⸻ A Live Conversation
Clint Hurdle
"What I learned when they called me the next big thing."
28th July
7:00 PM ET
4:00 PM PT
60 minutes
total
Limited seats available · Replay access included
515
360
193
2013
32
⸻ About the Speaker
Clint Hurdle
A conversation about hype: what it feels like to get it, what it costs, and who you are when it moves on. In March 1978, Sports Illustrated put a twenty-year-old Clint Hurdle on its cover and named him “This Year’s Phenom” before he had played a full big-league season. The career that followed was a good one by any sane standard, ten seasons and a World Series, but it never matched the cover, and for years Clint carried the gap between the two. Then came the longer story: a manager who won a pennant nobody saw coming, broke the longest losing streak in North American professional sports, and became known across baseball for building people up one day at a time. This session is for the kid who just got ranked, showcased, or labeled, and for the parents reading the rankings. The label is not the story. The response is.
Clint Hurdle was the ninth overall pick in the 1975 draft, taken by the Kansas City Royals out of Merritt Island High School in Florida, where more than a dozen scholarship offers were waiting, including one from Harvard and one from Miami to play both baseball and football. He made his big-league debut in September 1977 as the youngest player in Royals history and homered in his first start. The following March, before he had played a full season, Sports Illustrated put him on its cover at twenty under the headline “This Year’s Phenom.” Royals hitting instructor Charlie Lau called him the best hitting prospect he had ever seen in the organization. The playing career that followed ran ten seasons across the Royals, Reds, Mets, and Cardinals: a .259 average, 32 home runs, and a trip to the 1980 World Series with Kansas City, where he hit .417 against the Phillies.
What happened next is the part no one puts on a magazine cover. On December 1, 1987, Hurdle retired as a player and accepted the manager’s job at Class A Port St. Lucie the same day, at age thirty. He spent a decade learning to lead in the minors, joined the Rockies as their big-league hitting coach in 1997, and took over as Colorado’s manager in 2002. In 2007 he led the Rockies on one of the most improbable runs in baseball history: 21 wins in 22 games, a thirteen-inning play-in win over the Padres, and a sweep through the National League playoffs to the first pennant in franchise history. After a season as hitting coach for the pennant-winning 2010 Texas Rangers, he took over a Pittsburgh club mired in the longest run of losing seasons in North American professional sports. In 2013 the Pirates won 94 games, reached the postseason for the first time since 1992, and Hurdle was named National League Manager of the Year. He managed seventeen big-league seasons in all and won 1,269 games.
Today, Clint serves as a special assistant in the Colorado Rockies organization and may be the most prolific encourager in professional sports. The daily message he began sending his coaching staff in 2009 has grown into a Daily Encouragement email list thousands of subscribers strong, and in February 2025 he published Hurdle-isms: Wit and Wisdom from a Lifetime in Baseball, built from the sayings he has carried through five decades in the game. He and his wife Karla are longtime advocates for the Prader-Willi syndrome community; their daughter Maddie was born with the genetic disorder, and Clint has served as a national spokesperson for the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association. Ask him about the Sports Illustrated cover and he will tell you the better story is everything that came after it.
⸻ The Conversation
What You Might Hear
A real, honest conversation about the successes, the struggles, and the role parents and coaches played along the way to the Big Leagues.
Take Away · 01
Take Away · 02
Take Away · 03
⸻ Some of the Questions You May Hear
Some of the questions from this session include:
The session runs about 30 minutes of moderated conversation followed by audience Q&A. The conversation goes where it wants to go.
- "March 20, 1978. You are twenty years old with nine big-league games behind you, and your face is on the cover of Sports Illustrated next to the words This Year’s Phenom.” What do you remember about seeing it for the first time, and what did twenty-year-old Clint believe that day that turned out not to be true?"
- "Three seasons after the cover, you were playing in the World Series and you hit .417 against the Phillies. People call your playing career a disappointment, and yet almost nobody who ever picks up a bat gets a World Series at-bat. How do you hold both of those stories at the same time?"
- "You took the Pittsburgh job with the franchise buried in the longest run of losing seasons in North American professional sports, and in 2013 you broke it. How do you change what a clubhouse believes about itself, and what would you say to a kid stuck on a team that loses every single week?"
⸻ Career Profile
By the numbers.
⸻ What we are not
Sit in with your kid for this conversation.
Not a clinic. Not a meet and greet. A real conversation about the bigger thing baseball actually teaches, with one of the few people in the game who can speak to it from three generations of evidence.
- Live audience Q&A
- Replay access for seat holders
- Parent + youth athlete welcome