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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Still, Clemens insists that his tough winter regimen will pay off. He says he has never worked harder to get in shape. That is saying a lot, since Clemens is one of the hardest workers in baseball. From December to the start of spring training, Brian McNamee, a former New York City police officer who's now a strength and conditioning coach for the Yankees, commuted to Houston every other week to train with Clemens. "This is the first winter I went this heavy with squatting," says Clemens, whose hamstring injury—as well as an aching back—scared him into making his tough exercise regimen even tougher. "I can't let what happened to my hamstring last year happen again. I can't pitch without my legs. I can deal with shoulder problems, elbow pain, even sore arms," he says. "But without my legs, I'm in trouble." His rigorous workout schedule: time on the treadmill, push-ups and sit-ups, stretching, heavy leg-lifting, lower back exercises, the stationary bike, and running three miles a day. "I ain't jogging either," he says. "I'm running. Seven-minute miles." He even did exercises between innings of his spring-training starts. "I'm definitely putting my foot to the pedal these next few years. I want to maximize my time here. I don't want to look back and say I cheated myself. There were some guys who had a shot at three hundred victories but let themselves go and never got there [he is 47 wins away]. I ain't playing this game for the paycheck every fifteen days or to watch the paint dry. I ain't doing this for the money. I want to leave my mark on this game." When asked when he thought he might ease up, even just a little, he pauses: "When my playing career is over."
Just when that will be is anyone's guess, of course, but Clemens has already pushed past most of baseball's greatest pitchers. Consider the cases of hard-throwing great Don Drysdale, of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who was washed up at 33, and Bob Gibson, of the St. Louis Cardinals, completely cooked at 37. (Forget about Ryan, who pitched an inhuman 27 seasons, retired at 46, and threw a blazing fastball until the very end. He's the mother of all anomalies—a freak.) Yankee TV broadcaster and former major league catcher Tim McCarver, who caught both Gibson and Hall of Famer Steve Carlton, remembers, "Gibson went in a hurry. And Carlton, who worked harder than anybody I ever saw, evaporated almost overnight. He was superhuman for so long, then—boom!—it all blew up in a period of months." Still, McCarver—unlike so many others—believes that Clemens' problems are more mental than physical. "I haven't seen any noticeable drop-off in his stuff," he says. "I just think his mind is not allowing him to do certain things. Everybody is looking for something they can see, but I think Clemens' problem is something you can't. It's the mechanics of the mind at work here. He has fallen into the trap of thinking what got him to this point isn't enough anymore to keep him here. Last year, it was his overreliance on his slider, which looked like a fat fastball most of the time.
"And one other thing: He's human like the rest of us. He knows like everyone else that the Yankees were a better team, if not the best of all time, without him in 1998 than they were with him in 1999."
Despite Clemens' defiant spring-training proclamation that he "makes no concessions to age," he clearly already has and will continue to make them if he expects to survive another year. Nolan Ryan, the 53-year-old Hall of Famer and foremost expert on the subject, would not comment specifically on Clemens but said, "The aging process affects you tremendously as a pitcher; I don't care who you are. You start losing your natural ability. You lose sharpness off your breaking ball. You start losing velocity. You lose some movement. And that's enough for major league hitters to catch up to you. Believe me, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you work, your muscle memory keeps slipping, as does your muscle timing; everything goes a bit at a time."
Others see that in Clemens already. "Frankly, he's on the downslide, stuff-wise," says a former big-league pitcher and pitching coach, who now works as a scout and who insisted on anonymity. "Not by a lot, mind you, but by just enough. It doesn't take much in the major leagues to go from unhittable to hittable. The thing is, he's not throwing consistently hard anymore, more like 91 to 92 miles per hour instead of 93 to 94. He doesn't locate his pitches nearly as well, and his splitter doesn't have that snap it used to. What's happened is he has lost an inch here, an inch there, which is just enough to let the hitters make contact. And when hitters make contact, when they're able to put the ball in play, anything can happen. But he's still enough of a competitor, still knows how to pitch, and still works hard enough that he'll get hitters out for a while. How much longer, I couldn't tell you."
"No way is this close to what I get back in Houston," Clemens says over the din of clanging silverware and loud music at a Tex-Mex place in Tampa called Rio Bravo. He's working on a plate of grilled chicken fajitas. "I've got a place right near my house where the portions are huge. And the tortillas are fresh. They sling the dough right in front of you." This is a side of Clemens the hitters will never see: relaxed and high-spirited, laughing and joking and talking mostly about his favorite subject aside from his golf game, his four boys: Koby, 13, Kory, 12, Kacy, 6, and Kody, 4. Not surprisingly, all are athletes.
"So, get this," he says, "My eldest dropped a 'dude' on me the other day. He said, 'Dude, we're fixin' to scrimmage.' I said, 'Dude? Who's Dude?' I stopped him dead in his tracks. He's getting to that age, you know. I said, 'Hey, your friends are dudes, I'm your father.'"
He bites off a piece of tortilla. This is Clemens the family man, the man who obliges his pal former president George Bush by taking part in a Leadership Forum at Texas A&M—a thousand light-years from the snorting, stomping bundle of aggression that has been terrorizing major league hitters for the past seventeen years.
"That's the thing about my kids," he continues, warming to his subject. "I'm not the Rocket to them. I'm not Roger Clemens, the major league baseball player. I'm just Dad. I'm the one they see in my boxer shorts eating cornflakes in the morning. And I'm Captain Video with my camcorder at their Little League games. I've tried real hard to keep them away from all that celebrity stuff."
Clemens' home is a pine-shaded 15,000 square-foot place in the Villages of Houston's Memorial Park, where he has lived with his children and his wife, Debbie, since 1990. The house is almost a sports complex, including a seven-thousand-square-foot gym, a quarter-mile track, half of a baseball infield, a basketball rim, an indoor batting cage, and a weight room. It is less than four miles from where Clemens went to high school. Clemens says he would have liked to have spent part of his career closer to home. His best shot at that, in 1998, fell apart when his agent asked for a $27.4 million one-year extension, designed to put his salary on par with other leading pitchers. That led the Astros' general manager, Gerry Hunsicker, to publicly lambaste Clemens at the high-profile Baseball Winter Meetings for such a "mind-boggling" request and put an end to all talk of a trade.
Meanwhile, Clemens the homebody swears that, if getting to three hundred wins starts looking out of reach, if it seems like it's taking too long, he is prepared to leave and never look back. "I love baseball, but it doesn't define me," he says, somewhat astonishingly. "And I won't miss it. I have friends whose careers ended too soon, and because of that, they had a hard time dealing with it. That won't be me. They didn't have a clue what to do once spring rolled around. Me, I've got plenty of hobbies to keep me busy."
Doesn't he have any desire to manage or coach in the bigs, or at least go into broadcasting?
He cocks his head, as if waiting for a different sign from the catcher.
"None of that. I wouldn't mind coming to spring training to help out the young pitchers and see all the old guys I played with. But I don't want to travel. I'll probably work with high school kids and give Little League clinics.
"I know I won't be bored. And I'll sleep well at night knowing I gave everything I had to the game when I could. Knowing I left everything out there on the field."
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