Still a Hard-Hitter : JetHawks’ Clifford Learning to Tackle Baseball Without Linebacker Mentality

Stepping to the plate, James Clifford scowls at the pitcher and waves the bat like Popeye swinging a toothpick, purple uniform sleeves stretched tightly around beefy biceps.

The 6-foot-2, 215-pound JetHawk first baseman is a hanging curveball’s worst nightmare.

Which is good news for the running backs of the world, because he used to spend his time trying to knock them over fences too.

Clifford is playing minor league baseball because he made a wrong turn on the artificial turf at the University of Washington, where he was a linebacker tearing through the Pacific 10 Conference on his way to the NFL.

After that fateful cutback in preseason two-a-days, when he shredded the ligaments in his right knee, Clifford was not the football player he had been. Suddenly, baseball, a weekend hobby, became his career.

The transition is one Clifford only recently has mastered. He went from a sport in which slamming your helmet after giving up a touchdown is the norm to one in which slamming your helmet after striking out makes you look like a jerk.

“In football if I got mad or someone knocked the hell out of me, I’d go nuts and I’d be a better player,” Clifford said. “In baseball you can’t do that. That’s one thing I’ve had to learn a lot, how to be a professional out here.”

The football player inside Clifford still leaks out from time to time. Like when he ran over a catcher in a collision so violent it’s legendary around the Seattle Mariner farm system. Or when he snapped his bat over his leg after striking out.

Most days, Clifford is under control. After batting .163 early in the season, Clifford coolly collected himself and raised his average to .258 before slumping to his current .207. He leads the JetHawks with eight home runs and 34 runs batted in, and has a .434 slugging percentage.

Though his average is unspectacular, as it was in his four previous pro seasons, the Mariners have been patient with Clifford--the second-oldest JetHawk at 26--because he has major league power and is an above-average first baseman.

The Mariners also realize he got a late start.

At Ingraham High in Seattle, Clifford was a four-year varsity starter in football and baseball. Although he had offers to play football from most Pac-10 schools, he chose his hometown Huskies.

But after his senior season of high school baseball, the Mariners drafted Clifford in the 19th round. They made a push to get him, inviting him to take batting practice at the Kingdome before a game and tempting him with a $25,000 signing bonus.

The Mariners came back weeks later with an offer of $65,000, but by then it was too close to the start of Husky football practice. Clifford was too juiced up with the idea of hitting running backs to think about hitting baseballs.

He arrived at Washington, he felt, with a target on his back. His Husky teammates made a point early of putting him in place, reminding him he was a freshman, no matter how many times his picture had been in the Seattle papers as a high school athlete.

“I was getting head slapped,” Clifford said. “I remember telling myself, ‘I’m not taking any of this.’ I just went nuts from that day on. Any time anyone would do anything to me that I didn’t like on a football field, even my own teammates, I would literally try to kill them.

“I got in the habit of having to run the stairs every day from fighting in practice. I look back on it and laugh, because I was out of control.”

Clifford’s rage was constructive on fall Saturdays, though. He earned a starting job midway through his freshman season. As a sophomore, he led the Pac-10 with 164 tackles, including 27 in one game at the Coliseum against USC.

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The encore to that season was delayed, though. Shortly before the start of the 1990 season Clifford tore up his knee attempting a cutback on artificial turf during practice.

After trying to rehabilitate for a month, Clifford elected to have surgery and use his redshirt season. When he returned, he had lost his starting job. His final two seasons at Washington--which included a shared national championship in 1991--were good by most standards but not by those he set for himself after such a stellar sophomore year.

“I thought I was [the same after the injury],” he said, “but there’s a big difference between mentally thinking you are all right, but subconsciously you are a little hesitant. I looked back at film and I could tell I really wasn’t the way I was before. . . .

“I remember sitting in the locker room almost in tears, thinking ‘What’s going on? Where did it go?’ I went from being on top of the world to being almost worthless, I felt.”

The spring after his junior season of football, Clifford decided to go back to baseball. Not seriously, just for fun. During spring football, he wouldn’t even practice with the baseball team. He would show up for the games on weekends.

The Mariners drafted him again, this time in the 24th round. Clifford signed with the Mariners as nothing more than a fun way to spend his last summer before NFL training camps.

Randy Hart, Washington’s defensive line coach for the past nine years, didn’t think Clifford’s assumption was unreasonable.

“I thought, even after the injury, that he’d have a choice between baseball and the NFL,” Hart said.

After his final football season at Washington, Clifford was back in Arizona for spring training, though his heart wasn’t. He was there biding time until the NFL draft in late April. Just before the draft, his family visited him in Arizona for what they figured would be a celebration.

A total of 224 names were called in the 1993 NFL draft. Clifford’s wasn’t among them.

Distraught, Clifford skipped out on baseball workouts the next day while he considered whether to retire or accept invitations to NFL camps as a free agent.

A day later, his decision was made much easier. In a baseball exhibition game, Clifford hit three towering home runs and barely missed a fourth.

“I just decided I was going to give baseball a shot,” Clifford said.

When Clifford reported to Class-A Bellingham, Wash., for the 1993 season, he obviously had some football left in his system. That was where Clifford plowed over a catcher in a collision that lingers in the memories of all who saw it.

“He just drilled him, undressed him,” said JetHawk reliever John Thompson, who was with Bellingham that year. “It was like a yard sale: Hat went one way, a couple ribs went another way.”

Clifford, who regrets the play, said: “It was sad. I killed him. And he didn’t even have the ball. But I didn’t know that.”

Clifford’s tough-guy reputation grew through his next two seasons playing for the Mariners’ Class-A team in Appleton, Wis. Last year, Clifford was standing near the pitchers’ mound in the cut-off position when a relay throw from the catcher to second base struck him in the head and ricocheted 100 feet into the stands. Clifford didn’t come out the game.

“That’s just the kind of player he is,” said Pat Rice, pitching coach the past two years in Appleton. “You’ve got to beat him over the head to get him out of the ballgame.”

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Amusing stories seem to follow Clifford, but his football mind-set also caused him problems in a sport in which success at the plate still means failing seven times out of 10.

“He was maybe too focused,” said Carlos Lezcano, who managed Appleton in 1994 and now manages the San Jose Giants. “He needed to relax and just let his abilities take over. We had to settle him down into the baseball mentality.”

Clifford tried to use the rage that fueled his football performance in baseball. When he was in a slump, he would go into the batting cage for two hours and take out his aggression with 500 rib-jarring swings.

“I just wanted to overcome everything with anger, with brute strength,” he said. “I wasn’t getting any better. I wouldn’t concentrate. I wouldn’t listen to anyone. I would work without a purpose.”

Eventually, Clifford learned. He began to come to the plate relaxed, not thinking about how much he hated the pitcher or much he wanted to “kill the ball.” His aggression is tempered with thoughts about what the pitcher has thrown him before. He thinks about the keywords he’s written on the bill of cap that help keep his mechanics sound.

“I have a plan now,” he said. “I’m a lot smarter that way.”

Clifford still has some football left in him. Last month in a game at Rancho Cucamonga he snapped his bat over his leg after a strikeout. But that’s about it.

Given the hypothetical choice of being an NFL linebacker or a major league first baseman, Clifford now would chose baseball without hesitation.

“I love baseball,” he said. “Baseball’s not just a game it’s almost a way of life. It may sound a little weird, but you are with these guys so much, every day on the buses, it’s just fun. All the kidding around, it’s fun.”