Justin Verlander captured after nailing his 3,000th strikeout Saturday night.

You thought there’d be no excitement possibility on this year’s regular season-closing weekend? Think again.

The National League Central turned out to have a surprise in store for you this weekend: the Cardinals and the Brewers entered Sunday with a chance at facing an NL Central title tiebreaker game.

A couple of less wealthy teams in the American League East and West put wild cards in the bank and got to say, Look, ma—no tanking!

And a nice guy who pitches for the Astros while standing to win this year’s American League Cy Young Award hit two milestones Saturday night—with one rude interruption to his achievements.

A nice guy who became the only member of the 3,000 strikeout club to surrender a home run to the first man up after he bagged the milestone punchout. And on the first pitch, yet. Who says Andujar’s Law (In baseball, there’s just one word: you never know—Joaquin Andujar, once an Astro himself) is ripe for repeal?

Justin Verlander, as smart on the mound as he is nice otherwise, started against the Angels Saturday night needing six strikeouts to reach 3,000. The game meant little enough by itself, other than the long-lost Angels celebrating their fan appreciation night; the Astros owned the AL West all year long and had home-field postseason advantage in the bank while they were at it.

There’d be plenty of time to get back to the business of serious competition, especially with these Astros not only winning a third straight American League West but inspiring some oddsmakers to put them at +200 for going all the way to win a second World Series in three seasons. Saturday night was a night for one man’s milestones.

With the Angels—whose season ended well out of the contention they were never really in, was punctured by unexpected tragedy, and once again proved them a team unworthy of its and baseball’s best all-around player—leading 1-0, Verlander hit his first one in the bottom of the fourth.

He got 3,000 when he threw Kole Calhoun a nasty, down-and-in slider on 2-2, Calhoun swinging and missing rather emphatically. The Angel Stadium crowd wasn’t sure for a moment what to cheer louder, Verlander nailing the milestone punchout or Calhoun reaching first when the ball went past catcher Robinson Chirinos enabling Calhoun’s reach in the first place.

The official scorer ruled a wild pitch. It could have been ruled a passed ball; Chirinos was moving to the inside as Verlander delivered and looked in solid position, mitt down, to stop the ball.

Thus only the third time in his major league life had Verlander struck a batter out to see him reach base on it. Making him the second member of the 3,000K club whose milestone punchout resulted in the batter reaching base. Hall of Famer Phil Niekro brought that one off on the Fourth of July in 1984, as a Yankee, when he led off the top of the fourth by striking out the Rangers’ Larry Parrish—only to see Parrish reach first when Knucksie’s famous knuckleball knuckled past catcher Butch Wynegar.

Verlander didn’t hold it against Chirinos. “He was like ‘Don’t worry about it’,” Chirinos said to reporters after the game. “I lost that pitch because Calhoun is so on top of the plate, so the ball was coming into him and it hit my foot and went the other way. I was laughing that it happened in the worst moment. Something to remember. Good thing he got to 3,000.”

No worries. The Angel Stadium crowd handed Verlander a loud ovation—their own team has its problems but Angel fans appreciate achievement, just as a Hall of Famer appreciates it when his own achievement is respected and appreciated on the road. He tipped his hat to the crowd and went right back to work.

“I honestly haven’t had a moment to really have it set in,” Verlander said after the game. “My teammates gave me a good speech after and everybody gave me a great hug. Hopefully this is one of those moments that we look at and it’s just one of the special moments of the season that was extremely special.”

But I’d bet only the Angel Stadium audience thought what happened next was special. Angel shortstop Andrelton Simmons checked in at the plate and hit one over the center field fence. How rude of him. It made Verlander the only member of the 3,000K club to surrender a home run to the next man up after the milestone punchout. And on the first pitch to the guy.

Verlander and the Astros had the last laugh, however. They went on to overthrow the 3-0 deficit into which Simmons’s launch put them and win, 6-3, after Jose Altuve (a two-run shot) and Josh Reddick (a three-run shot) cleared the fences in the sixth, and Altuve added an RBI double in the seventh.

And Verlander exacted a little milestone revenge against Calhoun in the bottom of the sixth. When he struck Calhoun out then, it made him plus Gerrit Cole only the second pair of teammates (Curt Schilling and Hall of Famer Randy Johnson were the other pair, for the 2001 Diamondbacks) to strike out 300+ in the same season.

Sweetening that particular pot: neither Verlander nor Cole had ever struck out 300+ batters in their careers until now. And Verlander is the second pitcher to nail his 3,000th strikeout in an Astros uniform, behind Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan, who flattened Cincinnati’s Cesar Geronimo for that milestone on the Fourth of July in 1980.

I couldn’t resist. I looked up all eighteen games that included a 3,000th strikeout and what happened with the next man up in those innings after those pitchers bagged their milestones:

Walter Johnson (Senators)—The milestone: Stan Coveleski (Indians), bottom of the sixth, 22 July 1923. The next batter: Charlie Jamieson—fly out to left.

Bob Gibson (Cardinals)—The milestone: Cesar Geronimo (Reds), top of the second, 17 July 1974. The next batter—None; Gibson retired the side with that strikeout.

Gaylord Perry (Padres)—The milestone: Joe Simpson (Dodgers), top of the eighth, 1 October 1978. The next batter: Pedro Guerrero—reached on an infield hit and took second on the throwing error.

Nolan Ryan (Astros)—The milestone: Cesar Geronimo (Reds), bottom of the second, 4 July 1980. The next batter: Junior Kennedy—walk. (Dubious co-milestone: It made Geronimo the only man to be the 3,000th strikeout victim of two pitchers.)

Tom Seaver (Reds)—The milestone: Keith Hernandez (Cardinals), top of the fourth, 18 April 1981. The next batter: None; side retired.

Steve Carlton (Phillies)—The milestone: Tim Wallach (Expos), top of the first, 29 April 1981. The next batter: None; Wallach was the third victim as Carlton opened the game striking out the side.

Ferguson Jenkins (Cubs)—The milestone: Garry Templeton (Padres), bottom of the third, 25 May 1982. The next batter: Ruppert Jones—fly out to left.

Don Sutton (Brewers)—The milestone: Alan Bannister (Indians), top of the eighth, 24 June 1983. The next batter: None; side retired.

Phil Niekro (Yankees)—The milestone: Larry Parrish (Rangers), bottom of the fourth, 4 July 1984. The next batter: Pete O’Brien—fly out to center.

Bert Blyleven (Twins)—The milestone: Mike Davis (Athletics), top of the fifth, 1 August 1986. The next batter: Mickey Tettleton—walk to load the bases.

Roger Clemens (Blue Jays)—The milestone: Randy Winn (Devil Rays), top of the third, 5 July 1998. The next batter: None; side retired.

Randy Johnson (Diamondbacks)—The milestone: Mike Lowell (Marlins), bottom of the fourth, 10 September 2000. The next batter: None; side retired.

Greg Maddux (Cubs)—The milestone: Omar Vizquel (Giants), top of the third, 26 July 2005. The next batter: None; side retired.

Curt Schilling (Red Sox)—The milestone: Nick Swisher (Athletics), bottom of the first, 30 August 2006. The next batter: Mark Kotsay—grounded out to second base. (Note: Swisher hit an RBI double off Schilling in the bottom of the fourth.)

Pedro Martinez (Mets)—The milestone: Aaron Harang (Reds), bottom of the second, 3 September 2007. The next batter: None; side retired.

John Smoltz (Braves)—The milestone: Felipe Lopez (Nationals), top of the third, 22 April 2008. The next batter: Cristian Guzman—grounded out to first unassisted for the side.

CC Sabathia (Yankees)—The milestone: John Ryan Murphy (Diamondbacks), 30 April 2019. The next batter: None; struck out the side. (Without a little trouble, though, since former Met Wilmer Flores hit one out against Sabathia with two out in the inning and Nick Ahmed singled right after, before Murphy came up.)

Thus we have eight pitchers whose 3,000th strikeouts retired the side and three whose 3000th strikeouts struck out the side. Two walked the next man up and one of the two loaded the bases with that walk. (Blyleven escaped that inning unscathed for runs.) Two got ground outs from the next batters; three got fly outs next. And two (Walter Johnson, Pedro Martinez) struck out fellow pitchers for their milestone punchouts.

Justin Verlander would probably have loved nothing better than to get rid of Andrelton Simmons immediately after he dispatched Kole Calhoun for number 3,000. I’m sure he’ll settle for being the only man to get the same guy for two milestones on one night.

The flip side, of course, is that Calhoun—a solid if not so spectacular Angel outfielder with 34 home runs on his 2019 ledger—would have loved nothing better than not being Verlander’s 300th strikeout of 2019 and 3,000th strikeout lifetime on the same night.

Joaquin Andujar, wherever you are in the Elysian Fields, call your office.

David Clyde at home in Texas, at peace with his mishandled career, but in the battle to redress pensions for short-career players between 1949 and 1980. (NGSC Sports photo.)

Hyped, mishandled, injured, finally discarded. Former Rangers pitching phenom David Clyde has long been at peace with his aborted career. He’d like to see himself and his fellow short-career players at peace, too, with even a small entry into baseball’s pension plan.

That plan was re-aligned in 1980. It now vested health benefits after one day’s major league time, granted a retirement allowance after 43 days’ major league time, but excluded players like Clyde whose major leaguer careers were short and occurred between 1949 and 1980.

When not recovering from spinal fusion surgery last winter, or continuing to coach youth baseball, Clyde continues fighting in his way to help get what he considers financial justice for those players. Once upon a time, he joined the battle for its own sake, since before his recent health issues he didn’t need the extra help himself.

“I got involved initially just because it was the right thing to do,” says Clyde, who sounds at 64 more like an amiable Texas rancher than the teenager who struck eight Twins out in his circus-like first major league start right out of high school. “I guess the biggest thing I’m disappointed in is why the [Major League Baseball] Players Association doesn’t feel like it’s . . . bound to do a dad gum thing for us.”

Legally, the players union and MLB alike aren’t bound to lift a finger on their behalf. Clyde and his fellows understand only too well. But for them it’s not a legal matter. “I think it’s beyond morally and ethically,” says Clyde, who missed his full pension vesting under the pre-1980 plan by 37 days.

“I guess what bothers me the most about it is, the Players Association—they loathe being called a union—didn’t hesitate one bit taking my dues when I was a major league player,” he says. “But as soon as you’re no longer a major league player, they basically don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

Staying engaged is one thing. But it’s a little more difficult for Clyde to press forward formally now. Not too long ago, Clyde, former Braves pitcher Gary Neibauer, and former longtime first baseman-turned-executive Eddie Robinson, three key voices on behalf of the short-career players, were removed from the Pension Services Committee of the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association.

And interesting and engaging fans and major media, sports and otherwise, is an issue by itself. Douglas Gladstone—whose 2010 book A Bitter Cup of Coffee first exposed what the 1980 re-alignment didn’t mean for Clyde and his fellow short-career players—continues battling to get the major media engaged. To precious little avail.

“You tell me why people who are in a position to bring this to the public’s light on a national basis refuse to even acknowledge it exists,” Clyde says.

And he has a point. A fair number of former players have made high enough-profile second careers as baseball broadcasters. They include Hall of Famers Dennis Eckersley (with the Red Sox), Joe Morgan (a longtime ESPN fixture), and John Smoltz (Fox Sports), plus former pitchers Ron Darling (with the Mets), Mike Krukow (with the Giants), and Rick Sutcliffe (ESPN); former infielders Keith Hernandez (Mets), Eric Karros (Fox Sports), Jerry Remy (the Red Sox), and Alex Rodriguez (ESPN); and, former outfielder Harold Reynolds (formerly ESPN; now MLB Network).

Clyde says he’s even tried talking to assorted Hall of Famers (he wouldn’t drop names) who agreed players such as himself should be brought back into the pension plan. They even crafted a letter to present at a mid-2000s Hall of Fame ceremony. But “at the last minute,” he continues, “the face of that letter withdrew his support.”

If that sounds jarring or alarming, Clyde won’t argue with you. “I’m still very good friends with [that] person,” he says. “I’ve never approached the subject with him, I wouldn’t want to put him on the spot of possibly harming our friendship. [But] the letter itself could be worth a retirement plan with the signatures on it.”

At that, Clyde laughs heartily. But he becomes serious again.

“I don’t know what baseball is so afraid of,” he says. “When you talk to some of the ownership side, the ownership says, ‘We can’t talk about it, the players have to bring it up.’ And when you talk to the players, ‘Well, we don’t have any legal obligation to represent them’.”

By the time Gladstone wrote A Bitter Cup of Coffee, what began as involving about 1,100 short-career players was down to 875. Almost two decades after the book first appeared (Gladstone published an updated edition earlier this year), 248 of those players passed away, leaving 627 short-career former players hoping.

David Clyde on the mound. He wore number 32 in tribute to his boyhood hero Sandy Koufax.

“By the day, it’s getting cheaper for [baseball] if they ever decide to do it,” Clyde says wryly. “When this thing started, it was going to cost about $15 million a year to fund this thing.” Per affected player, that equals less than a single minimum major league salary per team today, he says.

“You have players today who could single-handedly fund it,” Clyde continues, referring to several of baseball’s nine-figure stars. “And I would think there would be tremendous tax benefits to it.”

But Clyde and his fellows remain left to their own devices and open to suggestions. One, tendered by former Mets pitcher Bill Denehy, might be placing cards outlining the pension struggle along with items people send former players to autograph. (Clyde says he still gets between five and ten such requests a week on average.)

“That’s a great idea,” he says, acknowledging the actual phrasing would have to be worked out. “But who are we sending them to? “Are a majority [of autograph requests] coming from card dealers, eleven-year-old kids?

“If they’re coming from kids, then they don’t have a whole lot of say-so,” he continues. “How do we know that they’d actually be getting to the people who need to know? Why does the national media not want to touch this thing with a twenty-foot pole?”

In 2011, then-commissioner Bud Selig and then-Players Association executive director Michael Weiner announced a small redress: Players frozen out of the original re-alignment would get $625 for every 43 days major league time, with the 43 days representing a quarter and a limit of sixteen quarters, good for $10,000 before taxes. The bad news: If a player dies before collecting the last of those payments, the remaining payments can’t be passed on to their widows and children.

Volumes have been written about Clyde’s baseball saga. Perhaps nobody captured it better in thumbnail than Fort Worth Star-Telegram sportswriter Mike Shropshire in 1996, in Seasons in Hell: With Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog, and “The Worst Team in Baseball History”—The 1973-1975 Texas Rangers.

“If there is anything of enduring value from the narrative of (the book),” Shropshire wrote, “it’s the David Clyde saga: the tale of the teen phenom who gets a pile of dough, gets exploited by the ownership, and ends up with a career that is shot.”

Clyde idolised Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax growing up; he wore uniform number 32 in tribute to his hero. His pitching career at Houston’s Westchester High evoked what you might have imagined Koufax in high school if baseball was his sport. A warehouse full of strikeouts. A backpack full of no-hitters. But Clyde also represented something else to then-Rangers owner Bob Short.

Short despaired of credibility for the club after moving it from Washington. He wanted and needed to goose his gate. He saw Clyde’s goose overloaded with golden eggs right out of high school and took him number one in the June 1973 draft. And, he insisted the eighteen-year-old lefthander with the live arm step right onto a major league mound, without a drop of badly needed minor league experience and maturing first.

Clyde won his first start and pitched well overall in his first two starts. He did what Short hoped he’d do—make the Rangers credible and, coincidentally, help rescue the team’s finances. Some called Clyde the franchise saviour, and still do. He denies “saving” the franchise, but he’ll agree he made the team viable in their part of Texas.

But Short reneged on a promise to manager Whitey Herzog and refused to send Clyde to the minors. When you suggest to Clyde that Herzog may have been the only man in the Rangers organisation of the time wanting to do right by him, he replies, “As far as I know, that’s the absolute truth.”

A boy among men, subsequently saddled with Billy Martin as his manager when the White Rat was canned before the end of the 1973 season, Clyde ended up a mess. Martin’s notorious lack of patience with pitching youth was magnified regarding Clyde, who’d now pitch only occasionally. Not until 1975 was he allowed to see the minors—after one start followed by a shoulder injury.

He spent three years in the minors from there, returned to the majors with the Indians in 1978. He had scattered success and less scattered failures; he was traded back to the Rangers after the 1979 season but released as “damaged goods” after more shoulder trouble. A 1981 comeback attempt in the Astros organisation came to nothing, and in spring 1982 he retired.

Clyde made a second career in the lumber business, leaving in 2003 but continuing his youth baseball coaching activities, especially pitching and the pitfalls and pratfalls that too often accompany young players to the professional game. He cautions them that the professional sports world won’t always be as honest or as upright as the values with which he and they are raised at home.

“Look out for yourself, first,” Clyde says he advises his young charges in hand with pitching knowledge. “Once you’ve used up your usefulness to them, they’re done with you. So I’ve always told my guys look out after number one first, make sure you don’t believe everything they’re telling you.

“I was in a very unique situation, a perfect Catch-22 situation, and probably, in my opinion if any other organisation beside the Rangers had drafted me, we might not be having this conversation today.”

Most writings about Clyde in recent years paint a portrait of a man with no bitterness about the way his pitching career turned out, no matter how it was compromised by forces past his control.

“I have been a blessed individual my whole life,” he says. “I’m still blessed to this day, I’m very thankful for everything the good Lord has given me. Why should I be bitter? I had my chance. Granted, a lot of people may say it was under the best of circumstances, and I can argue it was under the worst of circumstances, but I did get the chance.”

He drew an insight toward such perspective one day while working in his garage and listening to a sports radio program. The broadcaster said  “at that time there were about fifteen thousand people who ever played major league baseball, and of that fifteen thousand, roughly half of them were pitchers.

“So you have seventy-five hundred players in over a hundred years who have ever toed the rubber on a major league mound when the umpire says, ‘Play ball’,” Clyde continues. “When you narrow it down to those terms, no matter how much we sucked, we were still pretty good.”

He hopes only that for short-timers such as himself, it’s still pretty good to get them un-frozen from baseball pensions.