RC coda

I once related to Lanyard my wish for Roger Clemens upon his assimilation into the Yankees' organization. It was roughly this: I wished that during one of his starts, he would pitch so badly that he would become physically ill all over the pitcher's mound. Having thus evacuated his stomach in such a public fashion, he would then become so morbidly embarrassed that it would cause temporary dementia, such that his next decision would be to get down on all fours and reingest his vomit.

Now that Clemens has come out of retirement again and returned to the Yankees again, my desires are no different, except to say that I hope he had a giant bowl of spaghetti for dinner (I will entertain other possibilities, but in my experience, spaghetti vomit is the grossest of all, especially if stomach-residency is relatively brief).

I really can't think of a better way to at once declare 1) that you have little respect for your fellow players 2) that you have little respect for the fans of baseball - the ones that pay your salary and 3) that you are a pompous douchebag than by coming out of retirement in the middle of the season not once, but twice. And for what is possibly the most amount of money that a baseball player has ever been paid for a single season (yes, he doesn't actually get $28 million because he's only playing a partial season...). To anyone that says it's "not about the money," I say, "phbbbt."

I for one (and I'm sure I'm not alone) was relieved to hear that he was not going to return to the Red Sox. I truly believe that their offer of $18 million was nothing more than a gentleman's offer, one the Red Sox knew would never be accepted. For one thing it was significantly less than he made last year with the Astros - in his home state. But this way nobody can say that they didn't offer (whether if the Sox actually needed pitching they would have made a higher offer is anybody's guess).

To be fair, I will wholeheartedly disagree with the many people I have heard (or read) say that Clemens is "washed-up" or "on the way down." How he does this year remains to be seen, but there is no evidence that such a decline has actually begun. Last year his ERA was 2.30, which, if he had had enough innings to qualify, would have led the NL by about 0.60. In 2005 he did lead the NL in ERA by almost that much. No, his W-L record was not great, but through no fault of his own. All you can ask out of a (starting) pitcher is his ERA and innings pitched. So it's very easy to argue that even in the last two years he was the best pitcher in the league.

But in some way that just makes his behavior even more irritating. If he's still so good, why did he retire in the first place? Answer: to spend more time with his family. That is entirely acceptable and even applaudable, but in that case just retire and stay retired. Is he so shielded from the outside world that he can't see that all this flip-flopping is viewed as disingenuous, greedy, and self-centered? There are many who would argue, "well, if he can negotiate such a contract, then why shouldn't he?" I guess my answer is "just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should." After all this ranting, though, I'm afraid this is probably just another page in the book titled "Athletes Really Do Care about Integrity More than Money, and other Fantasies." (Simon & Schuster, 2001).