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  Most teams in baseball had at least one scout following Hurdle. The Kansas City Royals became intimately familiar with him because his high school was near the home of Royals minor league pitching instructor Bill Fischer. Fischer said of Hurdle in the 1978 Sports Illustrated cover story: “He was hitting the ball over the fence and into the drainage ditch. I quit working out with him more out of fear than anything else. I was afraid I might get killed.”

  The Royals brought Hurdle to their minor league complex in Florida, where he put on what Fischer recalled as “the greatest exhibition you ever saw.” Fischer recommended to the Royals’ scouting staff that they select Hurdle—and early—in the 1975 draft. The team obliged, selecting Hurdle as the ninth overall pick before future stars such as Lee Smith, Carney Lansford, Lou Whitaker, and Andre Dawson. Hurdle signed for $50,000, bypassing a full ride to the University of Miami, where he was signed as a prized quarterback recruit. He was an excellent student, who made only one “B” in high school (and that was in driver’s ed). Hurdle had also received a scholarship offer from Harvard.

  From there his ascent to stardom only seemed to accelerate. After being named the top prospect in the Midwest league in 1976, Hurdle was invited to big league camp in 1977, where he hit .300. He skipped Double-A and hit .328 with 16 home runs and 66 RBIs in Triple-A Omaha and was named the league’s top rookie and MVP in 1977. He made his major league debut on September 18, 1977, starting in right field for a 102-win team. Having just turned twenty, he was the youngest Royal in the club’s then nine-year history. In the fifth inning of his first game he smashed a 450-foot home run off Glenn Abbott into the left-center field waterfall at Royals Stadium and spent an hour and a half after the game signing autographs, smiling the entire time. Stardom seemed preordained. He had the look and the power of a franchise-changing force. In his 9-game call-up from the minors, Hurdle hit .308 with 2 home runs and 7 RBIs.

  When Hurdle returned to big league camp in the spring of 1978, the spring when he was captured for posterity on the cover of the nation’s premier sports magazine, the level of hype and expectation elevated even more. The cover photo was one thing but also consider what was said in the accompanying cover story regarding Hurdle. Royals general manager Joe Burke said of him, “one of the top prospects, I’ve seen in the 17 years, I’ve been in the majors leagues.” Schuerholz, the scouting director, said, “I bubble inside when I think about his potential.” Royals hitting coach Charley Lau called him the best hitting prospect he had ever seen in the organization. “Clint is a lot like me,” Royals star George Brett said that spring. “I guess that’s one of the reasons we’ve become close. In 1974 I was the all-American boy trying to make it in the big leagues, and now it’s Clint. I can remember the front office asking me not to chew tobacco or go into bars. I was their golden boy. Now the golden boy is Clint, and they’ll probably want to protect him, too.”

  But the Royals failed to protect Hurdle from the pressure and expectation, and they failed to protect him from himself.

  The Sports Illustrated cover jinx is perhaps not a jinx at all but a mathematical phenomenon: Sports Illustrated tends to capture athletes at their extremes, at their highs or lows. From that cover, there was only regression for Hurdle.

  Hurdle had a so-so rookie season, batting .264 with 7 home runs in 1978. He spent most of the next season in the minor leagues and appeared to recover in 1980, batting .294. But it was an empty .294 as he hit just 10 home runs in 130 games. The power he had displayed as an amateur and in batting practice did not translate to game action. He was trying to make too many people happy. Lau wanted Hurdle to be a line-drive hitter. Royals manager Whitey Herzog wanted him to hit home runs.

  “Clint would call me and really be upset,” Clint senior said. “‘Dad what should I do?’ I said ‘Clint, I’ll tell you one thing. Herzog is the manager. He’s your boss. You need to do what he says.’”

  The problem was Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, which remains one of the most difficult stadiums to hit home runs in today, and Hurdle played there before the fences were brought in.

  Questions started to bubble up in the clubhouse from the print media, then grew to a boil as teammates and coaches began to whisper, “What’s wrong with Hurdle?” Players and coaches often say they don’t pay attention to the media or the public’s opinion, but the truth is it finds a way to them. Comments and opinions are either passed along or a player’s curiosity is too much to suppress.

  In something of an avalanche effect, problems on the field began to contribute to a growing problem off the field. If Hurdle went 0 for 4, he’d try to forget it at the bar, but that would only lead to a sluggish performance the next day. His father had asked him to ease off the nightlife, but Clint wouldn’t change.

  “Initially it was a release. Maybe it was a hard day. My day wasn’t so good, maybe my night will be better,” Hurdle said. “The problem was after having good nights, you have days to answer to.”

  The crushing weight of expectations began to show. Said Hurdle in a 1981 interview with reporters, “If I’d done everything I was supposed to, I would be leading the league in home runs, have the highest batting average, have given a thousand dollars to the cancer fund, and have married Marie Osmond.”

  His performance began to decline dramatically. He played just 28 games with the Royals in 1981 and was released after the season, just three years after being labeled the game’s next star, and just six years after being judged the ninth-best amateur talent in the country. After the players’ strike in 1981, during which Hurdle bartended to make ends meet, he was traded to the Reds. He batted .209 in his first season there, was placed on waivers, and claimed by the Mets. He spent most of the 1983 season and all of the 1984 season in the minor leagues. When he did get brief opportunities with the Mets, he failed to bat .200. His bat was slowing, and his lack of speed limited him to few positions on the field. Hurdle appeared in only 3 major league games in 1987 with the Mets. One day that season, according to an ESPN feature story, Mets Triple-A manager Bob Schaefer sat Hurdle down and told him to get himself together or Schaefer might be his last manager. He was. Hurdle’s playing career was over. His last major league plate appearance came on June 26, 1987, in Philadelphia, a pinch-hit strikeout against the Phillies’ Kevin Gross. He was twenty-nine years old, when he should have been in his prime.

  Hurdle had to come up with a plan B, but what could he do? He was smart, but he had no college degree. He had sacrificed that by going straight from high school to professional baseball. But while he had failed at playing the game, it still fascinated him. He enjoyed being around it, enjoyed the strategy, and even enjoyed the drill work. He liked philosophizing and joking with people and the camaraderie of the clubhouse.

  “I loved the game and I was a part-time player,” Hurdle said. “I asked the farm director if he had any managerial opportunities opening the next year. He actually thought it was a good idea, which was another bad sign. He shared it with other people. I had people calling me up and telling me what a great thought it was. I had two dozen people tell me it was the perfect decision to make at the perfect time.”

  The following season, in 1988, he became the High-A manager for the Mets affiliate in Port St. Lucie, Florida. This job felt right. He loved the interaction with young players and liked having knowledge to share. “I thought at the time I could be a very good encyclopedia for somebody, personally and professionally: the ups and downs and the sideways. All of it,” Hurdle said. “And at the end of the day you watch a game.”

  He had a commanding presence, a booming voice, a charismatic personality, and his authority was not easily challenged. By 1991, he was promoted to managing the Mets Double-A affiliate in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He was still drinking, though. Although he had created some order on the field, he was still struggling to find happiness off it. By this point he had burned through two marriages and was still spending too many nights at the local bar.

  Hurdle’s mother and fathe
r were always invested in their son. When Hurdle played, they followed box scores in the paper. As a manager, they watched the Pirates’ games from Florida through the out-of-market television package. Clint senior joked that he would feel “exhausted … as if he had played” after each game. They traveled to see Clint as often as they could. When Hurdle was at his lowest point they tried to help. During one visit soon after Hurdle’s second marriage ended, Clint senior suggested to his son they take a walk. “I told him life isn’t fair,” Clint senior said. He told his son sulking about the past did not do any good. He had to move forward. He had to find peace.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1991, Hurdle met an attractive, smart brunette named Karla. A local accountant, she was not chasing ballplayers. Hurdle met her while having his taxes prepared. He didn’t get a phone number, but he knew he had to see her again. So he made the most important strategic decision of his life: he had a friend host a party as an excuse to invite Karla. His plan worked. After six years of dating, as Hurdle advanced to manage the Triple-A Norfolk Tides in 1992 and then joined the Colorado Rockies as a minor league hitting instructor in 1994, Hurdle asked Karla to marry him, she said no. Hurdle was taken aback. He was a former star, an ex–major league player, something of a celebrity in minor league towns. He knew he was charismatic and joked that he was pretty good at getting married, having already lived through two marriages, but Karla stood her ground. She believed something meaningful was happening between them, but before she could commit, Hurdle had to get his life together. She wouldn’t tolerate his drinking binges. Hurdle had to get comfortable with who he was and his past and had to stop trying to run from it. Karla saw a man who was still haunted by that Sports Illustrated cover, tormented by his former phenom status and by what he never fulfilled and never became.

  “I just thought there were a lot of things he wasn’t quite right with,” Karla Hurdle said in an interview with ESPN. “He had to put some of his demons to rest that I couldn’t help him with.”

  Former big shots like Clint usually get extra leash slack and extra chances in life. They aren’t always challenged and instead are usually accommodated. This time it was different, he had to change. He had to figure out what made him happy. He found he was happiest coaching, managing, and when he was helping people. He discovered that he was happier when he wasn’t drinking and reengaged with his faith. He went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings—Hurdle still attends them from time to time—and learned to recite his favorite Bible verses.

  At forty-one years old, Hurdle finally stopped drinking in November of 1998 and hasn’t had a drop since. He asked Karla to marry him again in 1999, and this time she accepted. For the first time since he was a top prospect some twenty-one years earlier, his life finally seemed to be rocketing upward. He had joined the Rockies organization in 1994 and was named their major league hitting coach in 1997. In 2002 he was promoted to manager, but the success and happiness was fleeting.

  In Colorado during Hurdle’s first season as manager, Clint and Karla had their first child together, Madison Reilly. She was born prematurely and diagnosed with the genetic disorder Prader-Willi syndrome. Hurdle said he learned of the diagnosis during a road trip to Houston. He told a reporter he went to his hotel room and “cried more in three days than I had in twenty-five years.” He learned about the disorder’s litany of frightening characteristics, such as cognitive disabilities, behavioral problems, and a chronic feeling of hunger, and that there is no cure.

  Early in the 2007 season when the Rockies were struggling, a Denver TV reporter asked Hurdle if one particular loss “was crushing.” Hurdle entered the season on the hot seat and had yet to produce a winning season as Rockies manager. Months later in October, when the Rockies were in the midst of an improbable run to the World Series, Hurdle recalled that question. Said Hurdle: “Crushing was when a doctor told me my little girl was born with a birth defect. Baseball is a game. And I’ve learned that. And I’ve embraced that and I’ve tried to share that with my players.”

  While he had found perspective, he reached another professional crossroads in Colorado. In the spring of 2009, two years after guiding the Rockies to the National League pennant, the team stumbled to an 18–28 start to the season, and Hurdle was fired on May 29. In eight years with the Rockies, he had produced just one winning season. He had presided over nearly a hundred more losses (625) than victories (534).

  While Hurdle had changed dramatically off the field, he was mainly traditional on the field. Following the tenets of tradition helped him become a top prospect, then go on to rise through the coaching ranks. He was raised on and believed in old-school, twentieth-century baseball orthodoxy, which suggested that statistics often lied and that subjective decisions were most important, and that only those who had played the game could understand it meaningfully. Maybe it was denial or willful ignorance, but Hurdle had never investigated the available data that was constantly pouring into the game early in the twenty-first century.

  He had gone to the World Series with one of the most traditional franchises in baseball, the Rockies, who didn’t employ a single stat-crunching front-office employee. For an example of the Rockies’ adherence to conventional wisdom, consider sacrifice bunting. It is a traditional strategy and almost always reduces a team’s probability to score a run. Yet, even in hitter-friendly Coors Field, no major league team had as many sacrifice bunts as the Rockies from 2004 to 2006. And with the Rockies he became the most traditional of baseball scapegoats. Though managers have little control over roster construction or player performance, they are often the first to be blamed for failure and the first fired.

  After being fired by the Rockies, he finally had something in his life for the first time in a long while: he had time. Hurdle was able to reflect on where he had been and what he wanted to do, and he had no obligations. But he could only be idle for so long. He still wanted to be in the game, he knew that much. To pass the second half of the 2009 season, Hurdle became an analyst for the fledgling Major League Baseball Network. He was a natural for television with his booming voice, lively personality, and library of anecdotes that he easily retrieved as if he were going through a neatly organized drawer. He figured the gig would be a fun way to pass the time until the next opportunity came along.

  Hurdle had no idea what waited for him at the MLB Network headquarters, housed in a nondescript, warehouselike building in a business park in Secaucus, New Jersey. But here his sabermetrics enlightenment began. Sabermetrics is a term for data-based, objective analysis of baseball.

  In the television studio Hurdle was exposed to new age baseball thought and sabermetrics data. He couldn’t ignore or avoid it there. Flat-screen computer monitors were everywhere, along with data-savvy interns and analysts. He was in an alien environment, surrounded by elements of the game that he had ignored. Sitting in broadcast booths and preparing for shows, Hurdle was struck by how much data on-air analysts were fed. He had assumed analysts were bright people who did their own research and found their own trends, but he was taken aback by the support network and the information-gathering infrastructure of the MLB Network. For example, he could ask for how often a pitcher threw his slider, what its average speed and inches of vertical break were, and have the answers in mere moments.

  His colleagues directed him to the Web site FanGraphs.com, which was a public treasure trove of data, where Hurdle began conducting his own investigations, often looking for statistical data to support a theory or hunch he had for an on-air segment. The young analysts and assistants at the network clued him in to the statistically based theory that was being produced at Web sites such as Baseball Prospectus and The Hardball Times. Hurdle learned which players the sabermetrics community thought were underrated and overrated.

  “It was kind of like being in a Wizard of Oz setting with no ramifications,” Hurdle said. “It goes back to that saying ‘the more you learn the less you know.’ Once I got started, it was hard to stop.”

 
; Hurdle was not out of a coaching job for long. He was hired by the Texas Rangers to be their hitting coach on November 4, 2009. In Texas he employed some statistical-based scouting reports on pitchers’ tendencies to help create game plans for his hitters. By the time he interviewed for the Pirates managerial job after the 2010 season, he talked a good game. The Pirates liked his leadership and passion. They were surprised by the depth of his knowledge and his interest in new age, statistical baseball thought. While he admittedly wasn’t on the cutting edge of analytics, he felt he was in play and that he had an understanding of the new data entering the game.

  But as Huntington and Hurdle met on that chilly day in October of 2012, Hurdle had put little of the Pirates’ statistical findings from the analytics department to use on the field in his first two seasons.

  Despite the struggles of the Pirates, he was having trouble breaking from tradition and trusting what he couldn’t see. He had always trusted his instincts.

  “I think at times I can get hardened or callous to straight statistical analysis because that’s not my comfort area. I didn’t go to school there,” Hurdle said. “I don’t have the depth and knowledge and understanding. I’ve had to rearrange my furniture to have a better understanding of that.”

  The Pirates needed the conflicted Hurdle to break from tradition. All over baseball the manager and his staff were holding back the big data movement, and it had been no different in Pittsburgh. Huntington and his analytics team needed a complete buy-in to change from Hurdle. And if they needed convincing evidence to make their case, they believed that they finally had it.