Roger Clemens

Baseball Player

• Born: August 4, 1962
• Birthplace: Dayton, Ohio

Sport: Baseball

Early Life

Roger Clemens was born on August 4, 1962, in Dayton, Ohio. At the age of four, his family moved to Houston, Texas. There, his parents encouraged him and his older brother, Randy, to participate in sports but also insisted that they concentrate on gaining an education. Randy played baseball and basketball at Mississippi College then went on to a successful business career.

Clemens starred in three sports at Spring Woods High School, winning three letters each in football and in baseball and two more in basketball. In 1979, he also helped his American Legion team to a Texas state championship and was named all-district defensive end for the Spring Woods football team the same year. Rather than immediately pursue a career in professional sports, Clemens followed his parents’ advice and accepted a baseball scholarship to attend Texas’s San Jacinto Junior College.

The Road to Excellence

At San Jacinto, Clemens earned junior college all-American honors. Although he was drafted by the New York Mets after the 1981 college season, he chose instead to continue his education at the University of Texas at Austin. There he compiled a 25–7 record as a pitcher over the next two years and was named all-American both seasons. His strong performances caught the attention of Major League Baseball (MLB) scouts. When the Boston Red Sox made him its first-round draft choice in 1983, he decided to forgo his final year of college eligibility and begin playing professional baseball.

Clemens spent little more than one year in the minor leagues before he was called to the parent club in 1984. Meanwhile, he compiled a 3–1 record and an impressive 1.24 earned run average (ERA) in four games at Boston’s Class A team at Winter Haven, Florida, and a 4–1 record with a 1.38 ERA in seven games at AA New Britain, Connecticut. In 1984, he started his second professional season with the Red Sox’s AAA farm team at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, but his performance in his first seven games earned him promotion to the majors. During his rookie season, he compiled a 9–4 record with a 4.32 ERA before suffering an injury and missing the last month of the season.

Clemens continued to be plagued with injuries during the 1985 season, missing virtually the entire month of July because of a sore pitching shoulder and the final month of the season when he injured his shoulder again. The second injury necessitated an operation on August 30, and the Red Sox management feared that he might never regain the blazing fastball that had made him so effective as a pitcher. However, he underwent a successful rehabilitation program after his rotator-cuff surgery and returned in 1986 to have his finest year and lead his team to the World Series.

The Emerging Champion

Clemens’s 1986 season was the sort about which most pitchers only dream. He led the major leagues in total victories, with a 24–4 record; in winning percentage, at 85.7; and in ERA, at 2.48. He also won the American League (AL) Cy Young Award. In one game against the Seattle Mariners, aided by his faster than 95-mile-per-hour fastball, he struck out an incredible 20 batters. That mark bettered the all-time major league record for strike-outs in a single game by 2 strikeouts. During that same season’s all-star game, he pitched 3 perfect innings, helped lead the American League to victory, and was voted the game’s most valuable player.

The Red Sox rode Clemens’s arm to an American League Eastern Division Championship and victory in the American League Championship Series against the California (now Los Angeles) Angels in 1986. He was 1–1 with a 4.32 ERA against the Angels in a series that the Red Sox won in dramatic fashion in seven games. His dream season ended in disappointment, however, when the Red Sox lost a heartbreaking seven-game World Series to the New York Mets. Nonetheless, that defeat could not tarnish the luster of his regular-season performance, for which he was voted the league’s most valuable player and The Sporting News major league player of the year. Up until then, only Sandy Koufax and Denny McLain had ever won both awards and the Cy Young Award in the same year. Clemens had clearly established himself as the premier pitcher in the American League, perhaps in the majors, and potentially one of the greatest power pitchers of all time.

Continuing the Story

After his dream season of 1986, Clemens continued to terrorize major league batters. In 1988, he led the major leagues in strikeouts with 291; in 1987 and 1988, he led the majors in shutout victories. He also led the American League in complete games in 1987, with eighteen, and tied for the league lead in that category with fourteen in 1988. In 1988 and 1990, he led the Boston Red Sox to the American League Eastern Division Championships only to see his team fall both times in four consecutive games to the Oakland Athletics. He continued his phenomenal record in all-star games by pitching 1 inning in the 1988 game and 2 innings in the 1990 game without giving up a hit or a run. In 1987, he won his second consecutive Cy Young Award, only the third pitcher ever to do so—the other two were Jim Palmer, in 1975 and 1976, and Sandy Koufax, in 1965 and 1966.

In 1991, Clemens signed a four-year, $21-million contract with Boston, making him the highest-paid pitcher in baseball history up to that time. He earned his money that year by posting an 18–10 record and recording an AL-best 2.62 ERA, good enough to secure his third Cy Young Award.

At the end of the 1996 season, after thirteen years with Boston, Clemens became a free agent and signed a contract with the Toronto Blue Jays. During his two years with Toronto, he led the league in wins, ERA, and strikeouts. In 1997 and 1998, with the Toronto Blue Jays, he duplicated his feat of ten years earlier when he won back-to-back Cy Young Awards, bringing his total to a record five awards.

Despite all that Clemens had accomplished in his career, a World Series Championship still eluded him. That changed in 1999, after he joined with the New York Yankees, who had made a multiplayer trade that sent David Wells to the Blue Jays. He was bothered by a hamstring injury early in his first season with the Yankees, and his regular-season ERA was 4.60. However, he improved that mark during the postseason, when he pitched 7 shutout innings against the Texas Rangers in the American League Division Championship Series and held the Atlanta Braves to 1 run and 4 hits in the World Series. During that year, he was also selected for the MLB’s all-century team. Putting to rest any speculation about his advancing age and power as a pitcher, he finished the 2000 season with a 13–8 record and an ERA of 3.70 and won his second World Series ring.

Clemens began the 2001 season on an unprecedented pace that led to his sixth Cy Young Award. After building an amazing 20–1 mark, he finished the season with the best win-loss record of his career, at 20–3, and again led the Yankees to the World Series. In the seventh game of that series, he pitched well, but the Arizona Diamondbacks pulled ahead in the ninth inning to win the game and the series.

In early 2003, when Clemens was forty years old, he announced he would retire at the end of the season. Then, he went on to compile a 17–9 record and a 3.91 ERA and again played in the World Series. He also reached several significant milestones, including 300 career wins and 4,000 strikeouts. Incredibly, he reached both milestones in the same game. Only twenty other pitchers in major league history had ever recorded 300 wins—a figure that traditionally guaranteed entry to the National Baseball Hall of Fame—but his strikeout figure was even more impressive. Clemens was only the third pitcher in history to reach 4,000 strikeouts.

Clemens’s 2003 season took the form of a farewell tour; he was honored in every stadium in which he made his last appearance of the season. Boston even honored him twice—once in the regular season and once during the playoffs—although many Red Sox fans were bitter that he had left the team. After the season ended, he realized he still had more baseball left in him. As a free agent, he signed with his hometown team, the Houston Astros, in early 2004.

Clemens’s deal with Houston was for only one year, but he played there through three seasons, during which he won 38 games and suffered only 18 losses, while posting some of the best ERA numbers of his career. In his first season on a National League team, the recently unretired Roger found himself in the surprising role of starting pitcher for his new league in the all-star game. He finished the season with an 18–4 record and won his seventh Cy Young Award. At the age of forty-two, he became the oldest pitcher ever to win that award and was also only the fourth pitcher to win the award in both leagues.

After again flirting with the idea of retirement, Clemens signed another one-year deal with Houston, this time for $18 million—the largest amount of money ever paid to a pitcher for a season. He repaid the Astros with another fine year. His ERA of 1.87 was the best mark of his career, the best in the majors in 2005, and the best in the National League in a decade. He had fewer wins than in the previous year, but that was due mostly to the poor run-support he got from the team during his thirty-two starts.

Clemens’s next two seasons were curiously truncated. In 2006, he waited until the end of May to sign a new contract with Houston and did not start playing until late June. In only 19 starts, he won 7 games and lost 6 but recorded another fine ERA of 2.30. Once again, he appeared ready to retire. However, the following May, he signed a new deal with the Yankees and returned to pitching in the American League in June 2007. His statistics were merely respectable that year, but he reached another major milestone in July, when he recorded his 350th win. Perhaps more surprising was a single he hit in a game against the National League’s Colorado Rockies in June: his age of 44.88 years on that date made him the oldest player in Yankees history to get a hit. The record is ironic for a pitcher who had only 170 at bats during his entire career.

Clemens’s career pitching statistics were remarkable by any standard. Even more remarkable, perhaps, was the high level at which he pitched after leaving the Red Sox at the age of thirty-five. However, starting in the late 2000s, many people began to look at his achievements with some skepticism, wondering if they had been aided by performance-enhancing drugs.

In 2005, retired star hitter José Canseco—an admitted steroid user himself—published Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ’Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big, a book alleging that Clemens and other players had probably used anabolic steroids. Similar allegations from other players also began surfacing, leading to a major steroid abuse scandal for the MLB. These charges reached a more serious level when a former US senator, George Mitchell, publicly released a report on steroid use in baseball in December 2007, prepared for the commissioner of Major League Baseball. The fact that the report mentioned Clemens more than eighty times seriously undermined his own denials about using steroids. The following January, Clemens appeared on television’s Sixty Minutes to refute allegations against him. In February 2008, he also testified before a congressional committee investigating steroid use. However, because his testimony was not found to be fully convincing, the issue remained unresolved. When the new baseball season started, no team showed any interest in signing him; this meant that 2007 was Clemens's final season playing in the MLB. He played in a total of 709 games during his twenty-four season professional career, and retired with a total of 354 wins and 4,672 strikeouts; as of 2022, Clemens held the record for third-most career strikeouts of all time, behind only Randy Johnson and Nolan Ryan.

In August 2010, Clemens was officially indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of perjury, three counts of making false statements, and one count of obstruction for allegedly lying during the congressional hearing. In a response to the indictments on Twitter, Clemens once again vehemently denied the accusations and stated that he was looking forward to proving his case in court. While his initial trial began in 2011, it ended abruptly in a mistrial due to inadmissible evidence presented by prosecutors. One year later, after nine weeks in court, the jury ultimately reached a verdict of not guilty on all six charges. Experts suggested that the jury did not find the prosecution's key witness, Clemens's former trainer Brian McNamee, and his stories about dealing steroids and human growth hormone to Clemens convincing—or at least convincing enough to warrant prison time. Despite the favorable verdict, however, Clemens expressed concern that the accusations had irrevocably damaged his baseball legacy. In 2013, during his first year of Baseball Hall of Fame eligibility, Clemens did not receive enough votes through the traditional ballot process to gain entry. Clemens was also rejected in subsequent years of voting. In 2022, during his final year of ballot eligibility and last chance to enter the Hall of Fame as a player through the most common channel for players, Clemens was once again rejected by the voting committee; this made it impossible for him to enter the Hall of Fame as a player through the ballot process.

Impact

With his blazing fastball and fierce competitiveness, Roger Clemens broke many longstanding career pitching records during his twenty-four seasons playing in the MLB. However, in the 2000s, toward the end of his career, Clemens faced allegations of steroid abuse that cast a shadow of controversy over many of his achievements and led to legal difficulties.

Bibliography

Callahan, Gerry. “Commanding Presence.” Sports Illustrated 86.13 (1997).

Canseco, José. Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ’Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big. New York: Regan, 2005.

Clemens, Roger, with Peter Gammons. Rocket Man: The Roger Clemens Story. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Macht, Norman L. Roger Clemens. Philadelphia: Chelsea, 1999.

Macur, Juliet. "Clemens Found Not Guilty of Lying about Drug Use." New York Times. New York Times, 18 June 2012. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

"Roger Clemens #21." Major League Baseball, www.mlb.com/player/roger-clemens-112388. Accessed 16 Feb. 2022.

Schmuck, Peter. “Roger Clemens: He’s Back in Command.” Baseball Digest 56.9 (1997).

Snyder, Matt. “How Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Others Can Still Make Hall of Fame after Falling off Ballot in Final Year.” CBS News, 25 Jan. 2022, www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/how-barry-bonds-roger-clemens-others-can-still-make-hall-of-fame-after-falling-off-ballot-in-final-year/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2022.

Svrluga, Barry. "Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens Snubbed by Baseball Hall of Fame in Steroids-Era Rebuke." Washington Post. Washington Post, 9 Jan. 2013. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

Verducci, Tom. “Returning to Their Houston Roots, Inseparable Pals Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte Want to Share the Fun of Pitching the Astros to a Title.” Sports Illustrated, 23 Feb. 2004.