All Grown Up

Twenty-five years later, David Clyde asks if you want to see the scars.

He is shoveling through weeds in a rusty rail yard in southeast Texas. The sun is high, the air is tight, like a wool straitjacket, 100 degrees, an oven-roasted breeze.

Clyde swats at an unseen bug, stares up at a graffiti-covered brown boxcar, hulking and packed with yellow pine. He and his crew have been fighting to move and unload that car for four hours. They will be here four more hours, until 11 p.m., working behind a forklift with lights.

Tomorrow he will get a break, leave the lumberyard, hustle over to watch one of his two boys play baseball. He will crouch behind the home-plate fence for another four hours, working the game as hard as he works the wood.

He lives the furious life of a man making up for lost time, so it’s not surprising that he suddenly smiles, puts down the shovel, pulls off his shirt.

There, on his left shoulder, snaking across the white skin, are two red results of operations representing but a cinder in one of the most brilliant burnouts in major league baseball history. So brilliant, sometimes it still hurts to look.

Oh, you say. Those scars.

A Calloused Example

Twenty-five years later, David Clyde goes to a baseball game. The Texas Rangers play in a new park, but they are still the Texas Rangers, and he still gets free tickets, and he drives up to Arlington after a long week of work.

He looks around at the fancy new stands and nice seats and contending team and can’t help but think, if he doesn’t take the mound on that April 27 evening in 1973, maybe none of this exists.

He was drafted first in the nation out of high school. Fitted for a major league uniform a couple of days later. Took the mound as an 18-year-old with an entire state hollering in his ear. Breathed life into a franchise on the verge of being shipped out of town.

Now he is a fan. They don’t know him. He doesn’t care. He takes his seat. The game drags on. It has been a long week. In the eighth inning, his family looks at him with amusement.

At probably his only game this season, he falls asleep.

“The sport is not what it used to be,” says David Clyde, and neither is he.

Twenty-five years ago, he was the most famous baseball player in the country, attending his senior prom one day, pitching for the Texas Rangers against the Minnesota Twins the next. No minor leagues, no preparation, all fastball and flash and future.

Today, one 18-win career later, he is the calloused example of why the sport should never try anything like that again.

Twenty-five years ago, he was a child king, the first of the media age, before Kobe Bryant, before Kerry Wood, before any of those kids incessantly trotted out as the next something-or-other.

Today, with a boxcar full of hardened memories, he is the living lesson that these gifted children should be careful what they wish, and should never do so with eyes closed.

Once he was known as the Houston high school star who struck out three of every four batters and finished his senior year at 18-0 with a 0.18 earned-run average.

Then he was known as the kid who wowed the nation by winning a major league game a few days after winning a state high school semifinal game.

Today, the resume is different:

Only three full major league seasons. An 18-33 lifetime record. More strikeouts in his senior year of high school (328) than in his big league career (228).

Two failed marriages. A bout with alcoholism. A reputation for high and fast and silly living.

A boy who had to fit in among men and, understandably, failed miserably.

Today, around draft time, baseball development people say “David Clyde” the way a mother says, “Measles.”

“He was the nicest kid you’d ever want to meet, but he was like Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining,’ ” said former Ranger teammate Jeff Burroughs. “He did a slow disintegration.”

Today, David Clyde has landed in a small country town north of Houston and beyond all that. He has a happy and stable marriage of 16 years, a tough but good job, three children who fill his expansive brick home with laughter.

But the past never quite leaves him, as he hustles about this town of 6,370 as if determined never to be short-changed again.

He runs a successful lumberyard--of which he is the co-owner--like a baseball manager. He gives motivational talks, hands out bonuses, spends eight hours with a boxcar as a manager pitches batting practice.

He works his two teenage boys as if he was their pitching coach. The other day, he was hassling a youth league umpire so much that the ump flashed him an obscene gesture behind his back.

“You can’t change what happened yesterday,” he says. “But you sure can sure as hell learn from it.”

He wasn’t the only one who learned.

Because of Clyde, every pro team sport is careful to offer mentoring and support to the ones who arrive young.

He entered the game as a pioneer. He left it as a sacrifice.

Twenty-five years later, he has grudgingly accepted that one man can be both.

Only sometimes, maybe when the tears flow while reading a scrapbook about a bushy-haired future Hall of Famer that never was, does he wonder why that man had to be him.

“I’m not bitter at all,” he says. “Maybe . . . melancholy is more like it.”

The Big Jump

Twenty-five years ago, everyone wanted to be David Clyde. What mid-1970s high school kid struggling with sports and girls and acne didn’t?

We couldn’t imagine what it would be like to walk away from the suffocating high school hallway and into the national spotlight, a big league uniform, a big league mound, a nation watching, a beautiful girl waiting.

Some of us would have given the rest of our lives just to be David Clyde on April 27, 1973. Turns out, the only one who did was David Clyde.

The tale is a common one. An owner (Bob Short) moves his struggling team (the Washington Senators) to the Sunbelt (Arlington, Texas, in 1972) in hopes of recouping his fortune.

But the new town’s heart is with football, not baseball, and even with Ted Williams as manager, the team loses 100 games and can’t draw flies.

In 1973, Whitey Herzog becomes the manager, but the Rangers are still lousy and crowds are still low and Short needs to sell the team, but nobody in Arlington will buy it and here come the moving vans again and. . . .

Along comes a kid from down the road who throws so hard, so fine, that fans stand four deep along outfield fences just to watch him pitch.

Three days before the draft, Herzog calls Gene Clyde, the father of this young pitcher, with some good news and bad news.

“We’re going to take your son with the first pick,” Herzog told the elder Clyde.

Before Clyde could say anything, Herzog quickly added, “But our owner wants to bring him right to the major leagues. I do not want this to happen. This should not happen. But this is a cruel, harsh world. And it’s going to happen.”

For what amounted to a $100,000 bonus, the Clydes weren’t about to stop it from happening.

“What was I supposed to do, tell them to send me to Pocatello?” Clyde says today. “I still remember that one statement, ‘How would you like to go to the big leagues?’ That one statement numbed me.”

It did the same to 35,698 Ranger fans, who filled Arlington Stadium for the first time in franchise history when Clyde made his debut against the Twins.

There were cameras at his breakfast table, cameras in the bullpen when he was warming up, 10,000 fans listening on their car radios because they could not get in, fans even following on a scoreboard in the Houston Astrodome.

At the time, it may have been the most publicized regular-season sporting event in this country’s history.

“There were people and cameras and press everywhere--yet I was more nervous than David was,” catcher Ken Suarez remembers.

Clyde walked the first two batters, Jerry Terrell and Rod Carew. He struck out Bobby Darwin, George Mitterwald and Joe Lis to end the first inning.

By game’s end, he had given up one hit and two earned runs in five innings with eight strikeouts. And the Rangers had won, 4-3.

“How do you describe living your dream?” Clyde says.

For the rest of the 1973 season, more than a third of the people who came to watch the Rangers play came on the nights Clyde would pitch. They saw him win only four of 12 decisions with a 5.03 ERA, but he struck out 74 batters in 93 innings and everyone could see the boyish magic.

What they didn’t see were the boyish problems.

His first day with the team, he remembers sitting in a hotel lobby, wide-eyed, watching the players walk in wearing fancy clothes--”One of them even carried a purse!”--and fancy attitudes.

The first guy he met was another pitcher who, upon shaking Clyde’s hand, said, “Don’t expect me to be your friend, because you’re trying to take my job.”

The older guys he met said something equally dangerous, something about joining them after the game for a drink.

“Some of us bent over backward trying to make him feel at home,” catcher Rich Billings says. “Maybe too far backward.”

He began partying after games with a group of thirty-something players once described as baseball’s “Hell’s Angels.”

At a time when most kids his age were enjoying their last summer at home, he was traveling the country alone, vulnerable and desperate to belong.

“I was honored that they would ask me to go drinking,” he says. “So I drank.”

A kid who barely drank in high school--and who wasn’t even legally allowed to drink in many states--began partying all night after he pitched and showing up at some day games with a hangover.

He once almost didn’t show up at all, barely running on to a commercial flight as it was leaving Boston.

His teammates noticed that he was wearing the same clothes from the night before.

“He looked like he had all it took to make it,” Burroughs says. “But he was the epitome of a kid who was mentally not ready to make the jump to the big life.”

He was never flashy, but soon he was buying expensive jewelry, once being ripped off by a clubhouse salesman with phony rubies.

He walked into a car dealership with $7,500 in bills, hoping to pay cash on the spot for a $6,000 Buick. Where most of the Rangers lived in apartments, he bought a fancy condo.

Then there was his high school sweetheart, who thought his new riches meant they were getting married. She wept when he told her no, so he felt bad and married her anyway.

“He would see all the older players being met by their wives at the airport, and he didn’t like being alone,” his father says. “It was hard for him to feel like he belonged.”

That marriage lasted a year. His second marriage lasted two years. In both cases, it was about a boy trying to hurry his journey into manhood, a boy in a world with no peers or support.

“I never really had anyone,” Clyde said.

Although Clyde hated disco music, he would follow the older players to discos. He had never smoked more than a cigarette or two a day, yet soon he was up to two packs a day, even smoking in the dugout runway between innings.

He once phoned his father at 3:30 a.m. and told him that he was firing his agent and wanted his father to represent him.

“I said ‘Son, I’ll do it, go to bed,’ ” Gene recalls. “There was a lot of times he should have been in bed.”

“But,” Billings said, “instead of tucking him in, the older guys were taking him out to get a toddy.”

Billy Ball

Clyde still managed to stay on his feet until he met Billy Martin.

Martin, who never liked youngsters anyway, replaced Herzog at the end of the 1973 season and made it clear that he hated the very idea of an 18-year-old pitcher.

He told owner Short that Clyde belonged in the minor leagues. Short, needing the money and attention Clyde generated, refused.

In 1974, after Clyde began his second season 3-0, Martin moved him to the bullpen and refused to pitch him for a month.

“It’s not polite to speak about someone who can’t speak back, but . . . Billy Martin set out to destroy me,” Clyde says.

He would ask to throw long relief. Martin said no. He would ask to pitch batting practice. Martin said no.

When he asked to throw in the bullpen during games, Martin agreed, but the minute Clyde bounced a curveball, the phone would ring, and he would be ordered to sit down.

“Billy and I told them all he couldn’t pitch here,” recalls Art Fowler, Martin’s longtime pitching coach. “You couldn’t put him in the ballpark, he couldn’t throw the ball over the plate.”

Records and witnesses indicate otherwise. Several players interviewed for this story said Clyde had an excellent curveball and was improving his control. In 1973, he walked 47 batters in 117 innings, but when he finally was given a chance to pitch, he followed his early win streak with nine consecutive losses.

“I never said anything because I was taught to respect my elders,” Clyde says. “But when you hear somebody keep saying you can’t do something. . . .”

In 1975, after Martin accused him of quitting on the mound, Clyde was sent to the minor leagues, in Pittsfield, Mass.

Relief? Too late for that. He was as much of an outcast in the minors because of his big league dress and reputation.

Says Clyde: “I’m not going to worry about spilled milk, but looking back, I should have told the Rangers, ‘Do not draft me because I will not sign with you. Under any circumstances. For any price.’ ”

He was eventually traded to Cleveland, where, in 1978, Clyde was 8-11 and Manager Jeff Torborg believed he was finally ready to be a big league pitcher at 23.

But the next spring, his late-night habits persisted, seriously exacerbating an ulcer. Then, within six months of their child being born and home being purchased, his second wife walked out on him.

“All of a sudden, the roof caved in,” Torborg said. “It was sad. It was really sad.”

Three years and two teams and only three major league wins later, at the ripe old age of 26, Clyde retired.

He was pitching an Instructional League game for the Astros when he looked around the field, noticed that suddenly he had become the old man and realized he was tired of not belonging.

“I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ ” he said. “I walked off after the game and never came back.”

If only he had known that if he had returned to the major leagues for 27 more days, he would have qualified for a pension that today would have paid him as much as $40,000 a year.

If only David Clyde had known a lot of things.

“What they did to him was one of the worst things I’ve seen in baseball,” Herzog once said.

Or, what they didn’t do.

And what they will never do again.

“That’s one positive,” Clyde says. “What happened to me, they won’t let happen to anyone else.”

A Regular Guy

Twenty-five years later, David Clyde, 43, is feeling sorry for no one.

He has been crouching in his usual position between the backstop and press box at Tomball High, spitting sunflower seeds, wedged in for an inning watching his son Reed, 14, struggle in a youth league game.

This is about the only baseball he sees or talks about these days.

There are a few mementos hanging in a cluttered rec room in his house--including a framed telegram he received before his debut from Sandy Koufax--but nothing at his lumber yard office and store. New employees sometimes work as long as six months before learning of his past life.

He still attends old-timers’ games when asked, and the Rangers still treat him like an honored alumnus, but that’s no longer his focus.

On this Saturday night, Reed is.

“C’mon, 32, throw the ball,” he shouts through the fence. “I mean, 18.”

No. 32? That was once David Clyde’s number, and is often worn by his sons.

Reed struggles, walking consecutive batters. His father sighs, spits some seeds, shouts, “Relax, 18.”

Reed is removed from the game, finds his father afterward, asks for help.

“Can we pitch again on Tuesday?” he says.

“Tomorrow,” Clyde says.