The Rocket will Finish His Career as a Yankee

#26
#26
I don't know why it bothers some people as much as it does. ESPN runs with it because they love promoting NY sports since it is the biggest market in the country. It's not like I;m just saying this because I'm a Yankees fan though. If he had signed with the Sox I would be aware that the season would be a complete struggle, but I wouldn't have been angry. Roger is manipulating the system like any smart businessman.
 
#27
#27
Great baseball players have been getting old and dealing with their careers winding down for a hundred years. As far as I know, Clemens is the first player who's dealt with that by sitting home for 1/3 to 1/2 of the February-October grind, letting the pennant races shape up, and then hiring himself out for just the fun part of the year. And then doing it again every year. I'm sure it's great for Clemens and his agent -- in fact, Clemens probably wonders why he didn't figure this racket out 15 years earlier -- but to fans of almost every team in baseball it just looks stupid and greedy and even more mercenary than is usual in sports these days. I know he's just a businessman trying to make a buck, as you say, but don't ask me to root for him.

(And hey, be glad I'm at least not bringing up the look-at-his-giant-head steroids rumors again. At least I'm just calling him greedy.)
 
#28
#28
In his defense, at least he picked the team that offers him some challenge, instead of one that he can just coast with.
 
#30
#30
UTLCA said:
In his defense, at least he picked the team that offers him some challenge, instead of one that he can just coast with.
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They're paying him a million dollars more a month than Houston did last year. Somehow I doubt he picked the Yankees because of the "challenge."
 
#32
#32
Vercingetorix said:
They're paying him a million dollars more a month than Houston did last year. Somehow I doubt he picked the Yankees because of the "challenge."
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If you read Bill Simmons' take on him there's more reasons than that why he signed with the Yanks.
 
#33
#33
I don't see a new Simmons article about Clemens on ESPN.com, but there's a link to an old column of his that includes this gem: "Instead of a team logo, the cap on [Clemens's] Hall of Fame statue should simply feature a dollar sign."

Sounds about right to me.
 
#34
#34
Why would he end his career? He will pull the same stuff next year and go to the highest bidder again.
 
#35
#35
Vercingetorix said:
I don't see a new Simmons article about Clemens on ESPN.com, but there's a link to an old column of his that includes this gem: "Instead of a team logo, the cap on [Clemens's] Hall of Fame statue should simply feature a dollar sign."

Sounds about right to me.
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That's what I was talking about. He hit evey nail on the head.
 
#38
#38
Bennett4UT said:
Ha silly Yankees you wont even make the playoffs
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Much as I would like this to be true, I'd be surprised if the Yankees didn't make the playoffs. They're leading the AL in runs scored, so if they manage to get any pitching at all, they should be poised for a run at the wild card at the very least. And other than Boston, they play in a weak division, so that'll help too.
 
#41
#41
Oh, I didn't mean that Clemens himself puts them back into it. But he helps. Their lineup is so good that I think they can make the playoffs if they can just come up with three decent starting pitchers -- and between Hughes, Wang, Pettitte, Pavano, Karstens, and now Clemens, you've got to think that three of them will get healthy and put together decent years.
 
#42
#42
It's just inexplicable to me that with that kind of payroll at his disposal, Brian Cashman let the starting pitching go to pot like that.
 
#43
#43
The only thing is that A Rod will go back to mediocre play once the Yankees are in contention again.
 
#44
#44
GAVol said:
It's just inexplicable to me that with that kind of payroll at his disposal, Brian Cashman let the starting pitching go to pot like that.
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It's amazing, isn't it? You can have an old guy or two in your rotation; you can have a couple of young guys; you can take a flier on a guy that's spent his whole career hurt, like Pavano. But when your whole rotation is made up of those guys, you set yourself up for what happened to the Yankees this April.
 
#45
#45
Vercingetorix said:
It's amazing, isn't it? You can have an old guy or two in your rotation; you can have a couple of young guys; you can take a flier on a guy that's spent his whole career hurt, like Pavano. But when your whole rotation is made up of those guys, you set yourself up for what happened to the Yankees this April.
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Wrong, wrong, wrong. Look at who went to the DL for the Yankees. Two of the 5 pitchers were the older ones you were talking about, the other three are younger than 27 and do not have injury histories.

First of all, there is no way anyone could have seen this Pavano thing coming. While he may have had some injury troubles, to expect him to miss at least 2.5 years of his 4 year contract (Probably closer to 3.5 years when its said and done) would make you a liar. The other older one with injury history is Moose, but his hammy has never been a problem, he has problems with his back.

Between the other 3, they have 4 DL stints between them, plus I believe Rasner began the year on the DL so you could bump it up to 5 for 4 pitchers under 27 with no history. Wang injured his hammy before the season (26, no history), Karstens went on the DL twice already and he never had before. And Hughes is 20 years old, how are you going to think that he was going give out like that?

There is absolutely no way you can pin this on Cashman. I absolutely disagree with you 100% on on this one. We have used 10 starting pitchers in 1.5 months, that has never happened in the history of baseball, and it is not because our pitching staff is so incredibly old and injury prone. While 3 of them are, the rest are not and have had freak injuries.
 
#46
#46
UTLCA said:
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Look at who went to the DL for the Yankees. Two of the 5 pitchers were the older ones you were talking about, the other three are younger than 27 and do not have injury histories.

First of all, there is no way anyone could have seen this Pavano thing coming. While he may have had some injury troubles, to expect him to miss at least 2.5 years of his 4 year contract (Probably closer to 3.5 years when its said and done) would make you a liar. The other older one with injury history is Moose, but his hammy has never been a problem, he has problems with his back.

Between the other 3, they have 4 DL stints between them, plus I believe Rasner began the year on the DL so you could bump it up to 5 for 4 pitchers under 27 with no history. Wang injured his hammy before the season (26, no history), Karstens went on the DL twice already and he never had before. And Hughes is 20 years old, how are you going to think that he was going give out like that?

There is absolutely no way you can pin this on Cashman. I absolutely disagree with you 100% on on this one. We have used 10 starting pitchers in 1.5 months, that has never happened in the history of baseball, and it is not because our pitching staff is so incredibly old and injury prone. While 3 of them are, the rest are not and have had freak injuries.
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I'm not saying that Cashman should have seen into the future when he signed Pavano in the first place; I'm saying that he's been so injury-prone since joining the Yankees that it was crazy to count on him this year for anything.

The problem isn't with any of the individual decisions Cashman made with regard to his potential starters; it's all of them put together. Cashman has an essentially unlimited payroll available to him, yet managed to start the season without a single starting pitcher on the roster who A) did not have a recent history of injury, B) was under 35 years old, and C) had really established himself at the major league level. Wang was probably the closest thing, but I wouldn't call him a rotation-anchoring pitcher yet. When you have access to the funds Cashman does and you're surveying your pitching during this past offseason, how can you not go find an innings-eating, middle-of-the-rotation guy, somebody whom you know can give you 200 average-to-decent innings? With that lineup, all you need is average pitching and you'll win a lot of games.

Maybe it's not fair to Cashman, but frankly, more should be expected of Cashman because he has so much more money to play with. He's not constrained by bad contracts in a way other teams would be. The Braves, for example, made a horrific trade for Mike Hampton, and now they're stuck with his salary eating up a big chunk of their payroll. But if you're Brian Cashman, you can look at Carl Pavano's $10m salary, the 100 IP he's given you in the last two years, and say, "I don't know what we're going to get from Carl this year. We need to go get somebody else." And then do it. When you've got a $200m payroll, you should be prepared for contingencies.
 
#47
#47
Vercingetorix said:
As far as I know, Clemens is the first player who's dealt with that by sitting home for 1/3 to 1/2 of the February-October grind, letting the pennant races shape up, and then hiring himself out for just the fun part of the year. And then doing it again every year. I'm sure it's great for Clemens and his agent -- in fact, Clemens probably wonders why he didn't figure this racket out 15 years earlier -- but to fans of almost every team in baseball it just looks stupid and greedy and even more mercenary than is usual in sports these days.
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"Don't hate the playa, hate the game."
sq-don-poses-greengold-wi.jpg


You know if you could get paid in full to do (in theory) 1/2 the work, you would too. If he wasn't still a top 5, money pitcher, the Yanks wouldn't have given him the contract. He had the best ERA in baseball last year. If it wasn't the Yanks, it would have been the Sox, Astros, or some other big market team.
 
#48
#48
The Dude said:
"Don't hate the playa, hate the game."
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Being a fan of professional sports requires a certain suspension of disbelief. We have to believe in the concept of the team, that there's something about the guys who wear the same uniform that makes them ours, somehow, arrayed in battle against the hated and worthless rivals. That the guys who wear that uniform are pulling together and putting the team first and all the other things we learned in Little League; that they are not, in other words, just a bunch of random co-workers who wear silly clothes and get paid a lot of money to play a kid's game. This suspension of disbelief is what makes it possible for so many people to care enough use the pronoun we when referring to a professional sports team, even though the only relationship a fan can ever have to a pro team is that of customer.

When Roger Clemens sits at home for the first third of the season, picks a team in May based on who will pay him the most and what the standings look like, and exempts himself from having do to little details like actually go to road games, he spits on this concept of team, the notion upon which the whole shebang depends. If the team is meaningless to the players, after all, then why should we as fans care? Clemens's yearly narcissistic parade is an unpleasant reminder that, as Jerry Seinfeld said, all we really do is root for laundry.
 
#50
#50
Vercingetorix said:
Clemens's yearly narcissistic parade is an unpleasant reminder that, as Jerry Seinfeld said, all we really do is root for laundry.
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Yeah, I agree, Clemens is very annoyingly narcissistic, but you cannot blame him for taking 4.5 a month to pitch. And the concept of a professional sports team is a very abstract image in modern day sports, so when a player acts like this or holds himself above the team in any way (i.e. Barriod Bonds getting his recliner in the Candlestick lockerroom), it's not a surprise to me nor do I find it to be any sort of landmark thing. It's just an aspect of pro team sports that sucks. And lets keep in mind that Clemens is a top 5 pitcher now, and maybe best pitcher ever, so it's not like we are talking about the Yankees giving these perks to Todd Van Poppel or Oil Can Boyd or someone. Shaq did the same think and held a golden basketball over his head when the season was done, more than once if I remember correctly.

Edit: Shaq never signed after the season started, but he has been "injured" during the eariler part of a few seasons, only to make a full recovery. And more than a few times Jordan was "sick" and missed early, regular season games, and he sent a look-alike to Vegas to play poker all night, I guess while he was "sick" in the bed.
 
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