Clemens and Bonds

Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds are now linked as they never could have been on the baseball diamond. In eight career plate appearances against Clemens, Bonds got none of his 2,935 career hits and none of his 762 career home runs. However, his career on-base percentage against the Rocket is .750. Eight plate appearance, two at-bats, five walks (three intentional) and one hit-by-pitch which, by the way, is one of the more memorable HBP’s of my lifetime.

It was June 9, 2002, and Clemens was on his way to going 13-6 with a 4.35 ERA for the Yankees and at the age of 39, it appeared he was getting close to his swan song. Bonds that year had a slash line of .370/.582/.799 and hit 46 home runs the year after hitting 73. The reason this one at-bat was so memorable is because at that point, Bonds was all over the plate during every trip to the plate. He crushed pitches in on his hands so his right elbow hovered over the plate, daring a pitcher to try to sneak one by him on the inside corner. Bonds also infamously had a pad on his elbow so think that of all the times I saw him get hit by a pitch there, I don’t think I ever saw him flinch; maybe he was that tough, but I think that pad had a lot to do with it. Clemens was never one to take such a perceived affront lying down. In the second pitch of the at-bat, Clemens hit that pad squarely and Bonds gave him a little glare as he went down to first base. Clemens, as always, was practically screaming “bring it on” with his body language.

I have many more memories from the man who won seven Cy Young Awards, 354 games, accumulated 4,672 strikeouts, was voted to be on 11 All-Star teams, and received votes for the MVP award in ten different seasons, including 1986 when he won the award.

I have almost as many memories from watching the greatest hitter of this generation. He won 7 MVP awards and got votes in 8 other seasons; he won 8 Gold Glove Awards and 12 Silver Slugger Awards and in a four year stretch (2001-2004) his slash line over 2,443 plate appearances and 1,642 at-bats was .349/.559/.809. In that run he hit 209 home runs and was walked 755 times, 284 of which were intentional.

Unfortunately, what I will remember about both from here on out is that they both appeared in front of Congress to testify about the use of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PED’s) and, so it seemed, from those moments they both began down a slippery slope which ended with them both being indicted by federal grand juries on charges of perjury.

I personally don’t understand why these titans that made opposing hitters and pitchers quake in their cleats got completely unnerved and unhinged by a bunch of guys wearing very expensive suits. Clemens and Bonds got unhinged to the point where they felt they needed to lie but the list hardly stops there. Rafael Palmeiro had the most famous finger wagging moment in the history of baseball. Sammy Sosa suddenly needed an interpreter (maybe to explain in his native tongue that lying is bad?). Mark McGwire developed a case of amnesia (or at least an unwillingness to talk about the past… “Hey, I’m clean now and will be in the future, let’s talk about that!”).

Why was it so hard to tell the truth? That’s what I really want to know. It cannot be denied that adding the title “Hall of Famer” in front of their names increases their net worth to a very large degree and they were trying their best to protect their chances.

Mark McGwire – $74,688,354
Sammy Sosa – $124,068,000
Rafael Palmeiro – $89,083,996
Barry Bonds – $188,245,322
Roger Clemens – $121,001,000

According to baseball-reference.com, those are the career earnings for those five players, a grand total of $597,086,672. If you’re beginning to feel sorry for them because of lost revenue due to not being inducted in the Hall of Fame, please don’t. I have a very hard time feeling sorry for them in any way but if they somehow managed to squander more money than most Americans see in several lifetimes, I’ll have an even harder time.

LOSS OF INNOCENCE

If the 1995-2003 time frame is going to be dubbed the “Steroid Era” then I propose that from 2003-2010 (and possibly beyond) be dubbed the “Loss of Innocence Era”. A time when young people all over the country realized their childhood heroes were nowhere near the good men they thought they were and when the records that meant so much were cheapened. I remember thinking that a career total of 755 home runs was simply unattainable. If Mark McGwire, the Brawny Paper Towel guy, who with a flick of the wrist could send a ball hurtling into outer space, couldn’t get there, nobody could. What I’m realizing now is that nobody could while clean. If we compare his career arc to none other than Hank Aaron, a few things stand out. What follow is a series of number; the first is games played, next is the slash line (batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage) and the last number is their home run totals. The first line for each is what they did in their careers up to the age of 35. The second line is everything they did after the season in which they turned 35.

Hank Aaron
2,426 – .313/.374/.563 – 554
872 – .278/.373/.527 – 201

Barry Bonds
2,143 – .289/.412/.567 – 494
843 – .325/.531/.731 – 268

It is quite amazing that Aaron hit 201 home runs and still managed to slug at a .527 rate from age 36 to his retirement at 42. He was one of the best and most consistent performers in major league history, hitting 755 home runs without ever hitting 50 in a season. Also, one of the little known facts about him is that he also ranks third all-time with 3,771 hits.

If you compare his younger days to his elder days, you see a fairly dramatic drop in production. His batting average dipped 35 points, his on-base percentage only dropped a point and because of that, his home run rate actually decreased from 17.03 AB/HR to 14.57. His slugging percentage also dropped 36 points, likely due to the fact that your body can’t necessarily do at 40 what it could do at 26.

Bonds’ transformation didn’t occur at the age of 35 but it was a decent time to make the cutoff between the younger part of the career and the older part. The difference for Bonds was simply astonishing.

Batting average? Up 36 points.
On-base percentage? Up 119 points
Slugging percentage? Up 164 points.

Up to the age 35 season, Bonds had 494 career home runs and a career OPS of .979, an outstanding mark. After that, he hit 268 home runs and his OPS jumped to 1.262, decidedly Ruthian territory. His home run rate went from 15.09 all the way down to 8.92, largely due to the fact that he was walking all the time and when he wasn’t walking, he was taking the one good pitch he saw and hitting it 450 feet.

Roger Clemens career arc isn’t nearly as stark as Bonds and in his later career he didn’t pitch as well as earlier on. However, he went 121-60 with a 3.48 ERA and a 1.231 WHIP after the age of 35 when most pitchers start slowing down.

Maybe we should be widening our gaze though. Randy Johnson’s numbers after his age 35 season are 160-87, 3.23, 1.102, and he struck out 2,546 batters (while Clemens struck out 1,519). I am much more inclined to believe that a 6’10”, 225 pound man who was throwing in triple digits for more than half his career is a freak of nature than a 6’4”, 205 pound man who is much closer to the physical average of American men.


So what should we all take away from this? Well, first of all, don’t lie. Many people don’t believe it when their parents try to grill it into them as children. They say something to the effect of “we’ll be mad if you do something wrong, but we’ll be ten times madder if you lie about it”. Put into adult terms; the cover-up is worse than the crime.

It should be said that I do not have anything personal against Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds. The fact that I had an opportunity to watch two of the greatest players of all-time is a thrill that I will cherish forever. Having said that, I hope that if they did lie under oath to Congress, they are found guilty and are thrown in jail. I think both of them need a serious shot of humility and the public backlash from being indicted isn’t doing it. They are both still proclaiming their innocence and I have a sneaking suspicion that several years in prison may not even change that. If prison won’t change that, nothing ever will.

The other thing that we should realize is that this country has a near infinite capacity to forgive. 236 years ago, we were quite possibly the biggest underdog in the history of armed conflict (with the possible exception of King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans). Ever since then, Americans have been suckers for flawed, human, underdog stories. The perfect example of this should be that the movie Rocky won best picture (Rocky loses that fight at the end, by the way).

Americans love a tragic hero straight from the Greek Plots. We love a person who is great but who has a fatal flaw. This flaw leads to a catastrophic downfall but in a Greek Tragedy, the tragic hero finds redemption at the end. We want these guys to come out and tell us their sob story about how they felt the pressure of living up to a contract and felt the need to use PED’s. It may not be 100% true but I promise you that more people have forgiven Alex Rodriguez for that reasoning that will ever forgive Bonds for “not knowing” what was in a cream that he was using (which was given to him by a guy who has been federally indicted for distributing steroids).

Bonds came off as ignorant and arrogant while Rodriguez at least attempted to come off as human. An even better example was Andy Pettitte. How many people actually remember that he sat in a press conference and admitted to steroid use? Probably not too many. He sat at the podium, answered questions about it, asked for forgiveness, and as far as I can tell, meant it. Today Pettitte is being talked about as an important cog in the Yankees playoff rotation, assuming he comes back near 100% from the tweaks and strains commonly associated with 38 year olds attempting to throw a baseball at 90 miles an hour.


I guess what I’m trying to say is the cover-up is indeed worse than the crime. Pete Rose may very well be in the Hall of Fame if he hadn’t lied about his gambling for 15 years. Bonds and Clemens might have been able to get into the Hall someday if they had stood up and said yes, I was human, I did this stuff.

Will it ever happen?



Probably not.