Chapter 8
The following incident happened on one of those Rangers trips rather early in the season. My tray table, as usual, was in what the flight attendants call the “down position” and cluttered with the customary assortment of miniature liquor bottles. I was scanning the current issue of Reader’s Digest and happened upon a feature headlined “Are You An Alcoholic?”
To find out, the reader was requested to answer twenty simple questions “yes” or “no.” Well, I knew what an alcoholic was, having seen Ray “One’s Too Many and a Thousand’s Not Enough” Milland in Lost Weekend, but decided to take the quiz anyway. I assure you that I am loosely paraphrasing the actual text of the Reader’s Digest article.
Question 1. Do you ever consume more than two drinks in the span of one month?
Question 2. Have you ever consumed more than two drinks in one day?
Question 3. Do you sometimes feel the need to drink in order to enhance your enjoyment of certain social occasions?
Question 4. Have you ever had so much to drink that you cannot entirely remember events of the night before on the morning after?
Question 5. Do you ever vary the types of alcoholic beverages you consume at social occasions? By that, I guessed they meant normal drinking patterns where you switch from beer to wine to gin to rye to Clorox bleach or any other damn thing you can get your hands on when you’re the only one still left at the party and the supplies are getting short.
Some quiz, I thought. How many of these Reader’s Digest magazines do they sell a month? A billion? Why do they think they have to win over the Hare Krishnas, too? Then, whoever concocted the quiz, turned up the volume a little. The questions became more realistic as the thing went along. I don’t remember all of the questions word for word, but the last ones went something like this:
15: Do all the girls look prettier at closing time? (Yes, but the boys don’t, thank God.)
16: Do you ever hide alcohol? (Ha! My first “no.” Hide my booze? Why the hell should I? A man’s home is his castle.)
17: Have you ever had grotesque or terrifying hallucinations, like you’re being attacked by a giant flying lizard?
18: Have you, after having too much to drink, shaved your head or painted your genitals purple?
19: Have you ever passed out while smoking in bed but didn’t set anything on fire because you’d pissed all over the mattress?
20: Have you ever driven your car over Niagara Falls?
What a snap. Five “no’s.” I hollered to the stewardess—before “flight attendant”—to bring me two or three more of those little bottles while I turned the page and received some very interesting news. The test person said that if you registered even one “yes” then you were a big-time alkie. “Head to the nearest county hospital, if you can manage to get your car key into the ignition, and check into detox right away because, brother, you are fucked up.”
Or words to that effect. What a revelation! Not only was I an alcoholic, but according to the standards of Reader’s Digest, so was everyone seated on that airplane. So was everyone in the last eight generations of my family and, in fact, every human being I had encountered since grade school, with the two exceptions of the late Walter R. Humphrey, editor of the Fort Worth Press, who never touched a drop in his whole life, and Bobby Bragan, also of Fort Worth, the former manager of the Pirates, Indians and Braves who, if he ever had touched a drop, hadn’t in the last forty years. And do you know what Bobby Bragan’s many friends say about Bobby? “Good old Bobby,” they all said. “What a great guy. Imagine what an even greater guy he’d be if he got loaded every once in a while.”
Most of my more pragmatic social companions and working associates by far had chosen to avoid AA and instead join AAA, an organization that will tow your car out of a ditch in the predawn hours. As the plane drifted into its final approach, I watched while most of the ballplayers began stuffing the little airline booze bottles into barf bags so that relief supplies would be available on the bus ride from the airport to the hotel. How dare Reader’s Digest suggest that these professional athletes couldn’t control their drinking activities. Having pondered the overall content of the quiz, my initial impulse was to head to the nearest pay phone when the plane landed, call whoever it was who devised that quiz and propose that he do what I had done and sign on with this … this roving airborne madhouse for thirty days, after which time, I would wager, he himself would become the first person ever to score a perfect 20-for-20 in the “yes” column.
The reality was that at age thirty-one I realized my drinking easily exceeded the accepted norms of the general population and ranked me in the top half of my class within the ranks of working print journalists. Only after entering into this association with the Texas Rangers baseball team had I found a work-and-social grouping in which my personal consumption fell in at mid-range. After extensive observation, the conclusion was that I drank more than the infielders but not as much as the pitchers.
The off-the-field play habits of the baseball players that I observed, the activities that entailed corruption of the human soul, mostly concerned extended post-game hours in dimly lit refreshment pavilions in which it was difficult to make conversation over the loud clatter of ice cubes. Contrary to what I presume is the popular notion, efforts to consort with female camp followers happened on an extremely limited basis, because most of the players of that long-ago era lived two-to-a-room on the road and privacy was at a premium. “Let’s put it this way,” a ballplayer complained to me. “If anybody gets lucky, it usually means that somebody else is going to get to watch. And I’ll tell you what. I feel a helluva lot more comfortable being the watcher than the watchee.”
Since sportswriters are never called upon to function in either capacity, off-hours were largely devoted to extended visits with John Barleycorn. Too many hours, by my reckoning. Actually, a personal agenda that called for a twenty-five percent alcohol reduction program had actually been activated.
When David Clyde had been sworn into the flock I transposed the agenda and began drinking twenty-five percent more. For the first time since spring training, this job was looking like fun. No longer—for a few weeks, at least—would it be necessary to grope for angles and ideas and explanations to enlighten readership on how the Rangers had managed to lose still another game.
David Clyde was all of a sudden the hottest sports story in the state. Sports Illustrated cover material, in fact. Big news.
When I went into the bar at the Leamington Hotel to meet David for the first time on that Sunday night, Bob Short was relieved to find his brand-new asset drinking a Pepsi, although the cigarette he was smoking—a Salem, as I recall—managed to tarnish Short’s Eagle Scout assessment. At six-foot-one, with wide shoulders and long appendages, Clyde at least looked like what a pitcher is supposed to look like and, within the shadows of the Leamington Hotel lounge, he looked older than eighteen, too.
When Short introduced Clyde to Harold McKinney, the guy covering the team for the morning Star-Telegram, David said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.” Sir!
When McKinney responded, “Cut the bullshit, kid. You sound like Eddie Haskell,” Clyde laughed out loud.
The Hope of the Franchise said all of the right things, for print purposes, and was more quotable than most of his allegedly street-savvy big-league companions. My initial impression was that Clyde was totally tuned in to the fact that a person could pass through 1,000 lifetimes and not experience what he was shortly to encounter. Like the rest of the world, Clyde most certainly had his vulnerabilities, but stage fright wasn’t among them.
His only special request from the Rangers, he said (after confirming that Bob Short’s bonus check of 150 grand had cleared the bank), was to ask for uniform Number 32 … same as Sandy Koufax. In that initial interview, my only suspicions that David Clyde might be carrying a couple of loose connections were aroused when he said that (a) he was thinking about getting married and (b) his career ambit
ion was to become a sportswriter.
One night later, when the Rangers were playing the Twins, it seemed almost as if Bob Short’s store-bought gate attraction was acting to rejuvenate the attitude of the jaded Texas players. They beat the Twins, 7-2, with Broberg—a product of Dartmouth College, of all places—pitching like Walter Johnson as he picked up his third straight win.
Jim Mason, a backup shortstop from Alabama who came across in person as a rather mean-spirited Gomer Pyle and who adhered to every stereotype usually associated with the rural South, hit his first career major-league homerun and looked like Marty Marion in the field, particularly on a sensational play where he robbed Rod Carew of a base hit.
And the Rangers won again the next night, 3-0, behind the shut-out pitching of Sonny Siebert. Whitey Herzog, a wise man, suspected that all of this was a mirage. He had seen too much baseball to believe in miracles. But Herzog and the rest of the team had also watched with keen interest while David Clyde threw batting practice before the game. Whitey was delighted to see the Rangers hitters reluctant to dig in.
“He had ’em bailing out,” Whitey said later at his favorite big-league drinking facility, Howard Wong’s restaurant in Minneapolis. Whitey was laughing. Clyde, in fact, could not throw as hard as Whitey’s other new hired gun, Jim Bibby, and nobody else in the American League could either. And Clyde, with a big leg kick and a sweeping three-quarter overhand motion, clearly showed enough good stuff to convince Herzog that he might not, perhaps, have to ship David back home in a pine box after his major-league debut.
Revved by stout distilled refreshment personally mixed by Howard Wong’s gracious and not unattractive daughter, Herzog was second-guessing himself and arguing that Short’s scheme for emergency cash flow might not be such a foolhardy one at that. When Whitey was unwinding from a long day at the yard, I never could figure whether he was talking on the record or not. But he said, “Yeah … yeah … this looks like a gimmick and a pretty goddamn cheap one at that. I know that … But lemmee tell you one thing. This kid is the type of pitcher who’ll wind up selling a helluva lotta tickets before he’s through.”
The difficulty that Herzog was facing now was that a week’s worth of games remained on the schedule before Clyde would make his much hyped world premiere at home. After leaving Minnesota, the team traveled to Kansas City for a weekend series.
Jim Merritt, an urbane veteran big leaguer well-schooled in the healing potential of fermented grain who had been hand-picked by Whitey to act as Clyde’s roommate and mentor in the ways and means of life on the road, picked up another win on Friday. Then the events of Saturday night presented the team with a reminder of who and what they really were. The Rangers blew a three-run lead in the bottom of the ninth and did not record a single out before Kansas City had scored its four runs. Paul Schaal of the Royals singled home the winning run off Don Stanhouse and, afterward, Schaal offered a strange speculation. “That pitch that I hit to win the game looked like it might have been a spitball,” Schaal said. “I’m not saying that it was. I’m just saying that the action on the ball made it look like it was. It acted funny.”
Schaal, in all likelihood, was simply attempting to enhance his brief moment in the sunshine by yanking Stanhouse’s chain. If that had been Schaal’s intent, he was entirely successful. Stanhouse hissed and sputtered when informed of Schaal’s veiled accusation, then offered an astute assessment of his own professional skill level at that point in his career. “If I knew how to throw a spitter,” he said, “my fuckin’ won-lost record would be one goddamn helluva lot better than it is right now.”
The next day the Rangers lost both ends of a double-header and returned to Texas to go through the motions until Clyde’s grand entry. That was set for Wednesday’s game against the Twins. The ticket office was inundated with fans armed with cash and Bob Short was adrift in a state of ecstasy.
I drove to the park Monday afternoon to gather information for still another feature about the Kid. An exhibition game against the Astros (one that I fully intended to skip) was scheduled that night. I did take the time to visit the Houston clubhouse to glean some quotes from the manager, Leo Durocher. Leo looked preoccupied, seated at his desk across from some old gargoyle of a bullpen coach. Despite my intrusion, Durocher refused to be distracted from other activities at hand. I threw out a generic question about the overall current state of his pitching staff and Leo said, “Injuries, injuries, injuries. Is that the jack of clubs? Gin.”
Leo shuffled and made one discard. I threw out another generic question. “What’ll it take to get the Astros back into contention? Any way you can compete with the Reds?”
“Things are going dog shit right now but …” He shrugged and said, “Look at that. Four queens. Gin.” End of interview.
On the Tuesday before David Clyde’s celebrated unveiling, Oscar Molomont scheduled still another great promotion. Hot Pants Night. This was not a giveaway. Instead, Oscar brainstormed a contest open to any female who wanted to win a trophy confirming that she and only she had the best-looking ass in North Texas. The pageant entries outnumbered the paying fans. They don’t have promotions like that at ballparks very much any more.
The setting at Arlington Stadium was very different on Wednesday. Fans began arriving an hour before the gates were open. In the press lounge upstairs, Bob Short looked out, surveyed the gathering throng and said, “They told me it would be like this every night before I moved the team down here.”
I wandered down to the dugout, where perhaps a thousand people were jammed, waiting to see the young messiah emerge to warm up. The stands were filling up and even Herzog seemed nervous now, pacing in the dugout tunnel. “This is a helluva thing to ask of an eighteen-year-old kid,” he said, as if suddenly stricken by second thoughts. “But that’s the way they said they wanted it … the kid, his parents, Bob Short. One thing I do feel good about. [Umpire] Ron Luciano will be working the plate. A lot of these old heads like to put the squeeze on a kid like Clyde. But Luciano will call a fair game for him.”
Herzog then walked out of the dugout and told the crowd, now eager to catch a glimpse of the Rangers’ left-handed prodigy, “He’ll be up here in a minute. I told him to drink a couple of beers and smooth out.”
Inside, Clyde seemed completely composed. He was reading a telegram. “Go get ’em Number 32.” It was from Sandy Koufax. In the stands, a society writer from the Dallas Morning News was interviewing Clyde’s petite fiancée, Cheryl Crawford. By now, Clyde was warming up to the accompaniment of high-pitched squeals from some adoring teenyboppers clustered around the bullpen. “I think it’s great,” Cheryl told the reporter, “that other women find David attractive.” Within the course of a year, the future Mrs. Clyde would apparently exercise the female’s legendary prerogative to change her mind on that particular topic.
The stadium was completely jammed a half hour before game time and special events coordinator Molomont had even arranged a pre-game show. It was a performance—I am not kidding—by some hula dancers. Presumably, the actual date of David Clyde’s big night had been confirmed too late for Oscar to line up some strippers.
At last, there could be no turning back. Clyde walked to the mound to a crowd response that would not be seen at Arlington Stadium again for sixteen years—the night that Nolan Ryan got his 5,000th career strikeout.
The first Twins batter, Jerry Terrell, walked on four pitches. The next batter, Carew, walked on five pitches. “The thought then crossed my mind,” Clyde would tell me over one year later, “that I was about to fuck this thing up.”
Next, Clyde worked to a 2-2 count on Bobby Darwin, a player built like Mike Tyson. Darwin took the next pitch and umpire Luciano signaled strike three while Arlington Stadium was transformed into an orgasmic ocean of delight. On another 2-2 count the next batter, George Mitterwald, swung late and low on a waist-high fastball. Then Luciano called Joe Lis out on another fastball on a full count. Industrial-strength adrenalin was flow
ing in the grandstand.
Clyde gave up a two-run opposite-field homerun that curled just inside the foul pole in leftfield to Mike Adams in the second inning. But Clyde continued to pitch through five full innings. His pitching line for the night was two runs, one hit, seven walks, eight strikeouts. He left with the Rangers leading 4-2. Reliever Bill Gogolewski, forever unsung for his effort the rest of the way, allowed one run in the final four innings. Not only would Clyde fulfill the wildest expectations of the crowd, he also got the win. The loser: Nine-time all-star Jim Kaat.
The Twins, for their part, were true major leaguers when it came to their post-game reaction. Said Bobby Darwin: “Big effing [Darwin’s word] deal.” Said Rod Carew, watching reporters encircle Mike Adams, who got Minnesota’s only hit: “I guess they think it’s some kind of miracle that Adams hit a homerun off the guy. Jesus Christ.”
Meanwhile, tickets were going on sale at once for Clyde’s next scheduled home start against the White Sox. In the press lounge, where the beverage lamp was lit, Bob Short could be seen working out a simple math exercise on a bar napkin with a ballpoint pen. “According to my calculations, on the extra gate receipts alone, in two starts I’ll make back David Clyde’s entire goddamn signing bonus,” Short told me. The man could not contain himself.
On the following night, when it was business as usual again at the park with the Rangers losing to the Twins 4-0 before an announced paid crowd of 3,200—two of whom were given the bum’s rush by the stadium cops for shouting racial slurs at Rod Carew—the smile had still not left the face of Robert E. Short and wouldn’t, I am told, until the day he died in 1987.
Chapter 9
David Clyde’s resounding, albeit improbable, triumph on the banks of the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike elevated the morale of the whole state. When Clyde’s stats were flashed on the garish scoreboard in the Astrodome, Houston fans responded with a standing ovation.
Seasons in Hell Page 7