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MORGANTOWN -- When West Virginia's Derek Clark walks to the mound in the NCAA Tournament that starts Friday afternoon in Tucson, be it in the Mountaineers' opening game against Dallas Baptist to get them into the winner's side of the double-elimination affair or in Game 2 to either keep their dreams alive or give them advantage in the quest to move on, it will be a far more symbolic walk than you might imagine.
Clark's baseball career has been uphill all the way as he battled against one of sports greatest biases, that physical size equates with athletic success, and what better way to prove that he is king of the hill than to be atop the hill that sits in the center of a baseball diamond.
He was deprived of that opportunity in the colossal flop that was the 2024 Big 12 Tournament for WVU coach Randy Mazey decided to hold him out of the first two games rather than pitch him on short rest even though he had emerged as the ace of the Mountaineers' pitching staff with a 7-2 record and 3.28 earned run average.
How much it hurt him during the Big 12 Tournament is something only he knows and his answer when asked about it on Monday was politically correct rather than revealing.
"Yeah, it was hard, but I understood where Coach Mazey was coming from, giving me the rest I needed, giving me a full week off. Throwing on short rest against TCU is what it is. We're just looking forward and looking ahead," he said.
Knowing what he has gone through throughout his budding career and knowing that he is in his final season of college baseball. You can almost feel the drive that burns inside him, especially since he is playing a sport at a position, pitcher, where they measure you on certain metrics that he doesn't have.
To scouts, size matters and a 6-5 Alek Manoah is penciled in as a first-round draft pick, a 97 mile an hour fastball written down as an asset, while Derek Clark offers neither.
The roster lists him at 5-9, he says he's 5-8 and that may be stretching it some.
In his mind, though, it's an asset, even if scouts look upon it as a negative.
"It just fuels my fire. You can be either 4-foot tall or 7-foot tall and still succeed in this game," he said. "You just have to trust the process and I have to trust my work ethic and come to the field every day looking to get better."
As proof, he offers up former MVP shortstop Jose Altuve, who is but 5-6, or pitcher Marcus Strohman, who currently is 4-2 with the New York Yankees with a 2.76 ERA and has a decade-long career mark of 81-78 despite being just 5-7.
What he has to do is get scouts to see him perform rather than to read reports that list the speed with which he throws or the spin rate of his curveball.
"Looking in the mirror, I know I'm not going to be a guy who is 97 plus," he said, speaking in miles-per-hour terms. "I just do what I can to get guys out."
And there are a variety of ways to do that.
"Switching up speeds, changing arm slots, executing pitches … trying to be crafty and artsy with it," he noted. "There's more to pitching than throwing hard and throwing it with a lot of spin."
At this point you ask him if he knows who Bobby Shantz was and, as you might expect, he doesn't, even though Shantz's story offers the greatest proof that you don't have to be a physical specimen to succeed on the mound.
In 1952, Shantz was the American League Most Valuable Player as a pitcher who went 24-7 with 2.48 earned run average. For his career he finished at 119-99 with a 3.38 ERA and has 8 Gold Gloves on his shelf at home as one of history's best fielding pitchers.
And yes, he is still with us, as 98 the oldest living former - oir, for that matter - current major league player.
His story is one Clark can latch onto. At 6, Shantz fell ill one night and some thought he would not live through the evening. It may have stunted his growth, for as he entered his teenage years he was just 4-foot-4 and was just pushing 5-foot as he entered high school.
He was a good player in high school, but he was an outfielder, his coach saying he was too small to pitch and never discovering the wicked curveball he had developed.
Shantz played semi pro for a while, grew to 5-foot-6, began pitching and eventually was signed and delivered.
"It's just awesome," Clark said. "Guys like Jose Altuve, Marcus Stroman, doing what they are doing in today's game, it just goes to show I can do it in a couple of years hopefully. I'm trying right now not to look too forward, just worry about playing Dallas Baptist."
Clark has become the definitive "crafty southpaw", more Shantz than Koufax, more Randy Jones than Steve Carlton.
"I go into a game with a game plan and try to execute it," he said. "I go out there attacking, competing and doing what I can to put the ball in play and get guys out."
When he's out there, he feels 10 feet tall.
"The mound is still 60 feet away and the bases are still 90 feet apart, so the size of the player doesn't really matter," he reasoned.
Like Shantz, he wasn't considered a prize coming out of high school, even if he did set a single season record for ERA at 0.20, in part because of his ability to throw strikes.
"Growing up, being on the smaller side, I was overlooked. In high school, I wasn't the best player in the world. Then I went to Northwood (University in Michigan) and was still kind of overlooked and just kept proving myself, proving myself there."
He went 23-7 with a 3.38 ERA in three years at Northwood before transferring to WVU for his final season. Now he's at the end of his college career and he cherishes every chance he gets to prove himself.
"Yeah, it means more to me now as I wrap up my college career. It feels like it was just yesterday when I was a freshman and didn't know what was going on. Now I'm a senior, playing my last year, it means more to me to win ball games and just enjoy them."