Signs of spring are everywhere. Along with budding trees, melting snow and acres of mud, Major League Baseball has returned to local TVs and radios after a long winter layoff.
But Harpswell’s bona fide baseball legend, Carl “Stump” Merrill, who spent nearly 40 years coaching and managing in the New York Yankees organization, isn’t excited about it at all.
Nope, not one bit.
Merrill thinks America’s pastime is in serious trouble, and he knows why.
Encroaching technology meant to speed up the game is sucking the life and humanity out of baseball. Also, every year more major leaguers play for individual stats, glory and riches, rather than team wins.
“It’s all about money,” Merrill said recently, rubbing his fingers together, sitting among a lifetime of baseball memorabilia in his house off Allen Point Road. “I can’t watch it.”
Merrill, 81, isn’t just some local codger claiming everything was better in the old days. No living Mainer has more baseball credibility.
Born in Brunswick in 1944, Merrill ran down foul balls in the woods for older boys at the diamond near his house on Jordan Avenue.
“Sometimes I’d bury a ball and say I couldn’t find it,” he said. “I’d come back the next day and get it so my friends and I would have a ball to play with.”
Drafted by the Philadelphia Phillies in 1966 after graduating from the University of Maine, the catcher played in the minor leagues until a leg injury forced him out in 1971. Merrill then returned to Orono as assistant baseball coach under Jack Butterfield.
In 1977, Butterfield got a job with the Yankees and brought on Merrill, who stayed with the organization for the next 38 years. During that time, Merrill won upward of 1,500 games managing Yankee minor-league teams in Connecticut, Tennessee, Ohio and New Jersey.
While in the minors, Merrill also helped develop several Yankee stars, including Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, Don Mattingly, Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada. Merrill even managed the New York Yankees for two seasons in 1990 and 1991.
He retired from baseball in 2014. Since then, Merrill said he’s watched the game decline.
“When was the last time you saw two kids playing catch somewhere?” he said. “It’s not America’s pastime anymore — not even close.”
Merrill, in part, blames recent rule changes meant to speed up the game, including bigger bases and automatic extra-inning runners, which have taken too much humanity out of baseball. He especially despises the pitch clock, which only allows pitchers 15 seconds with empty bases or 20 seconds with runners on base.
“The worst thing you can do is rush a pitcher when he’s trying to concentrate,” he said. “He’s up there trying to pinpoint his pitch — to throw it right up a gnat’s ass.”
This year, Major League Baseball is also experimenting with computer-called balls and strikes.
Hogwash, Merrill contends.
The technology will only make baseball more boring, he said, because understanding where an umpire is calling balls and strikes on a given day is a fundamental — human — part of the game. Being able to adjust to the day’s strike zone is what separates good pitchers from the great ones.
Merrill said he doesn’t see much teamwork on the field anymore, either. Every big-league hitter is now swinging for the fences, concerned more with launch angles and exit velocity than putting the ball in play. The tendency only leads to more strikeouts and less exciting games, he said.
Merrill once watched a star Yankee player come to bat with the tying run on third base and a huge gap on the first-base side. Instead of poking a single down the line, driving in the run, the player swung hard and flied out.
Later, in the locker room, Merrill asked him why he did that.
“Because I get paid to hit home runs,” the player said.
Merrill still shakes his head at that one.
The only thing that can save baseball, Merrill believes, is an old-fashioned, iron-fisted commissioner who can lay down the law, bench players who misbehave, get the money under control and return baseball to basics.
That’s probably a fantasy, Merrill admits. Still, he knows just the man for the job.
“Hell, I’d do it for nothing,” he said.
