Jack Clark Has Made a Career Out of Destroying Dodgers

Some years ago, in an otherwise routine game in which Roberto Clemente got his usual double to right-center, they stopped the proceedings, and someone carried the ball in to Roberto.

“What are they doing that for?” wondered Dodger Manager Walt Alston.

“Roberto got his 2,000th hit,” he was told.

Alston was startled. “Has he only gotten 2,000 hits?” he said and clapped his hand to his forehead. “My God! Did he get them all off us?”

Present Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda may be similarly astonished to learn that of Jack Clark’s 223 home runs, only 21 have been hit against the Dodgers.

The problem with Clark’s home runs against the Dodgers is not the quantity, it’s the quality.

Home runs do not always stand out. There were 3,813 homers hit in the major leagues last season. There’ll be more this year. But home runs tend to be like crocodiles. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

Oh, there were Babe Ruth’s 60th, Henry Aaron’s 715th, Roger Maris’ 61st. Then there was Babe’s famous “called-shot” homer in the ’32 World Series. They do paintings of that. There was Bobby Thomson’s pennant winner in 1951; Rick Monday’s pennant-clincher in 1981.

And then, of course, there was Jack Clark’s ninth-inning, two-out, three-run homer that put the Cardinals into the World Series and the Dodgers in a position from which they’ve never recovered.

A home run is never wasted--in the sense you can waste a double or even a triple. But home runs are rarely historic.

The one that Clark hit in the Dodger playoff game let the world in on a secret that every National League pitcher--well, almost every--already knew, namely that Jack Clark was one of the most dangerous hitters, if not the most dangerous, in the game.

Clark is a career wrecker. It is a matter of record that pitcher Tom Niedenfuer was never the same after that pitch he served up to Clark in the ’85 playoffs. The Dodgers were ahead at the time, and first base was open.

“People talk about homers like those, they talk about shots heard round the world, that kind of thing, but the truth is, you hit a lot of important homers in a year,” says Clark.

Was he surprised to find the first pitch a fastball and a strike?

“You don’t go up there to be surprised.”

Jack Clark wears out the Dodgers. But then, Jack Clark wears out the league. If, as appears as sure as sunrise, St. Louis wins the pennant this year, Clark is a lock to be voted the league’s most valuable player.

Jack Clark on the Cardinals must feel like the ringmaster in a circus acrobatic or high-wire act. He must feel as if he’s standing in the center with the big whip, guiding and anchoring all about in this wild tumbling, vaulting, somersaulting, handstanding act. Jack Clark and the flying Cardinals.

Periodically, Clark comes up and puts a temporary stop to this frenzied baseball by walloping one into the seats and giving everybody a chance to slow down to trot and rest awhile.

It’s the greatest marriage of strength and speed in the game. The Cardinals play their games in a park perfect for their style of play. It’s less perfect for a homer hitter. Except for Clark. When Clark hits home runs, they are what the experts call quality home runs, not only out of the lot but out of state.

The problem is, in a lineup in which he has hit almost as many home runs as the rest of the team combined, Clark would be susceptible to what baseball calls being pitched around, i.e., being given bad pitches in the notion that if he gets walked, so what?

Clark doesn’t think so.

“You only get your pitch about once every at-bat, no matter what the situation,” he says. “You have to be patient, wait for it, select it and be ready for it.”

Fortunately for Clark, pitchers have their egos, too. In the case of Niedenfuer, he tried to sneak the first pitch past Jack. But it was a fastball in Clark’s wheelhouse, and a second later it was in the bleachers.

You would think it was a lesson baseball won’t forget and will put on the team bulletin board: Pitching to Jack Clark with two on and a one-run lead is like teasing a rattling snake.

The problem with putting him on first base is that Jack is surrounded by guys who may not be home run hitters but they are hardly out men. The Cardinals may lack the long ball but they can short-ball you to death.

Clark was a superstar in a closet all those years because he played in San Francisco, where they knew he was a superstar in the making and thought he was holding out on them. If Clark hit 27 home runs, as he did one year, the fans grumbled because it wasn’t 50. If he drove in 103 runs, they wanted 153.

“I’m really tired of talking about it, but they did some baffling things in San Francisco,” Jack explains.

“For instance, I couldn’t understand why they had to pick up the artificial turf. Here you had teams around the league that got along perfectly well with artificial turf and they played in normal conditions. Here we were in San Francisco, playing in a mini-hurricane every night, and they had to go put dirt back in the infield so it would blow in your eyes and have guys circling under flies, blinking their eyes like chickens with their heads off.

“Besides I didn’t like coming to the park and seeing only 3,000 or 4,000 fans there. But I put up the numbers (25, 26, 22, 27, 22 homers). They just weren’t enough for them.”

Reflagged as a Cardinal, Clark is in an RBI man’s heaven.

“With that bunch, he can get a sacrifice fly with a guy on first,” cracked a rival National League slugger.

Clark is on a course that could produce the 50 homers and the 150 RBIs San Francisco longed for.

He has already beaten the Dodgers with a last-inning home run this year. He has hit five against them, including one rained out.

The question was put to a St. Louis star player. “If you were the Dodgers, what would you do with Jack Clark?”

The player thought a moment. “I’d either walk him or buy him,” he said.