David Clyde, 18-Year-Old Texas Rangers Savior, Sacrificed 50 Years Ago

At age 13, Dallas Mavericks’ star Luka Doncic signed a five-year contract with European basketball giant Real Madrid. Jennifer Capriati made it to consecutive tennis tournament finals at the same, tender age. Freddy Adu debuted in Major League Soccer at 14. Michelle Wie earned $1 million on the LPGA tour at 15.

But child prodigies don’t just play sports.

Yunchan Lim, 18, last year became the youngest Van Cliburn Piano Competition champion. Fort Worth’s Haley Schlitz graduated from high school at 13 and college at 16, then earned a law degree from SMU at 19. And then there was Neil Patrick Harris, who portrayed Doogie Howser, M.D, the fictional 14-year-old surgeon on 1990s TV.

But not all child prodigies enjoy happy, fairy-tale endings.

Take, for example, D/FW’s most famous Clyde this side of Bonnie’s sinister sidekick.

David Clyde was 18 years and 36 days old when the Texas Rangers first burdened, then exploited him as the savior of their struggling franchise. Cash-strapped and flirting with bankruptcy, the Rangers trotted Clyde out to their Major League Baseball pitching mound on June 27, 1973, with the weight of the organization on his electric left arm.

He was a novelty act, too green to pitch but also too lucrative to not spotlight as a pitch man. A fast start lathered with hype and buzz predictably crashed into physical and mental problems, and just like that – at age 24 – Clyde was out of the big leagues.

Though they rushed and ruined a once-in-a-lifetime talent purely for profit, the Rangers last week decided to “celebrate” the 50th anniversary of Clyde’s debut at old Arlington Stadium. Now a 68-year-old grandfather, he was asked to throw out a ceremonial first pitch before Texas’ game against the Detroit Tigers at Globe Life Park.

But just months after a fifth surgery on his throwing shoulder, Clyde was forced to decline.

“One positive that came out of my career?” Clyde said. “That’s easy. To this very day when a special talent comes along in baseball, I hear them say ‘We are not going to do to this young man what was done to David Clyde.'”

In 2002, 17-year-old basketball phenom LeBron James graced the cover of Sports Illustrated under the blaring headline “The Chosen One.” Almost 30 years earlier, Clyde was the “Lefty LeBron.”

In a state that has bred pitching legends from Nolan Ryan (Alvin) to Roger Clemens (Houston Spring Woods) to Clayton Kershaw (Highland Park), Clyde was – is – the most dominant high-school pitcher in Texas history. In 1973 as a senior at Houston Westchester, he went 18-0, threw five no-hitters, allowed only three earned runs in 148 innings and struck out an astounding 328 hitters. He set 14 national career records, two of which (29 shutouts, 842 strikeouts) still stand.

Because of his high leg kick, blazing fastball and nasty curveball, scouts billed Clyde as the “next Sandy Koufax.” He even wore the same No. 32 sported by Koufax, the Hall of Famer who starred with the Los Angeles/Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1960s and '70s.

Said Clyde during his initial press conference with the Rangers, “Well, if you believe what everybody says, I mean, I’m the next coming of (Sandy) Koufax. Which is a fantastic gentleman to be mentioned in the same book with him, let alone in the same sentence.”

To this day, however, Clyde is just one of three high-school pitchers to ever be drafted No. 1 overall and the only one to start an MLB game. His sad saga is a cautionary tale that baseball remembers and dares not repeat.

In the 1973 draft the Rangers – coming off a dismal 54-100 first season in Arlington – owned the draft’s top pick and chose Clyde over future Hall of Famers Robin Yount and Dave Winfield. (Again, we’re celebrating this pratfall?!)

He signed a contract with a $125,000 bonus, at the time the largest ever award to a rookie. Said Clyde of his lofty goals, “I want to become the greatest pitcher ever.”

Given his unprecedented high-school success and pedigree, drafting Clyde was genius. But yanking him into the majors was just plain greedy.

When the Rangers arrived from Washington, D.C., in 1972, owner Bob Short had spent considerable money upgrading original Turnpike Stadium to a suitable MLB facility complete with metal bleachers and the iconic blue Texas scoreboard in the outfield. His team wasn’t winning – or drawing fans – so he jump-started a marketing gold mine in Clyde.

Texas was averaging 7,000 fans per game when – just 22 days after the draft – Clyde started a game against the Minnesota Twins. D/FW went berserk. The game was delayed 15 minutes, allowing a crowd of 35,698 (the first sellout in franchise history) to enter the stadium.

Understandably nervous, Clyde walked the first two batters. But he then struck out the next three with 90 mph fastballs, raising the crowd and expectations to unprecedented volumes. He finished with eight strikeouts in six innings, ultimately getting the win in a 4-3 victory in which he outpitched future Hall of Famer Jim Kaat. In his next start – also at home in front of another sellout – Clyde hurled another six quality innings before leaving the game with a blister.

With revenue and public interest suddenly pouring in, Short irrationally scrapped the team’s plan to give Clyde two starts and then send him down to the minor leagues for instruction and development. He stayed with the Rangers, and made six home starts. In those games the team averaged 35,000 fans and 6,000 in the games he didn’t pitch.

In his autobiography White Rat, then-Rangers manager Whitey Herzog wrote that he was often forced by management to leave Clyde in games longer than it was necessary or safe, simply to appease fans.

It was money that fueled the malicious mishandling.

With enough cash coming in to keep the team afloat, Short sold the Rangers to Brad Corbett in 1974. But the damage to Clyde had already commenced.

His arm suffered from the wear and tear, and by the end of his first season his fastball was barely touching 85 mph. He made 18 starts, going 4-8 with a gaudy ERA of 5.01. The next season he started 3-0, but nosedived to a 3-9 finish. He started one game in 1975, injured his shoulder and was demoted to the minors. He toiled there for three seasons, his maturation and development stunted by shoulder surgery in 1976.

In 1978, the Rangers traded Clyde to the Cleveland Indians and one year later – at the age of 24 – he was gone from MLB. In four underwhelming seasons, one of the greatest pitching prospects in the history of baseball finished his career with 18 wins and 33 losses.

There have been no debuts by a younger player in MLB since.

Said then-teammate and long-time Rangers’ executive/announcer Tom Grieve, “It was the dumbest thing you could ever do to a high school pitcher.”

Out of baseball altogether at age 26, Clyde became dependent on alcohol and drank his way through two divorces. He later turned his life around, raising a family with wife No. 3 and creating a successful career in the lumber business in Tomball. He still feeds his baseball passion, serving as a private pitching coach.

Baseball movies are often romanticized with warm-’n-fuzzy finales in which the boy gets the girl, the underdog makes the catch and the hero hits the home run. Clyde’s script, however, was never allowed to mature.

“At 18? My head would have blown up,” said current Tigers pitcher Mason Englert, who in 2018 broke Clyde’s record for consecutive scoreless innings pitched while at Forney High School. “It would have been way too much. For my body. For my mind. Everything.”

Regardless of the Rangers’ quirky, questionable treatment of last week’s anniversary as a positive moment in franchise history, Clyde harbors no hard feelings. If his legacy is that of a cautionary tale, so be it.

“Any number of things could have happened to me,” he said, letting Short and the Rangers off the hook. “I could have still hurt my arm for the first time in ’76. It’s just hard to say. There’s just so many variables that go into it. I think it could have been a lot more successful.

“But I had my chance, and not many guys can say that.”