October 16, 1985 : THE DAY THAT WON’T GO AWAY : JACK CLARK : With One Swing of His Bat, the St. Louis Cardinals’ First Baseman Ended Dodger Hopes Last Season by Powering a Ninth-Inning Fastball Into the Left-Field Pavilion at Dodger Stadium to Put His Team Into the World Series

For Tom Lasorda’s sake, the Dodgers should add a Bonfire Night to their list of promotional dates.

And on the mound at Dodger Stadium, piled high to the sky, they should stack a certain Louisville Slugger bat, cut from the wood of a northern ash, 34 inches in length, 32 ounces in weight, number M253. The signature on the barrel: Joe Morgan.

The bats should all have been confiscated on the last day of the 1982 season, when Morgan leveled the Dodgers at the kneecaps with a home run off of Terry Forster, costing them a division title.

Instead, one wound up in the hands of Jack Clark three years later.

Same bat, same destruction, and another pennant went up in smoke. From ash to ashes, so to speak.

Morgan’s name may have been on the bat, but Clark branded his forever as a co-signer with his Game 6 home run off Tom Niedenfuer, at least on the scorecard of Dodger memories.

“ It’s the way I always imagined the big leagues to be like--the fans, the win, the way it was done. With the Giants, I had heard so much about Bobby Thomson, seen the home run so many times on the highlight film. I also had seen Willie McCovey line out to the second baseman (Bobby Richardson) in the seventh game of the ’62 World Series.

“ I had thought about it, I had dreamed about it, but when I got in that position I wasn’t really thinking about it. I was concentrating because I hadn’t been swinging the bat real good; that probably helped me relax more.

“ I was going to take my chances on getting a good pitch and try not to miss it or foul it back. If I’d hit a long fly ball or a line drive, I would have been happy that I’d given it my best shot, my ‘A’ effort. It’s nice that it worked out the way it did.

“ Even before the inning started, I knew I might get in that position. Of course, they could have snatched the opportunity away from me by walking me. “

No one will ever forget that Lasorda had the option of taking the bat out of Clark’s hands, not with fire but with a base on balls. He didn’t do it, and got burned.

And Clark got famous. Or did he?

“I didn’t get any endorsements flying my way, if that’s what you mean,” Clark said the other day at the St. Louis Cardinals’ spring-training base here.

“A household name in L.A.? That’s good, because we’re moving there. We’re moving to Newport Beach.”

For Clark, who grew up in Azusa, the move represents something of a homecoming. And while Clark says he’s happy to be with the Cardinals, the uncertainty of his contract situation--he’s in the last-year of a four-year contract that will pay him $1.3 million in 1986--has him contemplating aloud what it would be like to play for the Dodgers.

“I always thought I’d be a Dodger sometime in my career,” he said. “I’d love to play there sometime.

“I’m in the prime of my career. If I can’t play here (with St. Louis), if something can’t be worked out . . . you know, I’m 30 years old, and they’re only giving out three-year deals now. Sometimes you have to move on.”

The grief he caused Lasorda, Clark said, would be nothing compared to the pleasure he’d get from playing for the Dodger manager.

“Lasorda’s always been real good to me,” Clark said. “The first time we came here at the start of the playoffs, Lasorda gave me a hug. I’ve known him since he was managing Ron Cey in the Dominican.

“It would be a lot of fun. He’s always been more one of the boys, rather than the manager, which makes him easier to play for.

“When I had that collision with (Mike) Scioscia (last July 21), Tommy came to me and said, ‘Are you all right.’ Then he went to Scioscia. I appreciated that.”

Clark said he also appreciates the dilemma he created for Lasorda in Game 6. Would Jack Clark have walked Jack Clark in that situation--Ozzie Smith on third, Willie McGee on second, two out in the ninth, the Dodgers ahead, 5-4? It depends, he says.

“I would have unintentionally intentionally walked me,” Clark said. “Don’t give him anything good. If he wants to swing at those pitches, fine, but if it’s 3-and-0 and he hasn’t swung, I would have walked him.

“But the thing is, Lasorda knows his own team. I don’t know Niedenfuer and the Dodgers that well. A lot of times you don’t know the inside scoop when that situation has come up before. He has watched the guy before, and that adds into his decision.

“You just have to make a decision. I give Tommy a lot of credit. I have a lot of respect for him. He didn’t go by the book.”

In the seventh inning of the same game, Clark had come to the plate with Ozzie Smith on third and Niedenfuer had struck him out.

“If he’d gotten me out again, I would have been the goat two times in a row. He had moved the ball inside and outside on me, then he went upstairs on me, challenged me. I think I went after a ball that was a little out of the strike zone.

“I think (in the ninth) what he wanted to do was to pitch to me while not pitching to me. I was looking for a fastball. If he’d thrown me a curve ball, I probably would have taken it. If he’d thrown me a fastball from the middle of the plate on out, I probably would have taken that, too. And if he’d gotten two strikes on me, he could have done whatever he wanted to with me.”

Niedenfuer’s first pitch was a fastball, inside.

“I see that pitch, and luckily I got all over it. I don’t have a big bat, I have to hit the ball on the button. It’s a little-barreled bat, light weight, good wood. I count on bat speed.

“When I hit it, I knew it was gone. I’d always dreamed of hitting a ball out of Dodger Stadium. I’d never hit one out, not even in batting practice. I think maybe I’d reached the back wall. Kingman and Stargell had done it, and I thought it was within reach.”

This one stayed in the park, landing halfway up the left-field pavilion. But Niedenfuer said afterward that he thought the ball would hit the Goodyear blimp on its way down. Clark’s teammate, Andy Van Slyke, the on-deck batter, called it a laser shot straight out of Star Wars.

This was the moment the Cardinals had envisioned when they traded four players to the Giants for Clark last winter.

“They made me feel good when they traded four players for me,” he said. “It made me feel wanted for the first time in my career. By doing that, they told me, ‘We’re trying to win and you’re going to be a big part of it.’ ”

The Giants, to be sure, had envisioned similar things, and more, from Clark, especially after his second full season, 1978, in which he batted .306, with 90 runs scored, 98 runs batted in, 25 home runs, a club-record 46 doubles and a club-record 26-game hitting streak.

For that, they called him Jack the Ripper.

But when the Giants continued their spiral of losing, the nickname stuck for another reason: Clark’s verbal sniping at Giant management. In one of his more celebrated shots, on the weekend that then-Giant Manager Frank Robinson was in Cooperstown to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, Clark said that the manager’s absence would be good for the team.

And then, in 1984, Robinson made Clark captain, and he responded by hitting .320, with 11 home runs and 44 RBIs until tearing up his knee on June 3 while chasing a line drive. By the end of the year, Robinson was gone, and by that winter, so was Clark.

“I have no bad feelings toward the Giants--they gave me my start, they gave me a chance,” Clark said. “But it hurt every year to go to a team that people laughed about, joked about. They made fun of San Francisco, the ballpark, and if we said anything about the park, they made us out to be jerks.

“They say a lot of things about me and Frank Robinson, but actually we got along pretty good. There were minor flareups, but basically it was because I didn’t accept the situation.

“Frank made me captain. That, along with the home run, are the highlights of my career.

“I try not to think about the bad things--even the bad times, I learned from those experiences and made me the person I am today.

“The most difficult thing for me, personality-wise, was having to play for a different manager every year, and no matter what you did the year before, you had to come to spring training again and re-prove yourself.

“That’s what upset me. The Giants should have told them (the new managers) that I was their No. 4 hitter. But if we told them that, we’d get ripped for that.

“We had our ups and downs with Frank Robinson--we almost won it in ‘82--but then the organization and management got to him, too. They wanted him to be something he wasn’t.”

Robinson had a reputation for toughness and aloofness. The Giants asked him to be more accessible, and it didn’t work.

“It became a real bad scene,” Clark said. “I felt real bad for him, because as soon as it started, when they changed him, the whole environment came apart. It was uncomfortable for everybody.”

The trade to St. Louis placed Clark in a comfort zone. Then he took the Cardinals to a higher plane, the World Series, where they won three out of the first four games against the Kansas City Royals before coming undone in an 11-0 Game 7 debacle.

“I had all winter to think about it,” Clark said. “And I don’t think we took the same attitude, felt the same intensity, against the Royals that we did against the Dodgers.

“Whitey (Herzog) used to manage the Royals, there were a lot of guys who had played on both teams, guys who were friends, and it’s all in the same state.

“I don’t think we appreciated the importance of it. It was more like going trough the motions type of thing--whoever wins, OK.

“Obviously we were trying, we played the games. We had it if we wanted it, but we just left it there. They (the Royals) played it out the way it was supposed to be.”

Obviously, Clark said, the loss of Vince Coleman to the Killer Tarp made a difference.

“All of a sudden Willie (McGee) was batting leadoff and Ozzie second,” Clark said. “During the season, I felt with guys on base I didn’t have to get a hit to get a run in, a sacrifice fly or ground ball would do.

“But in the Series, we weren’t generating runs with our speed. It just stopped. They picked guys off, they threw runners out at third, we weren’t used to that.

“During the season, you didn’t see even the teams with the best catchers, not even (Tony) Pena, do that. To get the run in, or to get us closer, we had to hit the home run, and I think we tried too hard.”

Like many of his teammates, Clark perceived a lack of respect from the New York-West Coast media circles.

“Because we were in the Midwest, nobody really followed us that closely, gave us much attention, except the fans of St. Louis,” he said. “We’d be three or four games in front in first place, and we’d pick up the USA Today and read about how the Mets won another one.

” . . . But it’s good to be back in spring training. I don’t see anyone here (dwelling on the World Series). Nobody thinks they’re hot stuff, they’re not talking about the World Series, They’re fighting for their jobs.”

After a year in which he hit 22 home runs and drove in 87 runs despite missing a month with a rib injury, plus the Home Run That Devoured Los Angeles, Clark won’t be fighting quite so hard this spring.

“I’m happy as I can be here, but you never know,” Clark said. “I’m looking at the upside of my career, I’m looking to my future. I have three kids, and every move I make revolves around my family.

“I’m 30, my career could end tomorrow. I don’t know anything else but baseball. But I chose a great life. Baseball’s a great life.”

Tell that to ‘em on Newport Beach, Jack.