Baseball the Wright Way

By Clyde Wright

No-hitters are rare in baseball. Father-and-son combinations are rarer. Baseball the Wright Way covers all those bases and then some. Two pitchers with vastly contrasting styles, both Clyde Wright and his son Jaret Wright discuss the art and craft of pitching with an authentic, straightforward sincerity that will captivate all baseball fans. In the mid-1960s, Clyde became the country boy from Tennessee who had his feet in LA when he made his debut with the California Angels. With his special brand of small-town, country charm, Clyde invites you to relive his journey from the farm to the major leagues, where he won one hundred games, tossed a no-hitter, made an all-star team, and played alongside and against many superstars and Hall of Famers in the backdrop of sunny Southern California. From there, Clyde spent three years pitching in Japan, forging many lifelong friendships in the Land of the Rising Sun. When his playing days were done, Clyde returned to Anaheim and launched a pitching school where he trained thousands of major-league-hopeful youths for decades. One of those hopefuls was his son Jaret, who later carved out an eleven-year major league pitching career of his own that included starting game 7 of the 1997 World Series as a twenty-one-year-old rookie for the Cleveland Indians. Jaret picks up the story where his dad leaves off and moves candidly and honestly through his time in the major leagues, where he quickly rose to prominence and played with and against many of the game's legends. If you are a baseball fan, this book is right in your wheelhouse. If you are not a baseball fan, then Clyde and Jaret Wright will convert you with fascinating tales of life before, during, and after baseball.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684562879

Book preview

On the Farm

We just had a super time growing up as kids on a farm in Jefferson City, Tennessee.

People always ask me, Were you poor growing up?

I always answer, Well, no!

We didn’t know what poor was. We didn’t have any money, if that makes you poor. But we had everything else. We had brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles. We grew up on the farm, and we raised everything we ate. We had cows, so we always had milk and beef. We had pigs, and we had chickens. We’d grow all our fruit and vegetables in the garden.

They say, Well, that must have been hard work.

Well, we didn’t know any different. It wasn’t hard back then. It was just what we did. You got up, you milked 125 cows, you had breakfast, and then you went off to school. I used to tell everybody we walked to school two miles uphill both ways. That was just the way it was. It was that way for a lot of people down south.

We had an outhouse with the quarter moon carved in the door, a Sears and Roebuck catalog for toilet paper, and no running water except the creek that ran behind the house, which we used to bathe in.

We’d go rabbit hunting, and we would throw rocks and hit the rabbits. You could eat the rabbits. We’d go squirrel hunting, and the squirrel would run all the way to the top of the tree. One day, my brothers and I were out hunting, and we brought home two squirrels.

Dad looked at ’em, and he said, Wait a minute. There’s no meat on these squirrels. You knocked all the meat off ’em. Next time you go hunting, use the other hand to throw. We’d tell that story, and people would just die laughing.

We all had a good relationship with my dad. It wasn’t like he’d walk up and hug you after you did something good, but you could just tell he loved all his kids by the way he would look at you. If you did something good, he’d look at you with a different expression on his face. But if you did something bad, he had that expression on his face that told you that you did something wrong. It was that way with all the kids—my five brothers and my sister. There was no yelling or screaming or anything like that. You could tell just by the expression on his face how he felt.

He taught me to always to do the right thing and always tell the truth. It was always better to tell the truth whether it got you in trouble or not because the punishment was always easier when you told the truth than if you lied and he found out later that you lied to him.

On the farm, we always had dogs, cats, and all kinds of animals. At one time, my father had twelve little beagle dogs which could chase rabbits. My dad had ’em all named. He could sit on the front porch and listen to ’em run and chase the rabbits. He could tell each one by the way they barked, which one was in the lead, which one was behind. He’d just sit there and listen to ’em run. We had two big ol’ redbone hounds. We’d go hunting with ’em all the time for possums and raccoons.

When I was a kid, we never had to look to find somebody to play with because I had five brothers. We could play football, or we could play three-on-three basketball. Any sport that we wanted to play, we could play it. We never had to get somebody else from outside the family to play. I can remember one year we played a baseball game, and they were announcing the lineup, and the first six guys in the batting order were all named Wright. It was me and all my brothers. I was pitching, one was catching, one played left field, one played right field, and one was playing first base. The announcer said, Wait a minute, this can’t be right.

I’ll never forget one time when my older brother was playing first base. The ball hit his pocket and set his pants on fire. Somebody threw him a ball, and he missed it, and it hit his pocket. He carried those matchstick matches in his pocket to light his cigarettes, and when the ball hit those matchstick matches, it caught fire. We had to pour water on his uniform.

We had a good time playing baseball. We would use cow patties (dried cow manure) for bases and to make the occasional frisbee to someone’s head. We would take horse manure, dip it in water, let it dry out, and play dodgeball with it. When we threw it and hit something, or somebody, it would splat. We would also take a pig’s bladder and blow it up and use it for a football.

When we played catch, we didn’t have baseballs lying around to play, so we would put tape on a tennis ball and play catch. When we got tired of playing catch, one pitched and the other one would hit. If you got mad at whoever was batting, you’d just hit him, and that thing with the tape on it would hurt. And I don’t think two days went by a row that we didn’t get in a fight. There were six boys, three on a side, and that was a pretty good tussle. And then here came Mom. She’d line us all up to take a whipping. We got pretty smart because she would make us go cut a switch. We’d leave the leaves on it, and we would fight to see who was in line first because the leaves wouldn’t hurt. She finally got smart, and she’d take the switch and trim those leaves off. Then it would hurt.

We all stayed pretty close. If one of us got in a fight in grammar school, the other five were always there. There weren’t too many other families that had five or six brothers in the same school. Of course, we had fights among ourselves when we played, but when it came to someone outside the family wanting to fight us at school, it was six against one or two.

Of course, there were some things that I never outgrew from being raised on the farm. I still love to garden, and I always have. People in Japan knew that I can grow Japanese cucumbers, Japanese eggplants, potatoes, carrots, peas, or anything. In fact, I just had the Japanese come over and do a TV show in my backyard, in my garden. I’m an old farmer, so I can definitely farm.

Clyde

Winning the College Championship

In 1965, I was playing baseball for my college in Tennessee, Carson-Newman College, in my hometown of Jefferson City. It’s Carson-Newman University now, and they are doing very well. Their sports programs are very good. When I went there, we had some of the best coaches in football, baseball, and basketball. We had ’em all. That was where we really learned how to play baseball, under Coach Frosty Holt. In 1965, which was my senior year, Bobby Wilson took over for Frosty because Frosty had been sick. That year, with Bobby as the coach, we won the national championship for small colleges (the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, known as the NAIA) in St. Joseph, Missouri.

We went 33­­–3 in ’65, on our way to winning the national title for the NAIA. I won two games in the championship tournament, including the clincher, 3–2 over Omaha. In the first game I pitched in the tournament, I struck out twenty-two in a fourteen-inning win over Whitewater State (Wisconsin). To this day, the twenty-two strikeouts are a record for one game in the NAIA World Series. The second game I pitched was the championship game, and I struck out fifteen in that one for a total of thirty-seven in the tournament to tie a record set by Ray Washburn, who pitched in the majors for the Cardinals.

I finished my senior year with a 10–0 record and an 0.83 ERA, and I threw the first no-hitter in school history late in the season against Belmont. I struck out twenty in that game, including thirteen in a row at one point. I had a great season at the plate, too, with a .438 average, 13 homers, and 57 runs batted in. When the season was over, I was named the NAIA Most Valuable Player. My pitching record in four years at Carson-Newman was 39–4.

I was at a function in Los Angeles one night a few years ago, and they were introducing a lot of the baseball players who were up there. They said at one time, this guy struck out twenty-two batters in a game.

David Wells, a former Yankees and Blue Jays pitcher, said, How in the world did you strike out twenty-two guys in one game? I didn’t tell him the game was fourteen innings, and I pitched the whole game. He still thought I did that in nine innings.

We had our fifty-year reunion in 2015 at the college, just the baseball team. We wanted to go back as a group and not as a class reunion where everybody was there. We just wanted to have the whole campus to ourselves. Out of the thirty-three guys on the team, I think we’d only lost three or four guys, and that was pretty darn good, considering how long ago we played baseball together.

We had some super times together when we played. It was probably some of the best times I had ever had playing because there was no pressure, no money, and all the stuff that was involved today, like guys worrying about their batting averages or pitching records, and all that stuff. We were just some old country boys who loved to play, and we could play. We tried to play every team that we could think of. We tried to play UCLA, USC, Arizona, and Arizona State because a lot of ’em went down south down to Florida to take a trip to open up their season. And all the scouts used to tell ’em, Why don’t you stop down there in this little, old town in Jefferson City, Tennessee? Those guys at Carson-Newman College will give you a nice little game. But we never could get any of ’em to play us.

We did play the University of Kentucky and the University of Tennessee once. The big thing I remember about playing Tennessee was their big first baseman was a guy named Ron Widby, who was later a punter on the Tennessee Volunteers football team and later punted for the Dallas Cowboys. The big first baseman from Kentucky was Cotton Nash, who was an all-American basketball player who later played in the NBA for the Los Angeles Lakers and in the major leagues for the White Sox. I got to play against some pretty famous people, even in college.

Clyde

A College All-Star

In ’64, when I was a junior at Carson-Newman College, I went to Wichita, Kansas, to play in the National Baseball Congress (NBC) Tournament. There was a team almost from every state that went out there and played every year. It was like playing in the Cape Cod League or playing in Alaska. They had teams from Alaska come down there to play.

When I was a junior, I played for the Sioux Falls (South Dakota) Packers of the Basin League, which was an amateur league for college players during the summer. All the teams in the league were located in South Dakota—Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Sturgis, Valentine, Winner, and Pierre. In order to be eligible to play in the Basin League at that time, you had to have a job. The job we had in order to keep our eligibility to play in the Basin League was sodding the field. We put new grass in the whole stadium. We went up there for about two or three weeks earlier and we laid all that sod in the stadium—the infield, the outfield, and all of it.

I took off and went to play in the NBC Tournament in Wichita. There were always scouts from big-league teams there. A ton of kids who played in that tournament over the years had signed and played in the big leagues for quite a while.

One of my teammates in Sioux Falls for the summer of ’64 was a pitcher by the name of Don Sutton. At the NBC Tournament, we were talking to a scout from the Yankees, and they wanted to sign both me and Sutton. But they offered Sutton more money than they offered me.

I said, Wait a minute, this doesn’t make any sense. You don’t know anything about baseball. Sutton can’t hit. I’ve hit three home runs in this tournament already. Sutton could pitch, but he never could hit. In fact, he holds the major league record for most at bats without a home run, with 1,354.

Graig Nettles was there in the NBC tournament playing for the Fairbanks (Alaska) Goldpanners, and he hit four home runs to win the big home run trophy. If I had hit one more, I would have tied with Nettles.

I told the scout he didn’t know anything about baseball, and later I found out he was the scout who signed Mickey Mantle and all the big stars that the Yankees had. There I was, a junior in college, telling that scout who signed Mickey Mantle and a bunch of other stars that he didn’t know what he was talking about because he offered Sutton more money than he offered me.

When I was a junior in college, there was another big reason why I didn’t sign with the Yankees. A little of it had to do with the money, but the biggest thing was the townspeople in my little town of Jefferson City, Tennessee. They made up all the money to send me through college because the coach had one scholarship left and he wanted John Manning, a big guy from Bristol, to come down.

He said, Clyde, I’m gonna give him the scholarship. But the townspeople are gonna put you through college.

I said, Okay, that’s fine.

I made that promise to them that if they paid my way through college, I would graduate. And I graduated in 1965 with a degree in physical education. I loved sociology and biology. I loved to cut up animals. We had frogs and little piglets. We used to cut ’em up and see if we could put ’em back together. I don’t know why in the world I liked to do that. I guess it was just from growing up on the farm.

Clyde

Getting the Call

Iwas drafted by the California (back then) Angels in the sixth round of the 1965 draft—the first draft ever in the major leagues. I was the 107 th player picked in that draft.

Someone from the Angels’ front office called me and told me they were gonna draft me. The Angels’ scout who watched me play, Carl Ackerman, came out to my little hometown, Jefferson City, and he came out to the house. We sat in the living room and talked. It was my dad, a couple of my brothers, and I were there. We were sitting around the