Dr. Jim Warren, executive medical director for the Centra Heart & Vascular Institute in Lynchburg, Virginia, notified the Yankees on Sunday that Clay died Thursday at home in Lynchburg. Warren said Clay’s cause of death was heart and kidney issues.<\/p>\n
 \u00a0Kevin Jairaj\/USA TODAY Sports<\/p>\n
A reliever for most of his career, Clay made his major league debut in June 1977 and appeared in two games in the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers<\/a>. In 1978, also against the Dodgers, he gave up a three-run homer to Davey Lopes in Game 1 in his only appearance.<\/p>\n His best postseason outing came in the opener of the 1978 American League Championship Series against Kansas City. The Yankees led 4-0 when Clay entered with one out and the bases loaded in the sixth inning. Clay pitched 3\u2154 scoreless innings and earned the save in a 7-1 win.<\/p>\n Clay was 1-7 in 1979 and finished the season in the minors. He was still in the minors when the Yankees traded him to the Texas Rangers<\/a> for Gaylord Perry the next year. Clay made eight starts for the Rangers in 1980, going 2-3, and was traded to the Seattle Mariners<\/a> after the season. The Mariners released him in spring training in 1982.<\/p>\n He made 111 appearances in the majors in his career, including 36 starts, and was 10-24 with three saves and a 4.68 ERA.<\/p>\n As Clay struggled in 1979, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner criticized him for underachieving, famously calling him a “morning glory,” a reference to racehorses that turn in excellent morning workouts but don’t perform well in races.<\/p>\n Clay also had a run of legal issues. In 1987, he pleaded guilty in Virginia to stealing more than $16,000 from a ring distributor he worked for after his baseball career ended. In 1992, he was sentenced to one year in a Virginia jail for stealing $550 from the car dealership where he worked. In 2001, he pleaded guilty to forgery and other charges in Florida and agreed to repay more than $40,000 to creditors for using an ex-girlfriend’s personal information to defraud three credit card companies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mar 30, 2026, 12:44 PM ET Ken Clay, who won World Series championships with the New York Yankees…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":554646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[363,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-554645","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-mlb","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/554646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}