This is a collection of great stories from my longtime love affair with baseball. Over parts of two centuries, starting in the 1970s at the age of 17, I coached hundreds of great players from Ricky Chisolm to Terre Woods to Chad Bradford to Efrain Morales, and so many more. It’s all I ever wanted to do. Over a thousand games. A whole bunch of stories. Great teams, good teams, fair teams, bad teams, and history making teams. The stories are positive, entertaining, and true.
Thanks to all the players, coaches, umpires, teammates, and friends who were a part of my great life in coaching baseball. Thanks to my high school coach, Bill “Moose” Perry, who inspired me to get into the coaching business. Thanks to the board of Magnolia Academy who gave me my first job and paid me $9000 a year in 1976. Thanks to Ron Polk for not accepting me as a graduate assistant at Mississippi State in 1982. Thanks to Bill Marchant who took me under his wing as a lowly volunteer assistant coach at Hinds in 1983. Thanks to Dr. Clyde Muse who hired me as the head baseball coach at Hinds in the fall of ’83, probably because I became a squatter in the apartment at the Sheffield-Wooley Dormitory when Bill left Hinds and they wanted to get that apartment back. Thanks to the Pearl High School board for getting me out of coaching for the first time in 2006 and the Hillcrest “Christian” School board for putting me out of coaching for good in 2013.
But seriously, thanks to my dad for putting me through college when he didn’t have the funds to do it, my mom for running a great concession stand at Hinds for many years and for smoking cigarettes when she was pregnant with me to form this brain I have and the way it works, thanks to my sons Josh and Jake for inspiring me to get this project done by printing the original copy of Diary of a Mad Baseball Coach as a Christmas present in 2020, thanks to my wife Patty for being the best baseball wife ever, and thanks to any of the other good or bad influences on my career. You know who you are.
31 seasons, 700 plus wins, hundreds of players, 41 championships, 4 World Series appearances , including the 1989 trip to the JUCO World Series in Grand Junction, Colorado (a first for a Mississippi team), a bunch of close misses, dozens of ejections and a lot of other firsts along the way. My dad used to say that there is only one “first.” We had quite a few firsts for Magnolia Academy, Mississippi high school baseball, Hinds, and Mississippi JUCO baseball.
Got this note from former Magnolia student Craig Stephens and I appreciate the kind words: From my buddy Anthony Thomas about Magnolia Academy Baseball. Anthony wrote: “I attribute our success to the one who set the standard and refused to accept anything but our best. Rick Clarke. Minus his unrelenting and maniacal pursuit of excellence, we were just goofballs.”
That’s the greatest compliment I ever got in over 30 plus years of coaching baseball.
Regrets? A few, but I won’t mention those and I chose not to bash anybody in the book that gave me a hard time along the way. I got to do it the way I wanted to and quit when I was ready…four times. 🙂
I hope you enjoy the stories. Check back often. There are always new stories and other interesting features as well. Enjoy the photos below. I’ll change them out from time to time.
Keep playing hard and having fun!
Rick
Rick Clarke's Diary of a Mad Baseball Coach 