The Futility Infielder

So as I was saying before, I trekked out to East Brunswick, New Jersey to watch the All-Star Game at Steve Goldman's pad, joining Will Carroll and Cliff Corcoran as well as Steve's lovely wife Stephanie and adorable four-year-old daughter Sarah (apologies on the spellings of those fine ladies' names, o pinstriped host). We had barely marshalled together an order for Chinese food, endured an American Idol National Anthem (it's a one-minute song, fer crissakes, not an opera), and watched Muhammad Ali juke with Derek Jeter when the American League decided to skip the ballgame and hold batting practice at Roger Clemens' expense.

Ichiro (no longer Ichiro! as we're pretty damn bored by him now) led off with a double into the rightfield corner that just missed going out. Then Ivan Rodriguez (who never should have been called Pudge so long as Carlton Fisk is still breathing) tripled to nearly the same spot, missing a homer by a mere couple of inches. After a Vlad Guerrero groundout came a long homer to Manny Ramirez, last seen threatening to charge the mound when Clemens threw him an eye-high fastball over the plate in Game Three of the ALCS. Clemens struck out Alex Rodriguez and looked to be out of the inning when Jason Giambi grounded to second baseman Jeff Kent. Mr. Porno Moustache couldn't backhand the ball cleanly, and Wormy G was safe. Derek Jeter singled to right, with Giambi legging it from first to third, something he probably won't do five times this year. Alfonso Soriano followed with a monster two-run homer to left field to make the score 6-0.

Having not seen Clemens pitch in an Astro uniform, I must say it was quite disorienting. I half-expected Mel Stottlemyre and eventually Joe Torre to head to the mound to calm the Rocket, even though Clemens was pitching against them. At some point, I swear I saw Torre pass from from glare to relief, as if to say, "Wait, this is somebody else's problem now." Still, it was weird to watch Jeter, Giambi, and especially Soriano do damage to their former teammate.

We wizened baseball experts sat around pondering the Rocket's launchpad explosion, the Yankee fans among us conveniently avoiding any mention of Game Four of last year's World Series. Clemens, still wiping his brow from a narrow, wee-hours escape from a dubious end, was again pitching for what the world though would be the final time. He allowed three first-inning runs and nearly had to depart in another walk of shame, but gritted his way through six more innings while holding the Marlins at bay. That noble salvage job would have made for a fitting epitaph if Clemens had made good on his promise to retire; we should all be so lucky to have our final actions read "7 8 3 3 0 5 ND" in a World Series game.

With that six-run inning, the All-Star Game quickly turned into a moot point, and we were treated to the amusing antics of young Sarah, who regaled us with the theme from Spiderman (the kid knows all the words) and her mastery of the somersault while generously sharing her various toys and books with us. Oh, sure, we were distracted enough by the game to take in the views from those embedded cameras -- "Check out that hip rotation!" marvelled our expert pitching mechanic. But we spent just as much time rummaging through baseball encyclopedias trying to determine whether Spud Chandler or Snuffy Stirnweiss was the 1943 MVP, recounting the follow-through of Goose Gossage, learning about Dr. Mike Marshall's rather obnoxious mastery of the Krebs cycle, lamenting constantly injured pitchers ("Dennis Leonard ought to be coming off of the DL any day now...") and nitpicking the failures of Walter Alston in the eyes of Leo Durocher. Fun stuff to talk bout during a suspense-free exhibition.

On the subject of Clemens, Salon's King Kaufman had a piece on Wednesday noting the Rocket's big-game shortcomings:

And listen, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Roger Clemens is one of the greatest pitchers of all time, maybe the greatest, but he's also a first-class punk. He has a way of coming up spectacularly small at the biggest moments, dating all the way back to his stupidly getting himself thrown out of a playoff game in 1990. (He shouldn't have been thrown out, but he also shouldn't have put himself in position to be thrown out.)

And maybe even dating beyond that, depending on whose story you believe about why he came out after seven innings of Game 6 in the 1986 World Series. John McNamara, then the Red Sox manager, has always claimed that Clemens asked out because of a blister. Clemens, who is more believable in this argument, has maintained he was yanked for a pinch hitter.

...In 26 postseason starts, Clemens is 8-6 with an earned-run average of 3.47. In the regular season, he's averaged a 13-7 record and a 3.18 ERA per 26 starts, which is about three-fourths of a season's worth. And that includes his lousy late Boston period in the mid-'90s. Of course it's tougher to pitch in the postseason, where all opponents are good teams, but we're talking about arguably the greatest pitcher of all time. For someone who could have been expected to put up Bob Gibson numbers in October, 8-6 with a 3.47 doesn't cut it.

It seems everybody in the latte set is taking their potshots at Clemens lately. The other day came this Slate piece from a snivelling Sox fan named Seth Stevenson, whose open letter to Clemens begins:

Dear Roger Clemens,

Let me offer my hearty congratulations on starting the All-Star Game. Wow, that is really terrific. I'd like to note, however, that I hate you.

Also: You are fat. They say you've got this hard-core training regimen, with calisthenics and whatnot. I'm not seeing it. You're wicked fat.

Oh, perhaps that was uncalled for. You know what else was uncalled for? Sucking, every time it mattered. You ruined my childhood, fatty. Because the trauma you put me through as a young, impressionable Red Sox fan has stunted my emotional growth, I revert to a juvenile mind-set whenever I see you. Like repeatedly calling you fat.

That one may as well have come from a Saturday Night Live skit starring resident Sox whiner Seth Myers, whose shtik just cracks me up.

The Clemens big-game flop trope is a well-worn one from a Sox fans' standpoint, and if you're a Yankee fan whose memory only goes back to the last two starts of the 2003 postseason, you might even share that view. You'd be right, but only in a half-assed way. The truth is that Clemens, like, Andy Pettitte, has pitched enough October innings to provide us with a glimpse of his full range of outcomes, from Clutch Jesus in Pinstripes to Uncle Crispy in the Burn Unit. Lest we forget that Pettitte, still smarting from the memory of that 0-2 ,10.00 ERA World Series performance in 2001 -- in which he was reputedly tipping his pitches -- spent last October pissing icewater (3-1, 2.10 ERA in 5 starts), then coolly took off his pinstripes for the last time, setting in motion the chain of events which took Clemens to the All-Star Game in the first place. Give a great pitcher enough starts and he'll do just about everything, and our tendency to confuse clutch performance with character traits makes that a bit messy. As Baseball Prospectus' Joe Sheehan put it:

It's much more enjoyable to extrapolate a certain moral superiority from on-field success, to attribute that game-winning double to your heart and desire, rather than to your fast-twitch muscles and hitting the fastball at just the right angle to push it past the diving center fielder. It's this need to turn physics and physicality into a statement about the character of people--to stick labels on them based on their day at work and the bounce of a ball--that is the most damning thing about the myth of clutch.

Yankee fans should have no beef with Clemens' performance in the postseason, and neither should Kaufman. I sent him an email which I'll excerpt here while adding a few hyperlinks:

While I don't consider myself much of a Roger Clemens fan -- I've screamed myself hoarse at him on more than one occasion -- I do feel compelled to defend him against your charges of him coming up short in big games... while Clemens had a reputation for big-game disaster in Boston, he did a considerable job of shedding that tag in New York: 7-4 with a 3.21 ERA in his pinstriped postseasons, including 3-0, 1.50 ERA in five World Series starts. Yes, there are a few meltdowns in there, but there are also some stellar performances:

* Given the chance to earn his first World Series ring in '99, he rebounded from a humiliation in Boston -- the team's only loss of the postseason -- and went 7.2 innings with 1 run allowed in Game Four to ensure a sweep over Atlanta.

* After getting shelled in the 2000 ALDS, he emphatically rammed the bat up the Mariners' collective asses (hey, there's no way to put it politely; just ask Alex Rodriguez, who went sprawling) with a 1-hit, 15-K performance in the ALCS and in the Series blew the Mets away as well with an 8-inning, 2-hit, 9-K game that's remembered for less flattering reasons.

* In 2001, with the Yanks down 2-0 in the Series -- a must-win -- he beat the Snakes by combining on a 3-hitter, then pitched 6.1 innings of 1-run, 10-K ball in Game Seven, leaving with the score tied.

* As all hell broke loose in that ALCS Game Three brouhaha last year, Clemens kept his cool like a little Fonzie, pitching 6 strong innings of 2-run ball, letting the Sox wear themselves out with emotional outbursts such as Pedro's whinefest and Manny's charging the mound. The Yanks won the tense 4-3 game.

* He even gutted out that ugly 3-run first inning in last year's Game Four to last seven frames without giving up another run; the Yanks did tie the score only to lose in 12. At the time that looked as though it might be the last game of Clemens' storied career; it would have been a much more honorable ending than the great majority of players' -- even great ones' -- careers.

You compare Clemens' postseason record to Bob Gibson's and it appears to come up a bit short. That's like saying Willie Mays couldn't hold a candle to Babe Ruth, as Gibson is only the single best postseason pitcher ever in many peoples' eyes. Clemens managed a 1.90 ERA in his seven Series starts, not too shabby next to Gibson's 1.89 ERA in his nine Series starts. When one considers how much higher scoring Clemens' era is than Gibson's, that's a bit more impressive, as is the fact that he was doing this at the time he was pushing 40, while Gibson was still in his early 30s prime. No, he didn't last as many innings as Gibby, but then Gibby didn't have Mariano Rivera to hand the ball to, either.

You seem to look at Clemens and remember only the failures, and yes, there are many, as there will be when you scan a player's 21-year career. I look at Clemens and while I feel no personal affinity for him, I recognize that while the man occasionally let his emotions get the better of him in key moments, he took his punches and got off the mat, ready to come back even stronger the next time. That doesn't make him the best pitcher ever. It doesn't even make him immortal. It makes him human, and we should be so lucky as to see that in all of our superstars.

I look forward to seeing if Kaufman responds. Much as I often thought of Clemens as a punk myself during his tenure in pinstripes, I'm prejudiced by the fact that I was at that '99 clincher. Good fortune found me in the ballpark with a team given the chance to clinch a championship, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and Clemens didn't let me down. It may be twisting the knife in Sox fans' backs, but I'll say that nothing will ever take the memory of the ovation Clemens received when he departed. Yankee Stadium shook, and it didn't stop shaking for the hour and a half. You don't forget a thing like that, and you tip your cap to the men who made it possible, the Rocket included.