Starting in December, Joe Posnanski began counting down the 100 greatest baseball players. Initially, we published one a day to count down to Opening Day — but with the start of the season pushed back, we’ll be counting down the last 13 with three essays per week. In all, this project will contain roughly as many words as “Moby Dick.” Yes, we know it’s nutty. We hope you enjoy.
Roger Clemens once threw a bat at Mike Piazza during a World Series game. It’s true, kids. Well, to be technical, he threw the barrel of Piazza’s bat, which had just shattered on a foul ball. Clemens might not have intended to actually hit Piazza. But what is intention, anyway? He definitely threw it in Piazza’s direction, and he threw it hard — the bat tumbled, end over end, all the way to the dugout — and it came fairly close to getting Piazza.
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The thing felt strange and grotesque at the time. But as the years go on, it feels stranger, more grotesque, like: Did that really happen? Did a baseball pitcher really throw a bat at a hitter during the World Series?
Yes. And Clemens’ later explanation did not exactly fill the heart with thoughts of Christian charity. “I thought it was the ball,” he said of the bat.
Much has been written about this incident and bizarre explanation. The very idea that Roger Clemens could have mistaken a baseball bat for a baseball is obviously nonsensical. But, even if you somehow bought into it — as a surprising number of Yankees apparently did* — Clemens left blank why he would throw a baseball full speed into the ground toward Piazza.
*“Why would he throw it at him?” Yankees manager Joe Torre raged at reporters after the game. “So he could get thrown out of the game in the second game of the World Series? Does that make sense to anyone? Somebody answer me!” Nobody answered him.
Here is the point, not only of this curious moment but of the impossibly chaotic career of William Roger Clemens: He got away with it. He got away clean. In the NFL in 2019, a player conked another with a helmet. The player was suspended for the rest of the season. Clemens threw a bat at a baseball player in front of the entire country, in a World Series game, and yes, the benches cleared, and yes he and Piazza had a brief back-and-forth about it, and yes on television Tim McCarver called it a “blatant act,” whatever he meant by that.
But then the game went on like nothing had happened. Clemens, incredibly, was not ejected from the game. Not just that: He stayed in to pitch the best World Series games of his life. He was a force of nature that night, snarling, grunting, throwing the ball as hard, surely, as any 37-year-old ever had. He pitched eight innings, allowed just two hits, both singles, struck out nine, didn’t walk anybody, did hit somebody with a pitch, didn’t allow a runner to reach third base. The Mets hit that night as if they were frightened; and why wouldn’t they be? The guy threw a bat at Mike Piazza.
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After all of that, what is the takeaway?
Is it that Roger Clemens might just be the greatest pitcher who ever lived?
Is it that Roger Clemens did not even deserve to be out there at all?
Or, somehow, are we left trying to make sense of both thoughts at the same time?
There’s a line from Roger Clemens’ autobiography “Rocket Man” that stays with me. The book was written in 1987, so this was when Clemens was still 24 years old and establishing himself as a big-league star — just one year after he won his first Cy Young award.
“I never wanted for anything,” he wrote of his childhood, “except possibly a father in the stands watching me pitch.”
Every single day while writing this series, every day, I have been reminded that so much of baseball — and not only baseball — is about fathers and sons. So many of these men found greatness in the game because they were inspired by their fathers, pressured by their fathers, intimidated by their fathers, taught by their fathers.
Roger Clemens never knew his natural father, a World War II veteran and chemical plant truck driver named Bill Clemens. His mother Bess moved the family away from Bill when Roger was less than six months old. In Roger’s memory, he and his father had exactly one conversation, and it was when he was 10 years old. Bill called the house, upsetting his mother. “I got on the phone,” Roger remembered, “and said, ‘There is no need for you to call here anymore.”
They never spoke again. Bill Clemens died when Roger was 18.
Roger Clemens adored his stepfather, Woody Booher. Bess married Woody when Roger was 2 years old. By family accounts, Woody was a sweet man, a tool-and-dye maker, who never raised his voice and adored being a father to all of Bess’ children. According to Jeff Pearlman’s “The Rocket That Fell to Earth,” Booher’s actual marriage proposal included these words: “I love you, but I’ll always look after your children first.”
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“Woody was the one,” Bess said, “who gave Roger all his extra pushes.”
But Woody died of a heart attack when Roger was just 8; Clemens would never forget the moment. He was sent to the basement when the ambulance arrived. He then put down a stack of books and climbed up so he could see the scene through the tiny window near the ceiling. He saw his stepfather on a gurney, covered by a sheet, and a crowd of hopeless people surrounding him.
“After my stepfather died,” Clemens said, “I had doubts God was fair.”
No, Roger Clemens did not have a father in the stands as baseball began to consume his life. He did, however, have his brother Randy, who was nine years older. As Roger came of age, Randy was the coolest guy in the world. He was a high school baseball star. He was a high school basketball star. He was dating the captain of the cheerleading squad, and they were the king and queen of the prom. “Randy was the star,” Roger would write. Randy was all that the young Roger Clemens could ever hope to become.
And Roger felt like the opposite of that. He was chubby then, awkward, filled with the rage of a boy who had lost not one but two fathers in his life. He looked to Randy to tell him how to live.
And Randy’s philosophy was simple. There are two options in life.
1. You win.
2. You fail.
That was it. There was no middle ground in the belief system of Randy Clemens. This would end up doing more than driving Roger Clemens’ life (“When I lose,” Roger would say many years later, “I feel so badly that I can’t go out and face the public”). It would also end up haunting Randy Clemens’ own life.
Roger Clemens was no baseball natural. He competed hard, but he didn’t throw hard. He lacked athleticism. His most noteworthy achievement when he was young was being the other pitcher on a team that featured Kelly Krzan, the first girl to play boys Little League baseball in Dayton and perhaps even the state of Ohio. Krzan dealt with all of the misogyny you might have expected from the mid-1970s (“Cute Batter Up” the Dayton Daily News headlined their story about her), but Krzan and others told Pearlman that it was Clemens who somehow felt most aggrieved.
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“Whenever Kelly was pitching,” Kelly’s mother Patricia said, “he’d get mad and throw things. He’d stomp around and tell people that a girl shouldn’t be pitching.”
Meanwhile, Tony, the son of the team’s coach Mike Kessler, said: “They were equal pitchers. Roger was no better than Kelly.”
At 15, Roger left Ohio and home to move in with Randy, who had gotten married and found a job in Sugar Land, Texas, just outside of Houston. Life had already turned somewhat dark for Randy. He had played college basketball, but was thrown off the team after being caught using marijuana on a road trip. He was already struggling with substance abuse issues that would grow worse with the years. But he was by all accounts a devoted brother who wanted to help Roger find his way. And that would mean pushing Roger to the very limit.
Roger wanted to be pushed. He had a hunger that he could not explain to anyone but Randy — and even with Randy, he didn’t have to explain. As a high school junior, Clemens wasn’t good enough to start regularly; he filled in as a spot starter and reliever. As a senior, he won games but he was no prospect. His fastball barely touched 80. But already, he was putting himself through the excruciating workout routines that would later be almost as celebrated as his pitching. He ran nonstop. He threw continuously.
He also became what one of his youth coaches called “a real pain.” He yelled at opponents from the mound (he would say that he picked this up from his hero, Nolan Ryan). He refused to accept coaching from anyone but Randy. He always seemed at the very edge of losing control, and this is because — as he would admit — he was at the very edge of losing control.
“They never said I was a can’t-miss prospect,” Clemens would say. “I didn’t open anyone’s eyes. They doubted my ability. I always had to overcome the doubts others had in me. But I’ve made myself thrive on that. I decided to prove them wrong. That’s what got me to the big leagues. That’s what made me a power thrower.”
He had no Division I scholarship offers out of high school. Heck, he barely had any offers at all. The greatest break of his young life happened when his high school coach, Charlie Maiorana, called San Jacinto College coach Wayne Graham on Clemens’ behalf. Maiorana did not actually call Graham to try and get an offer. No, he wanted to know if Graham could pull a few strings and help get Clemens to the University of Texas.
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Graham was connected — he’d been a star at Texas — but he was not that connected. Still, he took a liking to Clemens and offered him a scholarship to San Jacinto. It’s hard to tell if Clemens saw that as a disappointment at the time. But it turned out to be the turning point.
Wayne Graham lived a baseball life. He began as a batboy for his father’s team, the Finger Furniture Nine, which finished second in the prestigious Houston Post tournament one year. As mentioned, he was a star at the University of Texas, and then he was a line-drive hitting minor-league third baseman for more than a decade. He twice got big-league cups of coffee, once with the 1963 Phillies and next with the 1964 New York Mets.
More than anything, Graham was a brilliant student of baseball. At San Jacinto, his teams won five National Junior College championships. He later coached at Rice, where he mentored several future big leaguers (Lance Berkman and Anthony Rendon among them) and won a national championship.
Graham saw potential in Clemens when so few did. “Why did you recruit this fat boy?” Graham remembered one of his assistant coaches asking. Graham had his reasons. On the one hand, he saw how badly Clemens wanted to succeed, how hard he was willing to work, how much rage he had inside him. On the other, though, none of that rage seemed to come through in Clemens’ actual pitching. Where was the velocity? Where was the force? It seems that Randy had taught his younger brother to be smooth on the mound, to be graceful, and Graham had to break the kid of that habit. He wasn’t dancing out there. He was pitching.
“ROGER!” Graham would shout every time he watched Clemens pitch. “FINISH!”
That was the word between them. Finish. If you ever watched Clemens pitch in the big leagues, this was the part that would stand out. There was still a gracefulness to his motion, a fluidity, yes, but when it came to the end, the part when he threw the ball, he brought violence. There was no holding back with Roger Clemens, and he got that from Wayne Graham.
By the end of the year, Clemens’ fastball was not only topping 90 mph, it was getting closer to the mid-90s. He was dominating hitters. It was such an incredible transformation that suddenly scouts were quite interested. The New York Mets took him in the 12th round of the draft. But Clemens’ dream was still to pitch for the University of Texas, and that’s what he did instead. He left San Jacinto, went to Texas, became a superstar, and was on the mound when Texas won the College World Series.
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Boston took Clemens with the 19th overall pick in the 1983 draft, and you might know a bit about what followed after that.
But, yes, there is a postscript to the story, and not a particularly happy one. Clemens never told Wayne Graham that he was going to Texas. He never called. He never wrote. He never thanked Graham for changing his life. He never even said goodbye. The two men didn’t talk for years after that.
How should we look at Roger Clemens’ career? Should we look at it at all? This is the baseball question, and different people will give you different answers. In MLB’s Mitchell Report, he was charged with using steroids later in his career. The charge mostly came from a strength coach named Brian McNamee. Clemens was apparently so enraged by the charge (and was so driven to win, the defining quality of his life) that he demanded his day in court, his day before Congress, where he vehemently denied ever using steroids.
And from that, he was indicted by a federal grand jury on counts of perjury and Contempt of Congress.
And that led to two trials, one which ended as a mistrial, the other where he was found not guilty on all counts.
But, guilty or not guilty in court, he was found guilty in the court of public opinion, where he now lives a sort of baseball half-life as either a legend or a scoundrel. He has not been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. There is no indication he ever will be.
As such, his baseball career is, to many, nothing more than a mirage. You can talk about the achievements, the awards, the numbers. You can talk about seven Cy Young awards and a 354-184 record and 4,672 strikeouts and seven ERA titles, and numerous people will not argue about it because they don’t even see it.
But Clemens’ career happened, and there are many ways you can look at it. You can look at the career in total, counting everything, and if that’s the case you have, as Tom Tango once pointed out, a staggering combination of Pedro Martínez’s entire career and Sandy Koufax’s entire career.
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How’s that? Well look at Clemens’ career in Boston:
Clemens in Boston: 192-111, 3.06 ERA, 144 ERA+, 1 MVP, 3 Cy Youngs, 81 WAR, 56 Wins Above Average.
And now look at Martínez’s total: 219-100, 2.94 ERA, 154 ERA+, 3 Cy Youngs, 86 WAR, 61 Wins Above Average.
Clemens wasn’t quite Pedro in those years, but he was pretty darned close. Clemens never had a season in Boston as good as Pedro in 1999 or 2000, but his 1990 season was in the ballpark, his 1987 season was astounding, and his 1991 and 1992 seasons were incredible and we haven’t even yet mentioned his 1986 season when he went 24-4 with a league-leading 2.48 ERA and did something even Pedro failed to do, win an MVP.
I have made the argument before that Clemens was underrated as a young pitcher and overrated as an old one. I stand by that. By 1998, when he allegedly began working with McNamee, he was already a fully-qualified Hall of Famer and one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history.
Clemens’s years after Boston: 162-73, 3.21 ERA, 140 ERA+, 4 Cy Youngs, 58 WAR, 39 Wins Above Average.
And Koufax’s career total: 165-87, 2.76 ERA, 131 ERA+, 1 MVP, 3 Cy Youngs, 53 WAR, 31 Wins Above Average.
It’s pretty incredible if you look at it that way. He wasn’t Pedro. He wasn’t Koufax. He was both.
But how much of it was authentic? And, digging deeper, how hard does anyone want to work to stand up for Clemens and his legacy? He was hardly an admirable figure. There’s a pretty good argument that the PED allegations pale in comparison with his relationship with the late country music star Mindy McCready, which the New York Daily News reported began when McCready was underaged. McCready confirmed to the Daily News that the two had an affair, though she later said that it didn’t begin until she was 18.
Clemens meanwhile denied that the affair happened at all and publicly attacked McCready, calling her a liar. His lawyers briefly threatened a defamation case. When McCready died by suicide at age 37, Clemens made it sound like he barely knew her, even as his agent conceded that they were close friends. “The few times that I had met her and her manager/agent,” Clemens said, “they were extremely nice.”
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How can you think good thoughts about a person like that?
So, no, there isn’t going to be a parade of people who will stand up for Roger Clemens.
On the other hand, it has to be said that most people probably do think he does belong in the Hall of Fame. Clemens got 61 percent of the Hall of Fame vote from the Baseball Writers in 2019, and baseball writers are famously staunch on the subject. Most informal polls I’ve seen (or conducted) have Clemens’ Hall of Fame support closer to 75 percent.
One thing is sure: It’s almost impossible to have a pure baseball conversation about Clemens. He brought this on himself. Any attempt to discuss his power, his control, his 20-strikeout games, his incredible split-fingered fastball will and must turn into a discussion of his ethics, his rage, his bullying and various uncertain things. And here’s the big reason: All his life, Clemens got away with it. Whether it was throwing a bat at Piazza, taking PEDs to dominate or allegedly doing shameful things in his private life, well, we don’t know it all. But we know he got away with it. We know that he never admitted any of it, much less expressed any remorse.
And if there’s one thing so many people cannot abide, it is someone getting away with something.
He was one helluva pitcher. He really was. On the mound, he was the best of his time, and his time happened to include Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux and Pedro Martínez, three of the greatest who ever lived. What separated him was a hunger and a fury and a thunderous unwillingness to lose that swelled from somewhere deep inside. He couldn’t turn it off when the game ended. Maybe that was just how it had to be.
Note: Portions of this series were adapted from previous work that originated on my personal blog.
Check out the complete series on this topic page
(Photo: John Cordes / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)