Revisiting Texans lineman D.J. Readers brief Clemson baseball career

D.J. Reader navigates tightly packed lines of scrimmage as an interior defensive lineman, but the crowd he found himself in one winter day as a freshman at Clemson felt wholly different.

He stood in the dugout of the school’s baseball stadium, not down the road at Clemson’s famed football palace known as Death Valley. And the 20 or so reporters surrounding Reader before this preseason practice didn’t ask whether he would beat South Carolina that year. They inquired about his power hitting and the size-15 cleats he would wear as a 335-pound member of Clemson’s baseball team.

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“I don’t know why they want to talk to me,” Reader told his new teammates when the interview session ended and he walked onto the diamond.

Everyone else did.

Reader was 18 and just hoping to contribute to the baseball team. Yet no matter the venue, he was a Clemson football player, which made him the center of attention — even on a nationally ranked baseball team that featured 12 future draft picks, and well before Texans teammate J.J. Watt called him the NFL’s best nose tackle.

The Texans began training camp Thursday with hopes of signing Reader to a long-term extension prior to the start of the regular season, so his decision to ultimately quit baseball and focus on football was financially prudent. But more than six years later, Reader still sees value in his few months of college baseball, and when his former baseball teammates remember a couple of his remarkable feats as an oversized anything for the sport, they see signs of the athlete he eventually became.

“Just like the way he moves through the A-gap for the Texans, he was a first baseman and pitcher,” said Rudy Cox, one of Reader’s baseball teammates. “His feet were really good. He moved well. His body worked in rhythm. He had a lot of flow. As big as he was, he moved smoothly.

“And his swing! God dang it, man, it was really good.”

As a high schooler, Reader’s fastball could touch 90 mph, and his bat cut through the strike zone in an unnaturally fluid way for a defensive lineman with a barrel chest. But fans barely saw the swing and they never witnessed him pitch. Reader’s collegiate baseball stat line — 0-for-3, with one run, two walks and a hit by pitch — reflected his lack of readiness to contribute as a freshman who had missed fall baseball practices. He was busy playing for another top-25 program.

When Clemson recruited Reader, head football coach Dabo Swinney said the defensive lineman could play baseball only if he earned a significant role on the team. But that never happened, so his time on the diamond ended after he appeared in just seven games and received an excessive adulation.

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“When he walked, it was a big roar,” said Tyler Krieger, who now plays in the Cleveland Indians’ farm system. “You would’ve thought he hit a homer. He laughed to first. That’s just who he was.”

The highlight of his baseball career occurred in his final appearance, the first game of a doubleheader against Furman. Leading off the eighth inning, Reader got on first and the hitter behind him doubled. Suddenly, the defensive lineman burned through the base paths.

“D.J.’s big ass goes first to third without even picking up our first base coach,” Cox said. “Again, when you relate that to the NFL, that’s the closing speed he’s got on the running back on the sweep or the quarterback on a sack. The guy is incredibly gifted and incredibly blessed.”

To dull nerves before Texans games, Reader pitches a football to a teammate, who tries to smack it with an end zone pylon. He still misses the camaraderie that develops during weekend-long road series and hours spent together during a doubleheader. When training camp arrives, the Texans’ roster swells to 90 men, too many people for Reader to even learn every name. But in baseball, he had no choice but to get to know his teammates.

“You learn to get so personal with guys, and I think that kind of helps with football (today),” Reader said. “I don’t get as personal with all the guys, but the guys I am personal with, we create that relationship.”

Beyond Reader’s on-field value, Texans defensive line coach Anthony Weaver said the 25-year-old helps bind the unit because “he’ll talk to the lowest guy on the totem pole and the highest guy on the totem pole and treat each and every one of them the same, and can relate to them.” Cox called him “a very violent teddy bear,” a man who displays intimidating toughness at one moment and tranquility in another. Or sometimes, both at once.

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In that game against Furman, when he impressed on the basepaths, Reader reached first because a pitch hit him in the face.

“All he did was throw his bat to the dugout and walk to first base,” Cox said. “He ate the baseball.”

Recalling the moment on Thursday, as he removed tape from his hands after the first training camp practice of his fourth NFL season, Reader failed to see what made the moment impressive.

“It hit me square,” he said. “But it was a curve. I’ve been hit a lot harder.”

(Top photo: Courtesy of Mark Crammer / Clemson Athletics)

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