Clyde accepts past, wants future in baseball
I've made a lifelong contribution to the game. I hear them say -- and I've read it -- we're not going to allow this to happen what happened to David Clyde. Even though my career was mediocre at best, a flash in the pan, I've left a lasting contribution to the game. I'm very comfortable with my part in the history of the game. No, it didn't turn out the way I wanted it to, but that's the way a lot of things in life are.
- David Clyde
He was 20 days removed from his high school graduation, and he is probably the one player most responsible for the survival of major league baseball in the Metroplex. On June 27, 1973, 18-year-old David Clyde took the mound for the Rangers against my Minnesota Twins.
Clyde was 18 years old at the time and had graduated from Houston's Westchester High School 20 days earlier. The Texas Rangers, a franchise virtually on life support, packed 35,698 fans into Arlington Stadium for the occasion. To some, that evening marked the beginning of the acceptance of major-league baseball in north Texas....
The Rangers made him the first pick in 1973, gave him a record-setting contract for a draft pick worth $125,000 and informed him he would be going straight to the big leagues.
His assignment: save a failing franchise. The Rangers didn't put it that way, but Clyde figured it out. They had drawn just more than 20,000 for their first game in Arlington in 1972, and most nights, fewer than 10,000 showed up. There were rumblings baseball would not survive.
Then 18-year-old David Clyde arrived with that boyish smile and laser-like fastball. Suddenly, Dallas-Fort Worth got interested.
Game time was delayed almost an hour so the Rangers could keep selling tickets.
Clyde walked the first two Minnesota Twins that night, then struck out the side. As he walked off the mound, he received the longest and loudest standing ovation of his career.
He went five innings and picked up his first big-league victory. In a community crazy about its Cowboys, an 18-year-old lefthander from Houston pushed all other sports aside for a time.
Unfortunately, there would be few days like that one. He was never given the chance to mature as a pitcher or a man.
Clyde has a refreshingly positive view of what was a disappointingly brief and bumpy major league career. Rather than focus on what he didn't have, he's chose to focus on what he did have- an opportunity to pitch in the major leagues. To do it at age 18 with the future of a moribund franchise weighing on his shoulders must have been a burden unlike anything any of us will ever experience.
Last night, the Rangers honored the 30th anniversary of Clyde's major league career before their game in Arlington against the Astros. It's least they could have done.
