The turnstiles were clicking at Arlington Stadium on June 27, 1973. On the day John Lennon appeared in public for the first time in a fresh crew cut – he was attending the Watergate hearings with his wife, Yoko Ono – a sellout crowd of 35,698 packed the stadium for the major league debut of Texas Rangers pitcher David Clyde. Another 10,000, give or take, were turned away. At that time, it was the biggest crowd to attend a Rangers game. The fire-balling lefty, who was the No. 1 overall draft pick that month and was just 19 days removed from his high school graduation, would be facing the Minnesota Twins. “I just want to get the ball over the plate, get by the first inning, and not embarrass myself,” he told United Press International.
The 18-year-old Clyde denied feeling nervous, but how could he not be with all the pomp and circumstance surrounding his debut? Owner Bob Short arranged a pregame ceremony that included two bands, two lion cubs, a paper-mache giraffe on wheels, a half-bird, half-fish character, and Polynesian dancers. “It was the most dramatic first inning – heck, the most dramatic game – I’ve seen, and I covered 16 World Series and a bunch of Super Bowls,” said Randy Galloway of the Dallas Morning News to Steve Hubbard of The Pittsburgh Press.
Clyde walked the first two batters he faced, and then struck out Bobby Darwin, George Mitterwald, and Joe Lis on hard fastballs. In his five innings, he gave up one hit – a two-run home run by Mike Adams – struck out eight, and walked seven, including Rod Carew three times (smart kid!). Clyde faced just 10 batters over his final three innings and exited with a 4-2 lead. His manager, Whitey Herzog, had him on a 100-pitch limit, but let him throw 112, probably to complete the necessary five innings for a win. Bill Gogolewski pitched the remainder of the game to lock up the 4-3 win.
After the game, Clyde told the media swarm around his locker, “I’m not completely satisfied, but I was satisfied with my last three innings. . . I thought I would give up more hits. But I am a new pitcher, and they haven’t seen me and they don’t know my style.” Herzog said, “He throws easy smoke. His fastball is on them before they know it.”
The Rangers Draft the Kid
When the Rangers chose Clyde, he was the first high school player to be chosen with the first overall pick. The third and fourth choices, respectively, were Robin Yount and Dave Winfield, who would go on to combine for 6,252 hits on their way to the Hall of Fame. (They were passed up by the Philadelphia Phillies, too, who used the second pick to choose shortstop John Stearns, better known as a catcher for the New York Mets.) Clyde was a Houston native who pitched for Westchester High School. In his senior year, he went 18-0 and gave up just three runs in 148 innings. He pitched five no-hitters that year, including two in a row in the state playoffs while leading Westchester to a championship. The Rangers gave the six-foot-one, 195-pound pitcher a record bonus, variously reported at $125,000 or $150,000. Absurdly, Short tried and failed to get a “no marriage” clause in Clyde’s contract.
Short hadn’t learned his lesson when he shortsightedly (no pun intended) brought Denny McLain and Curt Flood to the Washington Senators in 1971 in an attempt to boost attendance. The moves didn’t help the moribund franchise, and they moved to Arlington after that season. The Rangers drew just 662,974 fans in 1972, when they lost 100 games. Other than slugger Frank Howard, there was little to cheer about. Short was looking for ways to generate interest in baseball. The Dallas-Fort Worth area was more into football. The Rangers hadn’t drawn more than 9,000 all season. Ludicrous promotions like Cough Syrup Night weren’t working. This time, Short promised Clyde an immediate promotion to the majors. The sellout crowd for Clyde’s debut paid for Clyde’s bonus. It worked out well for Short, but it wasn’t the best thing for Clyde.
Asked by Associated Press whether he liked the idea of a kid jumping from high school directly to the majors, Herzog, ever the loyal soldier, said, “When you get someone like David Clyde, I do.” Most other baseball people interviewed disagreed. San Diego Padres manager Don Zimmer spoke for all of them when he said, “No high school – or college – player has any business going straight to the majors. Once every five years or so an Al Kaline will come along, but not often.” (Kaline had made the jump in 1953. Two years later, at age 20, he became the youngest player to win a batting title.)
“He’s Like an Eagle Scout”
On June 12, the Rangers embarked on a 13-day, four-city road trip before returning home for Clyde to make his debut. Clyde was to join them in Minneapolis on June 17, when they would be concluding a series in Baltimore. In his uproariously funny book, Seasons in Hell, author Mike Shropshire recounts being on that road trip as the beat reporter for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The final game in Baltimore went 16 innings and took over four hours to complete. Travel arrangements changed. The Rangers were scheduled to land in Minneapolis at 3:00 AM. Short invited Shropshire to accompany him on his private jet to Minneapolis, where he promised him a meeting and an exclusive interview with Clyde. That sounded better than a 3:00 AM arrival, so Shropshire accepted. In the limousine on the way to the Minneapolis hotel, which Short owned, Short praised Clyde effusively, calling him “a gift from God. . . Photogenic. Mature. Articulate. A natural for the media. I mean, he’s like a [censored] Eagle Scout.” When they arrived at the front desk, Short asked the desk clerk whether Clyde had arrived yet. “You’ll find him at the bar,” the desk clerk said.
Clyde finished the 1973 season with a 4-8 record, 5.01 ERA, and an ugly 1.714 WHIP. In 2003, Toby Harrah, the Rangers’ shortstop when Clyde made his debut, told Kyle Ringo of The Rocky Mountain News that while it was a bad idea to rush Clyde from high school to the majors, Clyde didn’t help himself by migrating toward veterans who liked to party. “When things turned sour, I did party too much,” Clyde told Hubbard in 1986.
“The Artistic State of the Rangers”
With the Rangers playing poorly, another significant event in Clyde’s career was the firing of Herzog with 24 games left in the 1973 season. At the press conference to announce the firing, Short cited “the artistic state of the Rangers” as a reason. According to Seasons in Hell, Harold McKinney of The Star-Telegram exploded on Short. “[Censored], Bob! Artistic state of the Rangers!” cried McKinney. “Whitey’s not the one who went and rounded up Rico Carty and Mike Epstein to be the heart of the batting order! You were! Some [censored] art you collected there!” (Carty hit .232 and Epstein hit .188 for Texas. Neither was with Texas by this time.) While Short was mismanaging the press conference, Herzog said it best: “I thought that the emphasis here was supposed to be more on development than winning right away. I guess I was wrong about that, and when you’re wrong with a 47-91 record, you’re not going to get very far.”
The real reason for the firing was the sudden availability of Billy Martin, who had just been fired by the Detroit Tigers. Short wanted another gate attraction. He was hoping to build up the Rangers’ value so he could sell the team. For that, he needed to draw big crowds for every home game. Clyde was bringing crowds whenever he pitched, but a big crowd every fifth day wasn’t going to cut it.
“He Didn’t Think I Could Pitch”
Clyde didn’t have the same relationship with Martin that he had with Herzog and was only marginally better in 1974. After his first seven starts, he was 3-0 with a 2.70 ERA, and the Rangers won five of those starts. At that point, the Rangers were 19-19 and a game out of first place. However, Martin, who never met a good situation that he couldn’t sabotage, soured on Clyde because he didn’t think a 19-year-old should be pitching in a pennant race. “He didn’t think I could pitch, and the front office did, so he set out to prove he was right,” Clyde told Jim Taylor of The Toledo Blade in 1978, by which time Clyde was a member of the Cleveland club. “When I did pitch, the first batter would get a hit, and he’d have two guys warming up in the bullpen.”
“Everything was done to destroy my confidence,” Clyde told Hubbard. “Billy couldn’t have his way with the front office, so he was trying to force me to quit, to ask to go down [to the minor leagues]. I respect his knowledge of the game, but he doesn’t have much knowledge of how to handle young players.” Clyde recalled that Martin didn’t let him pitch or even throw on the sidelines for 30 days. The official record doesn’t bear that out, but it’s true that by July, Clyde was removed from the regular rotation, and by mid-August, his appearances were infrequent. He called 1974 “the most horrible time of my life.” Clyde finished the year 3-9 with a 4.38 ERA and 1.504 WHIP in 28 games, 21 of which were starts.
Meanwhile, the 1974 Rangers finished 84-76, good enough for second place in the American League West Division, five games behind the eventual “three-peating” World Series champion Oakland Athletics. The Rangers were officially eliminated on September 26 after they dropped a doubleheader at home against the Chicago White Sox. Clyde was relieved in the first game with the White Sox ahead, 3-1, and gave up two more runs in a 5-1 loss. The club boarded a flight to Kansas City to begin playing out the rest of the season. Shropshire wrote that as he walked onto the chartered jet, Martin, who probably already had more than one drink, stopped him and said, “You know who cost us the pennant? That [censored] little David Clyde, that’s who. Put that in your [censored] newspaper.” Shropshire shook his head and kept walking.
A New Lease on Life
Martin was fired in 1975 after a 44-51 start. Meanwhile, Clyde spent 1975 at Double-A Pittsfield except for a one-game cameo with the Rangers in September. At Pittsfield, he suffered damage to his arm and shoulder and required surgery to repair it. When he returned, some observers thought he’d lost some of the velocity from his fastball. Clyde was kept in Triple-A, where the results weren’t good, in 1976 and 1977. Late in spring training 1978, the Rangers traded Clyde and Willie Horton to Cleveland for Tom Buskey and John Lowenstein.
Clyde felt that the Rangers’ personnel understood sinker/slider pitchers. But fastball pitchers? Not so much. He was happy to get to Cleveland, where pitching coach Harvey Haddix told him to go back to the throwing motion he used in high school. Despite his relief at getting a new lease on life, in two seasons in Cleveland, Clyde was 11-15 with a 4.66 ERA and 1.452 WHIP. Cleveland traded him back to Texas, no longer owned by Short, after the 1979 season. He hurt his arm in spring training. If Texas had kept him and put him on what we today call the injured list, Clyde would have had enough service time to qualify for a pension, and the Rangers would have had to pay for his surgery. Instead, Texas claimed that Cleveland sold them damaged goods and released him. Clyde didn’t pitch at all in 1980. He took the Rangers to arbitration, but, in need of money, he settled for half what his 1980 salary would have been.
With the 1981 season already underway, he signed a free-agent deal with the Houston Astros, who dispatched him to the minor leagues. He began to find himself with Double-A Columbus, going 6-0 with a 0.76 ERA and 0.966 WHIP. That led to a promotion to Triple-A Tucson. But after struggling there with a 6.85 ERA and 1.991 WHIP, he found himself in the Instructional League at age 26. Standing on the mound in the middle of an inning, he realized he hated baseball and decided his family and friends were more important than chasing a dream. It was over for good.
“I Ran with the Wrong Crowd”
Since his career ended, baseball writers have given Clyde ample opportunities to reflect on his career. In 2002, Clyde told Greg Couch of The Chicago Sun-Times, “I went from high school to the big leagues and felt my talent had to make that jump also. Instead of believing in my abilities, myself, I thought, ‘I’m throwing 95 miles an hour, or whatever, I’ve got to throw 100.” He conceded that some time pitching in the minors or in college and having success might have helped with his confidence in the majors.
“I ran with the wrong crowd. I know that now,” Clyde told Jack Gallagher of The Houston Post in 1982. “I had put these guys on a pedestal – I had read about them as a kid – and here I was one of them. . . We’d party until 3:00 AM and then come to the ballpark with hangovers.” As one might expect, Short absolved himself of any blame for ruining Clyde’s career, blaming Clyde’s first marriage for his downfall. “Getting married to his sweetheart right out of high school is the thing that ruined David,” he told Gallagher.
As for Short, in 2012, Clyde told Douglas J. Gladstone of The Baseball Digest in an interesting “Where Are They Now?” article, “I don’t hold grudges. It was business. I understand that. Bob Short had money problems.” In Clyde, Gladstone found a contented, 57-year-old man who, after three marriages and problems with alcohol, was serious about Christianity, which was first introduced to him by Cleveland’s big first baseman Andre Thornton when they were teammates. Clyde was now teaching pitching for the Houston Miracles, a faith-based baseball/softball academy.
The Rangers drew nearly 2.4 million fans in 2025 and won a World Series in 2023. Baseball is thriving in Arlington. “David Clyde was responsible for putting the Rangers on the map,” Galloway told Hubbard. Clyde had a different opinion on his contribution to baseball while speaking with Couch. “[T]he mark I left on baseball is that at the draft every year, when a pitcher is taken, teams say they’re not going to let things happen the way they did with David Clyde.”
