Clemens limps into sunset
Posted: Sunday, October 07, 2007 8:16 PM
The last pitch Roger Clemens threw – probably the last one he’ll ever throw – was a fastball strike that Victor Martinez swung mightily at and missed. It was Clemens’ only strikeout in a gutsy but disappointing start against the Indians.
As Yankee fans cheered, Clemens limped off the mound and into the history books. He probably should never have started the game, and he had to know the tender left hamstring that had kept him out of the rotation for the last weeks of the season wasn’t entirely healed and wasn’t going to stand up to the demands he would put on it.
If you’re the sort who likes to beat up others, you could make a good argument for Clemens being selfish. But if you know and love the game of baseball, you’d know he was just trying to help, trying to win, trying for one more moment of glory.
“Roger’s got a lot of guts,” is how his manager, Joe Torre put it. “He always has. He was trying to tough it out.”
If he’d done anything else, he wouldn’t be the man who won 354 games and established himself as one of the very greatest pitchers of all time. If you want to call him the greatest ever, go ahead. You might get an argument, but the ground you’ll have to stand on will be the size of a continent.
The hamstring screamed at him after the second inning, when he gave up the second of three runs that would go against his record. He had it wrapped, went out for the third, gave up a walk to Travis Hafner and wild-pitched him to second. He was 0-1 and 0-2 on just about every batter up until then, and always on the edge of disaster.
But he took on Martinez, the Indians’ MVP, and blew one great fastball past him. Torre said he may be eligible to return for the World Series, should the Yankees get that far. But you have to think it was the last pitch Clemens will ever throw. And if so, it was a great one, thrown with everything the Rocket had left in his aging body.
And then he left, handing the ball like a torch to a kid, Phil Hughes, with the same kind of potential the Rocket came up with. It wasn’t the way Clemens wanted it to end.
“He was there to do a job, and he was very upset that he had to come out,” Torre said. “I don’t want to say it was heartbreaking, because he wouldn’t want me to say that.”
Love him or hate him, Clemens never asked for pity, and he’s not going to start now.
Hughes did what Clemens couldn’t – after giving up a double that scored Hafner, he clamped down on Cleveland and won the game for New York, keeping them alive in the series.
If New York moves on, they can’t count on Clemens and shouldn’t. He struggled all season, and the legs are finally breaking down. He’s had a magnificent career, and you owe it to yourself to run on over to his page at baseball-reference.com and remind yourself of just how spectacular he’s been.
And if this is the end, he went out the only way he should – with a strikeout.
