Still the Thrill: 22 years later, Clark remains one of a kind

A man walked into Whitey’s Seafood Restaurant and Bar in New Orleans back in 1980. He was looking for Bill Clark, and while Clark wasn’t there at the time, the owner of the establishment pointed the inquirer toward Clark’s son, who was working there.

The man walked up to the boy.

“I want to play your dad,” he said, alluding to the set of pool tables in the back of the room.

“And I looked at him and I said, ‘Well, the only way he’s gonna play you is for $100 a game,’” Will Clark remembers. “And he said, ‘OK, call him up.’”

The 16-year-old called his father and within 10 minutes, the clinic was underway.

The elder Clark, who had a reputation for embarrassing anyone foolish enough to play pool against him, only played Nine-ball, so that was the game. He won the lag and ran nine straight racks before his opponent missed his only shot. Then he finished him off, pocketing $1,000.

“My dad looked at me and said, ‘You get any more requests like that, you make sure and call me,’” Will said, laughing. “I said, ‘Yes, sir!’”

Will Clark turned 58 on Sunday, and when he thinks back on that day more than four decades ago, it’s with a blend of amusement and admiration. A lot has happened since then. He became a star baseball player at New Orleans’ Jesuit High School and then helped Mississippi State reach the College World Series. He won silver with the 1984 U.S. Olympic team and was drafted second overall by the Giants in ’85.

Clark went on to have an illustrious 15-year MLB career during which he was a six-time All-Star, a Gold Glove Award winner at first base and the MVP of the 1989 National League Championship Series.

If you saw Clark play, you never forgot the experience, primarily for three reasons: His intensity was unmatched, his ability to deliver under pressure was uncanny, and his swing was unfathomable in its sheer beauty.

That first trait -- the intensity -- is difficult to capture in words. “Smoldering” and “relentless” might be in the ballpark. And it came from Clark’s father, usually demonstrated to its fullest extent at a pool table.

“He would beat your brains out,” Clark said. “He would never take prisoners. He’d make you earn everything that you got from him.

“I learned my intensity and competitiveness from him.”

‘The Thrill’ arrives

When Clark went to Major League Spring Training in February of 1986, he had played in only 65 Minor League games. But in those 65 games for Class A Fresno, he hit .309/.458/.512 with 10 homers. Still, the conventional wisdom entering camp was that the slick young first baseman from Louisiana would be assigned to Triple-A at best.

“My dad and I, we had talked about it before I walked into Spring Training,” Clark said. “I said, ‘Yeah, I might be slated for Triple-A, but I’m goin’ out there to win a job.’”

Clark took Giants Spring Training by storm. Overall, he hit .297 with five home runs and 16 RBIs during Cactus League play, and it didn’t take long for him to be bestowed with one of the most memorable nicknames in baseball history. The nickname itself was a perfect encapsulation of what Clark would come to mean to the Giants and their fans, but the way in which it came about is another story, one that has to do with his actual middle name.

“The clubhouse there at Scottsdale stadium, they had two [toilets],” said Mike Krukow, who pitched for San Francisco from 1983 to ’89. “It’s an old, antiquated room and whatnot. So [Giants catcher] Bob Brenly goes in there and he takes in a brand new media guide for 1986. He’s sitting there just kind of reading, and all of a sudden, we hear him go, ‘What the [heck] is a Nuschler?!’

“So he comes walking out and we’re laughing, and he walks right up to [Clark] and goes, ‘Hey, Will the Thrill, what the [heck] is a Nuschler?!’ And that was it: ‘Will the Thrill.’ It stuck like glue.”

That spring was seminal for the Giants franchise.

“We were coming off a season where we had just lost 100 games,” Krukow said. “Had it not been for Will Clark and just the brash attitude that he had coming into camp, we’d have had to go back and rehash the problems of 1985, and it would’ve been a big negative we would’ve had to deal with that spring. So with him in camp, everyone sort of took on his story.”

Manager Roger Craig penciled Clark into the No. 2 spot in the lineup for the season opener on April 8, against none other than all-time strikeout king Nolan Ryan at the Astrodome.

Ryan needs no introduction, but just to put the scene into context, the flamethrowing Hall of Famer was seeking his first strikeout of his 20th MLB season when Clark came to the plate in the first inning, and the 4,084th of his career.

The first pitch Clark saw was a curveball.

“That first pitch from Nolan completely relaxed the situation for me,” Clark said.

“Will Clark was not afraid of Nolan Ryan,” said Wayne Hagin, who was a play-by-play broadcaster with the A’s and Giants between 1981 and ’88. “There were guys in that lineup, I guarantee you, who were afraid of Nolan Ryan. And here’s this young kid basically saying, ‘Give me your best shot, and I’ll give you mine.’"

The next pitch was a fastball up and away for a ball. Then came a jaw-dropping moment that no one who was in that building or watching on television would ever forget.

“When I hit it, I knew I caught it good,” Clark said. “Because when you catch a ball really good with a wood bat, it makes an unmistakable sound. And the sound was definitely more accentuated in the dome.”

Clark caught it so good, in fact, that Astros center fielder Tony Walker found himself in a dead sprint for the wall. As the ball cleared the center-field fence, a rare sight at the cavernous Astrodome no matter who was on the mound or at the plate, shock set in all around the ballpark.

“You have to keep in mind, nobody hit home runs in Houston,” said Krukow, who was the Giants’ starting pitcher that day. “And certainly not to center field. And certainly not off Nolan Ryan. They used to have a mascot out there called General Admission, and he had an old Civil War uniform on. The ball went out there to General Admission out in center field.

“As soon as he hit it, we were like, ‘Who is this guy?!’”

It wasn’t the first time Clark debuted with a homer, nor was it the last. He had homered in his first professional at-bat with Fresno the year before. A week after taking Ryan deep in his debut, Clark launched a two-run shot in his first game in front of the home fans at Candlestick Park, again against the Astros, this time off Bob Knepper.

It was a taste of things to come. The Thrill had arrived.

The best hitter in baseball

“I’m going to be honest, I want to be like Will Clark.”

Hall of Famer and eight-time NL batting champion Tony Gwynn uttered those words to the San Francisco Examiner in September 1989, when he and Clark were locked in a battle for the batting title down to the final series of the regular season, which was between their respective clubs in San Diego. Gwynn edged Clark, .336 to .333.

Gwynn’s words illustrate just how good Clark was.

What many don’t know, and what Clark himself didn’t know until the data was presented to him, is that by several metrics, he was the best hitter in baseball over the five-year span from 1987-91. Over that period, his 153 OPS+ was the highest in the game among hitters with at least 2,000 plate appearances. And his penchant for delivering in the clutch manifested itself in a 1.002 OPS with runners in scoring position, also the best in baseball among qualified hitters.

While Clark’s career-high for homers was 35 (1987), and his career-high for RBIs was 116 (1991), his home ballpark may have suppressed his raw output.

“I can legitimately look you or anybody in the eye and tell you that over those five years, [Candlestick Park] took at least 10 homers and maybe 25 RBIs away from me each year,” Clark said. “I mean, I would just tie into some balls and the right fielder would come running in on it. And then the next day, you’d hit the same ball and it’s like 50 rows deep.”

“The ’Stick,” as it was affectionately known by San Franciscans, was notoriously cold and windy. Gale-force winds swirled around the inside of the ballpark, which was completely enclosed in 1972 for football. There was no telling what a baseball would do when it got up in the air, as countless players over the years could attest.

Clark’s partner at the “Pacific Sock Exchange,” with whom he terrorized opposing pitchers in 1989, was Kevin Mitchell. The pair led San Francisco to its first pennant in 27 years with a combined 70 home runs and a 1-2 finish in NL MVP Award voting, with Mitchell narrowly edging Clark.

“The years I was playing with him, there was nobody better,” Mitchell said. “He did everything that could be done and that motivated me, man. I’d get upset when they walked Will ahead of me. I’d be like, ‘Take your punishment with Will. He’s gonna get you, too.”

Perhaps no team was punished more by Clark than the 1989 Cubs. In that year’s NLCS, Clark set a record that still stands to this day by hitting .650 (13-for-20) for the series. No one with a minimum of 15 at-bats in a League Championship Series has ever had a higher batting average.

And it was that series that yielded the defining moment of Clark’s career.

‘Fastball, inside’

The 1989 NLCS opened at Wrigley Field in Chicago on Oct. 4. Excitement was at a fever pitch, with the Cubs looking to earn their first World Series berth in 44 years. But before the seats were warm in the venerable old ballpark, Clark had already taken the air out of the place.

By the top of the third inning, Clark already had an RBI double and a solo home run. Then, with San Francisco leading, 4-3, the Giants loaded the bases with two outs. Cubs manager Don Zimmer went out to talk with his young right-hander, Greg Maddux. What happened next became the stuff of legend.

“Some people believe it and some people don’t,” Clark said. “You can believe whatever you want.”

As he stood with Mitchell in the on-deck circle, Clark gazed intently at Maddux as he spoke to Zimmer. He saw Maddux’s mouth form the words “fastball, inside.”

“How did I know an inside fastball was coming?” Clark asked. “Who does Greg Maddux ever throw an inside fastball to? Nobody.”

It was a fastball middle-in, and Clark crushed it out of Wrigley and onto Sheffield Ave. beyond the right-field wall. His 4-for-4, six-RBI performance set the tone for the rest of the series. According to many who were there that night, it was also the moment pitchers began covering their mouths with their gloves when having a meeting on the mound.

“Will had like 20-12 vision or something,” Krukow said. “And his baseball I.Q. was absolutely off the charts. He looked at the little things. Now, keep in mind, his old man was a gambler, so tells were pretty important, something he’s probably been exposed to his whole life.

“The story that you’ve heard, that’s not fabricated at all. At that time, nobody covered their mouth. Then, everybody started covering their mouths.”

Five days later, the Giants led the best-of-seven series, three games to one. Game 5 at Candlestick Park was a taut affair, with the score tied, 1-1, in the bottom of the eighth inning. With two outs and the bases loaded -- the same scenario as in Game 1 -- Clark came to the plate.

More than 62,000 fans moved to the edge of their seats as Clark stepped to the plate for the biggest at-bat of his life, trying to deliver yet again, this time with a chance to send San Francisco to its first World Series in 27 years.

“I guess we should’ve figured it would come down to this,” said the legendary Vin Scully, who had the call for NBC Sports. “Will Clark vs. ‘Wild Thing.’”

“Wild Thing” was hard-throwing left-hander Mitch Williams, who saved 36 games for the Cubs during the regular season but had a walk rate of 5.7 per nine innings. He had been summoned from the bullpen just for this situation. He had one job to do: Get Will Clark out.

‘It’s done’

There’s something you need to understand about Will Clark: He is absolutely enthralled by the high-leverage situation, so much so that he’s jealous if he’s not the man in the batter’s box when the game hangs in the balance.

Or, better yet, the pennant.

“A lot of people shied away from that,” Clark said. “I wanted that situation. I thrived in that situation. I’d be up at night thinking about that situation before I was in it.”

In baseball, there are precious few moments in which the perfect hitter-pitcher matchup aligns with the stakes as high as a trip to the World Series. In basketball, you can design a play to get the ball to Michael Jordan or LeBron James in the game’s final seconds. In football, Tom Brady or Joe Montana will be under center when you have under two minutes to put together a game-winning drive.

But in baseball, anyone could be up there in that pressure-packed spot. And in the 1989 NLCS, it came down to Will Clark and Mitch Williams.

As Williams finished up his warmup pitches after jogging in from the Chicago bullpen, Clark went over to his hitting coach, Dusty Baker.

“I just wanted to double-check with Dusty,” Clark said. “I went over and said, ‘What are you thinkin’ here?’

“And he said, ‘Partner, this guy’s got better control than people think. They call him ‘Wild Thing,’ but he ain’t that wild. Just go up there and look for what you want to look for.’”

As Clark returned to the on-deck circle, Mitchell had six words for him.

“I said, ‘You’ve got a job to do,’” Mitchell remembers. “And he said, ‘It’s done.’”

Williams jumped ahead in the count, 1-2. The masterful Scully set the scene.

“In every important series, there comes that important moment,” Scully said, “when it’s difficult to breathe, difficult to swallow. This is that moment.”

Right on cue, Clark stepped out of the box.

“I took one of the biggest, deepest breaths I’ve ever taken,” Clark said.

Here it was. The “Casey at the Bat” moment. The hopes of an entire city -- ironically, the same city in which the famous poem was written a century earlier -- rested on Clark’s shoulders. But this brash slugger, unlike Casey, would not strike out.

“He had the kind of confidence Casey had walking into the box,” Krukow said. “Casey didn’t think he was gonna strike out. He thought it was over. He thought he was gonna win it. That’s exactly what Will was thinking when he walked into that box.”

The next pitch was a fastball away, and Clark smashed it up the middle and into center field. Two runs were in, and an inning later, the Giants won the pennant.

Still ‘the Thrill’

Clark spent four more seasons with the Giants before signing as a free agent with the Rangers prior to the 1994 campaign. While injuries would derail much of his career thereafter, he was still a very good hitter when he was in the lineup -- in five seasons with Texas, he hit .308/.395/.485.

Following an injury-plagued 1999 campaign with the Orioles, Clark was traded to the Cardinals midway through the 2000 season.

“I flew from Baltimore to Montreal, where the Cardinals were,” Clark said. “And [manager] Tony La Russa called me into his office. And he said, ‘I don’t want you to be Mark McGwire. I want you to just be Will Clark.’

“And I flat-out told him, I said, ‘Tony, I’m swinging the [crap] out of the bat right now, so all you gotta do is put me in some RBI situations.’”

In 51 games down the stretch for St. Louis, the 36-year-old Clark hit 12 homers and posted a 1.081 OPS.

Then came the 2000 postseason, in which Clark delivered a huge three-run homer off Atlanta’s Tom Glavine in Game 2 of the NL Division Series, which the Cardinals swept in three games. In the NLCS against the Mets, Clark launched another homer in Game 4, though New York would win the pennant in five games.

Fittingly, that home run was Clark’s final Major League hit, and it came 14 years after his first big-league hit, also a homer. Eleven years after hitting .650 in the NLCS against the Cubs, he hit .412 with two doubles and the home run against the Mets.

Following the 2000 season, Clark decided to leave the game as a player on his own terms. He had a family he wanted to go home to, particularly his autistic son, Trey.

Now, 22 years after No. 22 last played in a Major League game, that number is scheduled to be retired by the Giants at Oracle Park in a special ceremony on July 30. San Francisco’s scheduled opponent that day is also apropos: the Cubs.

When it was announced that the Giants would be making Clark’s 22 the 11th number to be retired in that franchise’s long and storied history, Clark said that this was like his “Hall of Fame.”

There was a time when Clark was considered a lock for the Hall of Fame given his career trajectory. And there are still many who would tell you that he belongs in Cooperstown after what he did to lead the revival of the Giants franchise in the late 1980s.

“There wasn’t one game I ever played with Will Clark that I didn’t think I was playing with a Hall of Famer,” Krukow said. “I knew he was going to be a Hall of Famer. What he did for us, for our franchise and for that city, that’s what a Hall of Famer does.”

Whether he ever has a plaque hung in Cooperstown or not, one thing is certain: Clark was the quintessential baseball player, the one you would come up with if you were trying to construct a hero of the diamond.

And 22 years later, he’s still “the Thrill.”

“I mean, I’m damn near 60 years old,” Clark said. “But if I could run back out on that field, you better believe I’d wanna be out there with the game on the line.”