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........................................| 239 While the Red Sox get ready to take on the Texas Rangers on the night of August 12, 2008, Doug Clark heads back to join his team, far, far away. Over eleven seasons as a professional baseball player he had known hundreds of thousands of miles of travel, much of it bad. There had been the numbing bus rides in the low minors, some of them ten hours or more. In Triple-A he had endured some galling early morning flights, shoving shirts in a duffel bag after a night game at home, getting picked up in a van a few hours later, and wedging his six-foot-two frame into a coach seat for the first leg of a trip from Fresno to Oklahoma City. Down in Navojoa, Mexico, where he played winter league ball for years, the travel could be even worse. Some buses had shock absorbers that were ground to nubs. Cigarette smoke would waft to the back of the bus; beer was tossed everywhere. Drivers seemed to accelerate down the windy roads, always a good time in the back for a gringo with a little bout of Montezuma ’s revenge. Once, well after midnight, the bus broke down so far from anywhere that Doug felt he was on another planet; beneath a canopy of a million stars, he watched the driver remove his belt and tie it to an axle on a wheel that was billowing smoke. But of all those trips through all those years, this one on August 12— well August 11 and August 12—has proved the longest. It started with a farewell back in Springfield, Massachusetts, after an exceedingly rare summer visit with his family. Bill Clark had given Doug a ride down to Bradley International Airport late on Monday afternoon, the eleventh. He flew first to Cincinnati, before boarding Delta Flight 1789 for Los Angeles. On board, high above the heartland, headphones over his ears, Doug drifted into a deep sleep. Awakening to the captain’s voice and the increased air pressure from descent, he figured he was arriving in L.A., only to learn that the plane had been diverted to Albuquerque. A woman up front had been having trouble breathing. According to Delta spokesman Anthony Black, “no medical emergency was declared,” but a doctor onboard felt that the passenger should receive attention quickly. When the plane finally arrived in Los Angeles just after midnight, most of the groggy passengers picked up their bags to head home, while Doug raced across 18 A Giant among Legends Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean 240 | chapter 18 the airport to another terminal. His connecting flight, though, was already gone. Back he traipsed to the Delta counter, only to find that it didn’t reopen for business until four in the morning. He hauled himself over to McDonald ’s, grabbed a couple of burgers, a chicken wrap, and a Sprite, and crashed at the food court amid other frustrated travelers and airport itinerants. It was not until 12:30 the next afternoon that his thirteen-hour flight to Seoul began to climb over the Pacific. When Doug finally broke through to the big leagues with the San Francisco Giants in September 2005, he never imagined that a few years later he would be playing ball in South Korea. Sure, there was a little bit of family history there (stationed just south of the Thirty-eighth Parallel with the Army Corps of Engineers, Bill Clark had helped to build a wood and wire bridge to an orphanage more than forty years before); but Doug was not looking to follow in his father’s footsteps. Doug began the 2006 season with more than one thousand minor league hits, but he was 0–5 as a big leaguer. He signed that year with the Oakland A’s, finally cutting the cord from across the Bay after having spent his first eight seasons in the Giants’ organization. He started the year with the Sacramento River Cats, Oakland’s Triple-A affiliate in the Pacific Coast League. They were managed by Tony DeFrancesco, a ninth-round pick by the Red Sox back in 1984 who had spent eight years in the minor leagues, never making it to the bigs. Doug connected well with his new manager, who told him not to define the success of his baseball career on the basis of his big league experience. “I won’t, Tony,” Doug told him...

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