Horace Clarke

July 2, 1970. Tiger Stadium, ninth inning, one out. Joe Niekro had a no-hitter going against the New York Yankees, and the crowd in Detroit was on its feet counting down the outs. Horace Clarke stepped in and lined a single to end it. It was the third time in less than a month he'd done exactly that -- broken up a no-hit bid in the ninth inning or later, following Jim Rooker on June 4 and Sonny Siebert on June 19. No player in American or National League history had ever done it three times in one season. Nobody would match it again until Joe Mauer, in 2013.

That was Horace Clarke's whole career in miniature. Quietly, persistently good at things nobody noticed, while his name got attached to something much bigger than he was.

Taking Over From a Champion

Clarke was born June 2, 1939, in Frederiksted, on the island of St. Croix, and made his major-league debut on May 13, 1965, pinch-hitting at Fenway Park and singling off Dave Morehead in his only at-bat. He spent the next two seasons in a reserve role behind Bobby Richardson, one of the era's best defensive second basemen and a three-time champion.

Then Richardson retired after the 1966 season (walking away at 31, with three championships already in hand), and the job opened up. Clarke became the everyday second baseman in 1967 and never gave the position back for seven years. The problem wasn't that he was bad. The problem was the era.

The Banjo Hitter Who Could Actually Play

Clarke wasn't a slugger -- 27 home runs across ten seasons tells you that much -- but he could really go get the ball. He led American League second basemen in assists six straight years, 1968 through 1973, and in putouts four years running, 1968 through 1971. That's not a compiler padding garbage-time stats. That's a durable, sure-handed infielder doing the unglamorous work of covering ground for a team that gave him plenty of chances to do it.

His best year at the plate came in 1969: .285, a career-high average, with 183 hits (second in the AL), 33 stolen bases (seventh in the league) and a .706 OPS. He never made an All-Star team doing it, which says less about Clarke than about how little offense mattered next to a good story in those years.

He's also the answer to a strange piece of trivia. Clarke's first two career home runs were both grand slams -- one off Cleveland's Floyd Weaver in September 1965, the next against the Athletics in 1966. As far as anyone's found, he's the only player in major-league history who can say that. (Twenty-five career homers after that were considerably less dramatic.)

The Name Attached to the Fall

None of that stopped Clarke's name from becoming shorthand for the worst stretch in franchise history. From 1967 to 1973, the Yankees never finished better than second place, and sportswriters started calling it the Horace Clarke Era because he was the one guy who showed up at second base every single one of those years. His durability -- 148 or more games in four straight seasons from 1968 to 1971 -- became the very thing that stuck his name to a decade of losing he didn't cause.

He talked about it decades later, and the ambivalence was right there in how he put it: "Every time I hear 'the Horace Clarke Era,' I don't know how to take it, but I think it is mostly because we were losing and I was a member of all those teams." That's about as close as he ever came to complaining, and it's really just a man stating a fact he'd made peace with.

Roy White, his teammate through most of that stretch, put up quietly excellent numbers of his own during the same lean years and never got saddled with a losing-era nickname. Clarke did, mostly because he was the guy at the position Richardson had made famous, on a team that had forgotten how to win. The Yankees sold him to the Padres on May 31, 1974 (for $25,000, which even in 1974 dollars was pocket change for a decade of durable everyday baseball). He played out the string in 42 games and retired at season's end with a career line that was never as bad as the name implied.

Clarke played 1,237 games in pinstripes and never once made an All-Star team, never won a Gold Glove, never got his name called for anything except the wrong reasons. He just kept showing up at second base for a team that had forgotten how to win -- and somewhere along the way, he became the answer to a trivia question nobody else can claim.