Former Cardinal wishes he would never left St. Louis
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| Former big league slugger Jack Clark got down to the level of aspiring ball players speaking at Sunday's clinic in Granville. (BCR photo/Kevin Hieronymus) |
Editor’s note: BCR sports editor Kevin Hieronymus caught up with one of his favorite St. Louis Cardinals players, Jack Clark, who was providing hitting instruction for aspiring ballplayers Sunday at Putnam County High School in Granville. Clark talked about his days playing Whitey Ball in the mid-’80s in St. Louis and wished he’d never left.
KH: You hit 340 homers in 17 big-league seasons, so I know why you were called Jack the Ripper. Who gave you that nickname?:
Clark: Vida Blue (of the Giants) I guess. I was more of a line-drive hitter. The third baseman played way back and never worried about me bunting. Ripping the ball, something like that, I guess. I had to do that from my years playing in Candlestick Park because of the blowing wind. There was a jet stream blowing out to right, but the wind blows in from left. You got underneath something and thought you had a home run ... the shortstop ended up catching it. That’s the truth.
KH: You played three years with the Cardinals. Were they your favorite three years in the big leagues?:
Clark: Two of my favorites; in ’86 I got hurt. ’85 and ’87 was the first chance I had to play for a championship with my team. I wished I would have had done it with the Giants. I signed with them in ’73, and you always hope you’re able to do that. Free agency wasn’t a big deal at that point, and my attitude was hoping to stay with the same team my whole career. We never did well as a team. I had some good years there and not so good there. I enjoyed my time in San Francisco. Candlestick Park was the toughest place to play, and our teams never competed to the point where we were in the race. Our whole season was whether or not we could beat the Dodgers or not, because of the New York connection.
KH: The fans in St. Louis took to you right away.
Clark: Well, they’re great fans. We had some exciting teams and a great manager. Gussie Busch was still alive, and Anheiser Busch owned the team. Hall of Fame Jack Buck was alive, and a good friend of mine. (He) had been announcing the Cardinals games forever and just loved it in St. Louis. And Whitey Herzog was kind of ahead of his time, and his strategy with his kind of team and switch-hitters, speed and defense. The pitching was a bunch of characters with Danny Cox, Joaquin Andujar, Bob Forsch. We just had a good group, and Whitey knew how to get the most out of them. We just played Cardinal baseball; we played Whitey Ball.
KH: That was a bunch of jack rabbits and Jack Clark.
Clark: The only two power hitters on the team were me and Joaquin Andujar. That’s what Joaquin said.
KH: You had two World Series appearance with the Cardinals, leading 3-1 against the Royals in ‘85 and 3-2 against the Twins in ‘87, but yet no World Series championships. How disappointing was that for you?
Clark: We had a chance and didn’t win it. They always make a big deal about that call at first base (by umpire Don Denkinger in 1985). That was a bad call at a bad time. We had to take that seventh game, and it didn’t work out for us.
KH: The Dodgers were leading the Cardinals 4-2 in the ninth inning of Game 6 of the NLCS. How surprised were you when Tommy Lasorda pitched to you with two on and two outs and first base open and allowed you to hit the pennant-clinching homer?
Clark: I’ve played a lot of years with the Giants against the Dodgers. Most of the years we lost and the Dodgers won. That had happen to me a lot. That was just his style. He was going to show the Dodgers were better than us. We always had different managers and he was a mainstay. They had a better ballpark and more fans. I think our fans would have come except it was always cold and windy, like wintertime. We never won, and there wasn’t anything to cheer about. I wasn’t surprised, because I’d experienced that before.
KH: Is that the one play Cardinals fans always ask you about?
Clark: Cardinal fans, wherever I go, always seem to remember where they were at when I hit that home run. You hear stories what they were doing at that time.
KH: You had said you never really wanted to leave the Cardinals.
Clark: It was a weird time in baseball. Unfortunately, it wasn’t like it is now where both sides, the player’s union and owners were happy because everybody was making a lot of money. It was a time baseball was going through a change. I just happened to be a part of it. I wished it would have never happened. I wish all the years I went to the Yankees and Red Sox, I could have spent all those with the Cardinals and, hopefully, won a couple more championships and tried to get to another World Series. Whitey ends up leaving, things change for the Cardinals. Just sports. Sports and business, unfortunately. That business part clicks in and you kind of get caught up in the whole ... players before us fought the battles and all that type of stuff, so it’s our obligation to go ahead and do that. If I had to do it all over again, I think I would have done it differently. I wouldn’t have listened to the whole mess.
KH: I know Jack, you got into drag racing after baseball. What’s more exhilarating, drag racing or hitting a home run?
Clark: Oh, hitting a home run, for sure. Because it’s all you. A car is computer, mechanics, metal. It all has to work good with fuel and everything else. It’s like jockey on a horse. When (ESPN) talked about the greatest athletes, they put a horse as one of the greatest athletes. I don’t know how you can do it, because you can’t perform without the jockey. Drag racing was always something I loved. As a little kid, my father used to take me when I was 7, 8, 10-years old. Drag racing was like everything else, more old school. It wasn’t so-sponsor driven, kind of a good ol’ boy way of doing things. To be honest with you, I’m just glad to play baseball when I did, and be involved drag racing when I was. I had a bad motorcycle (accident) a few years ago, and I’m still here to talk about and work with some of these kids ... work with my son, watch my daughter play volleyball. She’s got a full volleyball scholarship to the University of Georgia. So she’s doing well. Got two grandkids now. I’m still very fortunate to still be here.
• On Thursday, Clark shares his opinion of the steroid controversy in major league baeball.
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