The Rocket will Finish His Career as a Yankee

[Vercingetorix]

Yeah, I agree, Clemens is very annoyingly narcissistic, but you cannot blame him for taking 4.5 a month to pitch.

Well, I guess that's the problem. If I've got to be realistic about the fact that Clemens is a businessman trying to make as much money for as little effort as he can, then I might as well go ahead and be realistic enough to say that he is going to make $4.5m per month to throw a little ball past other men who are trying to hit it with a stick. Devoid of the whole team-focused ethos inherent in sports, the action itself becomes meaningless.

And that's what Clemens has done that the others you mentioned didn't. Jordan and O'Neal may have paced themselves through the season once they got old, but at least they did it from with the context of a team. Clemens doesn't even sign a series of one-year contracts; he signs yearly five-month contracts that give him a special dispensation not to do anything with the team other than stand out there on the days he has to pitch. He's made it glaringly obvious in a possibly unprecedented way that he's not pitching for his team, and he doesn't particularly care about being part of a team; he's pitching for Roger Clemens.

I don't even know how it would be possible to really root for him if I were a Yankees fan. Sure, I'd want him to pitch well, because I'd want my team to win when he pitches. But he doesn't care about the pinstripes; he doesn't care about the New York fans -- if he did, he wouldn't have been in Houston the last few years. How can you embrace a player when you care and he doesn't?

 

[milohimself]

I officially got tired of this story about 10 minutes after I heard it.

 

[GAVol]

The audio of the Yankees radio announcer foaming at the mouth when the announcement is made is one of the most pathetic things I've ever heard.

 

[milohimself]

The audio of the Yankees radio announcer foaming at the mouth when the announcement is made is one of the most pathetic things I've ever heard.

Stuck in traffic hearing Dan Patrick pour over that call for an hour and a half didn't help matters.

 

[tidwell]

I couldn't help but laugh when Clemens' agent said at their press conference the other day that Roger would amp up his workout in order to be ready around the end of May/first of June. I was thinking, "what, increasing the injections?"

 

[Vercingetorix]

I couldn't help but laugh when Clemens' agent said at their press conference the other day that Roger would amp up his workout in order to be ready around the end of May/first of June. I was thinking, "what, increasing the injections?"

What are you talking about? It's perfectly natural that a Hall of Fame pitcher, well along the downward slope of his career, would abruptly have an enormous spike at age 36 and start suddenly pitching at his peak level again. It's a pure coincidence that that spike occurred right in the wheelhouse of the 1998-9 McGwire/Sosa era. And that pitcher is most definitely not exhibiting the stereotypical swollen physiognomy of the steriod-user; he's just getting big because he's getting old, right?