Roger, Over and Out?
At 38, Roger Clemens—the greatest pitcher ever to come out of Texas—is losing his edge. He is no longer the strutting, rosin bag-slamming, fist-pumping fireballer who terrorized the American League and won five Cy Youngs.
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He also became famous for being just plain mean. If a hitter did something he didn't like, Clemens wasn't interested in just embarrassing the guy; he was looking, if not to bruise him, to put the fear of God in him. "A lot of guys can go out there and try to be mean," says Yankees first baseman Tino Martinez. "But it doesn't work because it's not their personality. Roger's got it naturally." Look at him funny, you're going down. Crowd the plate, you're getting one up near the earflap. Show him up with one of those corkscrewing cuts, expect the next pitch stuffed in your armpit. The opposing pitcher hits one of his, he's hitting one of yours. "You can be a nice guy, but off the field," says Clemens. "I take the approach that the batter's trying to take away my livelihood with his bat. Trying to take money out of my pocket." He's especially well known for what's called "doubling up"—brushing back a hitter with two straight pitches just to reinforce the message. If that doesn't work, you're probably getting plunked on the elbow, wrist, or shoulder blade, someplace that hurts.
"Off the field, he's a great guy, generous, caring," says one of Clemens' best friends, former UT and Red Sox teammate Spike Owen, now working in community relations for the minor league's Round Rock Express. "But put a ball in his hand and he'll turn on you." Owen should know. The time Clemens struck out twenty against the Seattle Mariners, Owen was the Mariners leadoff hitter. "The first pitch brushed me back, and the second pitch knocked me down," says Owen, who ultimately struck out. "It kind of ticked me off. I said to myself, 'What's wrong with this guy? He's supposed to be my friend.' But that's the thing about Roger. When he's on the mound, he has no friends. Roger has always had the type of presence that says, 'You will not do certain things while I'm on the mound.'"
That apparently includes hitting grand slams off him. On July 8, 29 days after Piazza embarrassed him, Clemens drilled him in the head with a fastball. Clemens insisted that he hadn't meant it. "I wasn't trying to hit him in the head," Clemens said. "I was trying to crowd him, pitch him inside." Other pitchers might have gotten away with this. But this was Clemens, and the Mets weren't buying it. Said a groggy Piazza: "I thought it was definitely intentional."
Away from the pressurized world of the ballpark, Clemens becomes, as his pal Calvin Schiraldi puts it, "just another good ol' boy." In an interview in his hotel in Tampa, Florida, during spring training, he is both punctual and polite. His two-level white stucco villa at the Hyatt Regency Westshore looks more like a trainer's room than a home: exercise benches, Ace bandages, weights, Gold's Gym and Met-Rx stuff are scattered about, and the faint smell of muscle ointment hangs in the air. His brown hair is spiked and newly bleached blond in the front, making him look like a cross between former football rebel Brian "the Boz" Bosworth and Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear. By baseball standards, Clemens is huge: six four, 238 pounds. He has Popeye forearms, a bearlike chest formed by innumerable hours on the bench press, and the tree-trunk legs that are the secret to his drop-and-drive delivery. (Few pitchers have used their lower body as effectively as Clemens.) He has a dimpled chin, a perpetual five o'clock shadow, and a pair of famously off-putting light brown eyes that, when summoned, produce a burning, lingering, piercing glare. Clemens has a reputation, mostly formed during his thirteen years in Boston, as a difficult, testy, and occasionally even paranoid interview. Yet on this day Clemens is relaxed and cordial, though his opinion of the media clearly has not changed. "I think a lot of writers hit below the belt," he says. "They want to make bad things that happen to you sound funny. They want to sell papers. There's so much [coverage] now. And everything you do is just sort of exploited and magnified. I'm not sure players want to be around and have to explain everything."
He excuses himself for a moment, puts a George Strait CD into his CD player ("This music's good for you," he says. "It'll lower your blood pressure"), then fixes the TV on ESPN's SportsCenter with the sound turned off. "I keep most people at arm's length," he says. "I don't let everybody into my world. I let my guard down only around certain people. And there are times I don't want to be around anybody at all. Like the day I pitch. I'll run right over you."
How did he feel last season, when he had just one complete game in thirty starts? When he had a career-worst 4.3 walks per nine innings, when opposing teams hit an obscene .375 against him with runners in scoring position, and when he often went off, alone, to the weight room, where he would train by himself or mime his delivery ad nauseam in the mirror? "I wanted to slide in the back door," he explains now. "This was a winning machine rolling smoothly along, and I did not want to do anything to throw it off." It reached the point where Joe Torre called Clemens into his office one day, closed the door behind them, and said, "Rog, you really need to start being yourself." Later, Torre would say, "I think Roger just lost who he was."
Clemens does not accept the idea that he is in some sort of irreversible decline. He argues instead that, with a few runs here and there, everything could have turned out much differently in 1999. "Six games could've gone either way," he says. "I could easily have been a twenty-game winner. And if I did that, there wouldn't be any talk about how I'm losing it." It's true that the Yankees supported him with a mere fifteen runs in his ten losses last year, but how many times did they score by the bushel-load to dig him out of a hole? He just as easily could have been a fifteen-game loser. "Listen, the only downer last season was that I hurt my hamstring and couldn't hold on to some four-to-nothing leads." He hints that for most of season, he pitched while he was in pain. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner had theorized this over the winter. "I was in a defensive mode after the hamstring injury, trying to protect it, trying not to reinjure it," Clemens says. "I didn't want to miss more time. I wanted to answer the bell."
His best and worst performances last year came in the post-season. The worst: game 3 of the American League Championship Series, against the Red Sox and Pedro Martinez, when he was swatted around for five runs in two innings of an embarrassing 13-1 loss. His best: game 4 of the World Series, against the Atlanta Braves, clinching the championship with a masterful seven and two-thirds innings, yielding just one run on four hits. "I was so focused," he says. "Nothing existed for me that day but the mound and the plate." In a way, game 4 was his redemption for such a disappointing season. It was supposed to carry over. It was supposed to be the start of something.
It wasn't.
It has actually gotten worse. At near mid-season, Clemens was a thoroughly mediocre 6-6 with an ERA of 4.33, perilously close to the forbidden zone of five runs a game. "I'm as hacked off as anybody," he said after the June 9 loss to the Mets. A two-game stretch in May and early June is typical of the new Clemens: Against the Red Sox, he not only matches Cy Young Award winner Pedro Martinez, zero for zero for eight innings, but strikes out thirteen batters, equaling his high as a Yankee (though he loses after giving up a two-run homer with two outs in the ninth). The next game, against the Braves, he gets lit up like Times Square for six runs before exiting after five innings.
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