away from a summer in Iowa.
Unfortunately, that lesson is about all there is to The Baseball Whisperer. In Tackett’s telling, Eberly seems to have had no theory about the game, no strategy, no design—and no real knowledge of mechanics to impart. It’s all "There is no I in team" and "You gotta hustle." Merl Eberly was a great coach, the reader is told many times. But how Merl Eberly was a great coach, that remains a mystery.
Curiously for a baseball book, in the end there’s not enough baseball in The Baseball Whisperer. A curmudgeon’s lament about how the game is not what it used to be? Sure. A nostalgic, autumnal mood? Of course. Even that golden-tinged, half-sad light of so much baseball writing. But little actual ball playing, and little of the thing in itself, the reason we appreciate writing about the game. Try The Boys of Summer again, instead. Or Field of Dreams. Or even "The Metaphysics of Baseball."