The Salad Days

Those of you who have known me awhile know that at the mention of the name Roger Clemens, my blood pressure goes up. I have maintained for quite some time that he is and was a bad thing for baseball. This belief was cemented into place by the event depicted in the photograph to the left. In the photo, Roger Clemens is throwing a bat shard at (or toward) Mike Piazza. (As an aside, for those who don't know, there was history to this. Earlier in the season during interleague play, Piazza had hit Clemens very well, and Clemens proceeded to hit Piazza in the head and give him a serious enough concussion that Piazza was forced to sit out the All Star Game). This bat throwing incident happened when the stakes couldn't be higher. It was months later in the World Series, and Clemens was in the early part of the game. After the incident, Piazza walked toward Clemens with a look on his face that said, "Are you nuts?" Until that moment, my general disdain for the Mets had forced me to root for the Yankees, but Clemens' action and his teammates total support for him pushed me into rooting for the Mets. Also, the fact that Clemens was allowed to play and pitch a 2 (or 3, I can't remember) hitter told me that Major League Baseball (MLB) had no guts to deal with criminal behavior in their game.

Since that awful night, I have held Roger Clemens in contempt. I always thought him to be a fine pitcher and worthy of the Hall of Fame, but I was always puzzled by the accolades he would receive in spite of his brutish behavior. He was called "a fierce competitor," "intense," as well as other things meant to denote a positive competitive streak. And I have long thought him to be suspicious in terms of the steroid controversy. It seemed odd to me that a 44 year old could still be so dominant. But for some reason, all the flak went onto Barry Bonds, mostly because the press, for some reason, likes Clemens but not Bonds.

So today, I felt vindicated (but also saddened for baseball and its fans) to see Clemens' name appear in the George Mitchell report on steroid use in baseball. I hope that the press and baseball fans everywhere can begin to see him for who is truly is: a brilliant pitcher whose intense desire to win drove him to unhealthy extremes and excesses. No more can we all pretend to be horrified by the activities of Barry Bonds and turn a blind eye to "the ones we like." He should have been booked on assault charges that night in 2000, so I hope that now he doesn't dodge consequences yet again. What those consequences are is hard to say. MLB and the players union cooperated to make this mess, so it seems odd to keep these folks out of Cooperstown. But my hope is that the tarnish this brings to the game will wake up the establishment and its fans and bring consequences to those who have soiled this great game and its cherished records.