RIP Horace Clark

monte

monte

Well-known member
2023 $upporter 2022 $upporter
Was going to add to "Yankee 2020" thread, but felt that the passing of one of the Yankee greats deserves its own thread. Thanks for the memories Hoss. I'm sure you and Stick are turning 2 right now in that big ballfield in the sky.
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My dad is a non sports fan but one day he was watching the game with me for a while when Clarke came to the plate. The announcer said Horace Clarke leads the league in practice swings which really cracked up my father. Remember people saying you know how far the Yankees have fallen when Horace is their best player but hey they were a dynasty before HC. RIP
 
Remember him well. Switched hitter, #20 was a good ball player every other year.
 
[quote="bamafan" post=395391]My dad is a non sports fan but one day he was watching the game with me for a while when Clarke came to the plate. The announcer said Horace Clarke leads the league in practice swings which really cracked up my father. Remember people saying you know how far the Yankees have fallen when Horace is their best player but hey they were a dynasty before HC. RIP[/quote]

Roy White was their best player in the dark years.

Not a Yankee fan, but some of the remnants were pretty good. Mel Stottlemyre was a very good pitcher. Joe Pepitone was supposed to be a great Yankee. Bobby Murcer was hailed as the successor to yankee superstars DiMaggio and Mantle. Fritz Peterson was decent.

I still remember Horace Clarke's rookie card. It may be with Dooly Womack, as Topps would often have 2 rookies of the same team on one card. I still have my original Nolan Ryan/jerry koosman rookie.

It's numbing when you see someone pass away in old age that you remember as a young athlete starting out. Time flies. I hope his life was good.
 
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One of my earliest memories from the early 70’s was sitting in the old wooden bleachers at the old Stadium, baking on really hot days, pulling splinters out of my butt, while rooting for the Yankees.

It made the success that began in 76, that much sweeter!
 
On the day after Clarke was traded to the Padres on May 31, 1974, the back page of The Post announced it thusly:

“Yanks Can Lose Without Clarke”
 
[quote="Porgyman" post=395430]One of my earliest memories from the early 70’s was sitting in the old wooden bleachers at the old Stadium, baking on really hot days, pulling splinters out of my butt, while rooting for the Yankees.

It made the success that began in 76, that much sweeter![/quote]

My friends and I always stretched and paid the extra .50 to get in to the grandstands(upper deck), knowing that we could sneak down to lower lever from there. Sunday doubleheader's in a near vacant, cavernous Yankee Stadium are some of the most wonderful memories from my youth. Get there at 11:00 for BP, stay till end of 2nd game. No better way to spend a day.
 
I'm a Mets fan.
But I respect Yankee fans who lived through the awful years of (roughly) 65-75 and the late 80s/early 90s especially those who can talk affectionately about guys like Horace Clark. You guys know what it is like to suffer.
New(er) Yankess fans on the other hand.....
 
[quote="MainMan" post=395435]I'm a Mets fan.
But I respect Yankee fans who lived through the awful years of (roughly) 65-75 and the late 80s/early 90s especially those who can talk affectionately about guys like Horace Clark. You guys know what it is like to suffer.
New(er) Yankess fans on the other hand.....[/quote]

I was going to post something similar. I had friends who latched onto the Yankees during their extended glory run, even some from Queens - God forbid. My own nephew grew up with his dad a Mets fan, but now lives in Connecticut and is making his son a Yankee fan so he will not have to endure losing. My other nephew and I hold him in contempt for perhaps a greater sin than blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

I became an avid fan of the Mets in 1965, the Yankees first fall from grace with Johnny Keane replacing Berra, simply because Keane won the WS as manager of the 64 Cards.

My brother and I never hated the Yankees the way most Met fans think they have to. We did make the pilgrimage to Yankee stadium, and back then bleacher seats were 75 cents. I think the best position player on that barren team was Pepitone, who was a joke by then. Mantle may have been injured but didn't play that day. Tom Tresh was the SS. Maris and Elston Howard helped their teams to the WS in 67. Whitey Ford may have been in his last season.

Still and all, the old Yankee Stadium was majestic, and to mix in another thread, you had a sense of the ghosts of great players past still patrolling the field. There is something about looking out on a field and envision the precise places where Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Dickey, Berra, Lazzeri, and a literal HOF cast of others made the Yankees the premier baseball team of all time, and perhaps the most successful sports franchise anywhere.
 
I walked to Ebbets Field as a boy. Yankee losses are second on my sports fan pleasure list right behind STJ and Celtics wins.
 
RIP Horace “the Horse” Clarke.

Switch Hitting Second Basemen from the US Virgin Islands.

My first Major League game was Bat Day at Yankees Stadium in 1970 with my Dad. It is a tradition I kept with my kids and hopefully, If blessed to have any, my grand kids.

It was tough growing up in Queens and being a Yankee fan in the early 70’s but I was damned determined.

I was in the right field grandstand for the last game 1973 (played Detroit I think) in the old stadium before the renovation. They let the fans in the field after the game and it was bedlam. People brought tools and were trying to take anything they could including seats. My Dad wasn’t going for that but we brought home some outfield grass in a cup and planted it in the backyard. I wanted to go for the last game in 2008 but those ticket prices are insane.

Still get to about 10 games or more a year. Usually one or two at the other place too.
 
[quote="SJU85" post=395461]RIP Horace “the Horse” Clarke.

Switch Hitting Second Basemen from the US Virgin Islands.

My first Major League game was Bat Day at Yankees Stadium in 1970 with my Dad. It is a tradition I kept with my kids and hopefully, If blessed to have any, my grand kids.

It was tough growing up in Queens and being a Yankee fan in the early 70’s but I was damned determined.

I was in the right field grandstand for the last game 1973 (played Detroit I think) in the old stadium before the renovation. They let the fans in the field after the game and it was bedlam. People brought tools and were trying to take anything they could including seats. My Dad wasn’t going for that but we brought home some outfield grass in a cup and planted it in the backyard. I wanted to go for the last game in 2008 but those ticket prices are insane.

Still get to about 10 games or more a year. Usually one or two at the other place too.[/quote]

I was at that game as well. Took home a seat. Still have it. Not the entire seat, just the part that you sit on.
 
Interesting fact-in the span of one month during the 1970 season Hoss broke up 3 potential no hitters in the ninth inning of each game. Now that's hitting in the clutch. :unsure:
 
I didn't realize Clarke was born and raised in st. Croix. My family has been visiting st. John for more than 20 years. About 20 years ago we visited st. Croix on consecutive late winter vacations. I didn't realize there was any baseball presence on the islands. We stayed at the Westin Carambola twice but that 2nd year cruise ships had stopped making fredricksted a port of call because of high crime and reports of tourists getting robbed on the island.

When we first visited usvi in the early 80s, there was no cable tv there, and no mainland newspapers, so the islands seemed remote. 20 years ago there was a cricket field on st. John that since has become a softball field. A combination of the dream team and Tim Duncan, a st. Croix native, made basketball very popular on the islands. Duncan was a competitive swimmer who turned to basketball only after a hurricane destroyed the swimming pool he had trained at in his mid teens. Not sure if the cruise ships returned to st. Croix , but we were surprised to find that Christiansted was a high crime area, with some projects, and shootings.

It's quite an accomplishment for Clarke to make it to the bigs coming from a caribbean island that was not a hotbed for baseball. R.i.p.
 
many cruise ships stop at St Thomas, USVI. from there it is a short ferry to St.Johns,USVI
since the shooting, tourists have fled St Croix
The Fountain Valley massacre was a mass shooting that occurred on the afternoon of 6 September 1972 at the Fountain Valley Golf Course in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. The shooting left eight employees and tourists dead. Another eight were either shot at or wounded.
 
[quote="section10" post=395491]many cruise ships stop at St Thomas, USVI. from there it is a short ferry to St.Johns,USVI
since the shooting, tourists have fled St Croix
The Fountain Valley massacre was a mass shooting that occurred on the afternoon of 6 September 1972 at the Fountain Valley Golf Course in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. The shooting left eight employees and tourists dead. Another eight were either shot at or wounded.[/quote]

I visit st. John annually - makes sense, huh?

I'd heard about the st. Croix golf course slayings. The westin was contiguous to that property. Hess had a big refinery there, and Cruzan run still has a distillery there. Too bad. It's a beautiful island.
 
[quote="Beast of the East" post=395531][quote="section10" post=395491]many cruise ships stop at St Thomas, USVI. from there it is a short ferry to St.Johns,USVI
since the shooting, tourists have fled St Croix
The Fountain Valley massacre was a mass shooting that occurred on the afternoon of 6 September 1972 at the Fountain Valley Golf Course in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. The shooting left eight employees and tourists dead. Another eight were either shot at or wounded.[/quote]

I visit st. John annually - makes sense, huh?

I'd heard about the st. Croix golf course slayings. The westin was contiguous to that property. Hess had a big refinery there, and Cruzan run still has a distillery there. Too bad. It's a beautiful island.[/quote]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_Valley_massacre

Defense attorney was Kunstler. No surprise there.
 
[quote="Monte" post=395535][quote="Beast of the East" post=395531][quote="section10" post=395491]many cruise ships stop at St Thomas, USVI. from there it is a short ferry to St.Johns,USVI
since the shooting, tourists have fled St Croix
The Fountain Valley massacre was a mass shooting that occurred on the afternoon of 6 September 1972 at the Fountain Valley Golf Course in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. The shooting left eight employees and tourists dead. Another eight were either shot at or wounded.[/quote]

I visit st. John annually - makes sense, huh?

I'd heard about the st. Croix golf course slayings. The westin was contiguous to that property. Hess had a big refinery there, and Cruzan run still has a distillery there. Too bad. It's a beautiful island.[/quote]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_Valley_massacre

Defense attorney was Kunstler. No surprise there.[/quote]

Thanks for sharing. Because I visited St. Croix before the internet was in full tilt, I never thought to check the details, except to know there had been that event at the golf course, which had been renamed since and is contiguous to what was the Westin. It was an oceanfront resort, had seen better days, but were beautifully constructed buildings that each housed two 2-bedroom suites each having screened in porches. Westin went into the timeshare business not knowing anything about it and had partnered with a company called Sunterra. They split the relationship after a couple of years, and as part of the separation, Westin gave Sunterra the Westin Carambola Hotel property. Sunterra sold it a couple of years later, with 50 of those buildings a huge restaurant, and an estate house on the ocean for only $5 million. By then, the cruise ships stopped coming to Fredricksted, and tourism declined steeply once again.

On our first trip to St. Croix, on a Saturday morning I went into Fredricksted (a much closer town) to pick up some bakery items for my kids, and the streets were eerily empty. I got this unsafe feeling that a NYC guy learns at a young age to avoid trouble. I felt like there were unseen eyes on me, and I left hastily after buying some things.

By the time I had heard about the golf course murders, I remember somebody saying things about machetes, which may or may not have been part of the robbery. On our second trip, we noticed that most homes were gated with rusty steel gates, and padlocked.

Sorry to depart from the Horace Clarke story, who even as a Met fan, thought of him as a solid, good ball player, even though he wasn't a star.
 
[quote="section10" post=395491]many cruise ships stop at St Thomas, USVI. from there it is a short ferry to St.Johns,USVI
since the shooting, tourists have fled St Croix
The Fountain Valley massacre was a mass shooting that occurred on the afternoon of 6 September 1972 at the Fountain Valley Golf Course in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. The shooting left eight employees and tourists dead. Another eight were either shot at or wounded.[/quote]

If you are planning a big event like a wedding anniversary try Caneel Bay on St. John

Somewhat pricey but worth every penny, IMO

Pre-Covid, American Airline use to have some great early December deals.
 
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