Category Archives: Baseball

Baseball

Roger Clemens: Portrait in Hatred

nixonrocket.jpgRoger Clemens has been indicted for perjury. On the one hand, I think this is a huge waste of taxpayer money. While lying to Congress is a serious crime, the likelihood of conviction seems iffy at best. The feds have been trying to nail Barry Bonds on a similar charge without success for years, and the evidence against Bonds appears to be much stronger than that against Clemens.

On the other hand, Roger Clemens is one of the worst human beings on the planet. Not enough bad things can happen to him to sate my schadenfreude.

Last week, in a post about Chipper Jones, I wrote about how I can usually separate my personal feelings from objective reality. Emphasis on usually. I could cast a Hall of Fame vote for Chipper Jones. I don’t think I could do that for Roger Clemens. And not because of steroids. Simply because I hate him with a white hot passion. I hate him more than some people who have done actual, tangible wrong to me. If I could harness this hatred and turn it into energy, I could power a steel mill for a year.

The worst thing about Clemens (even worse than the fact that he literally tried to kill Mike Piazza by throwing a 95 mph fastball at his head): His craven, psychotic need to be not just loved, but worshiped. That is often the sign of a man who deep down knows he is horrible, and thus demands love from others. All so he can say, “How can I be a bad person–look at how many people love me!”

In another life or another nation, Roger Clemens would have been a crime lord or a dictator. Someone who snatched power by force. Someone who demanded absolute fealty and craved absolute love from everyone. Someone who can never be told that he has done wrong, for it is impossible for him to be wrong.

I can easily imagine Roger Clemens commanding cowering citizens to perform grand, choreographed games in his honor, as North Koreans do at Kim Jong Il’s behest. That is exactly the kind of sick, depraved person he is.

Keep in mind that the Congressional hearing from which the perjury charge stems would never have happened in the first place if he hadn’t demanded one. It wasn’t good enough for him to quietly deny the charges of the Mitchell Report. No, he had to loudly protest his innocence to the nation’s lawmakers and force us all to shower him in love once again. This maniac was so obsessed with being adored, he laid his own trap.

Joe Posnanski wrote an amazing column (as usual) about Clemens at SI.com, in which he takes us back to the infamous Game 2 of the 2000 World Series, when the Rocket flung the bat at Mike Piazza. Posnanski’s observation: Clemens has no interest in smoothing things over with Piazza, but instead focuses on proclaiming his innocence to the home plate umpire.

That is the essence of Clemens. He had no desire in doing right or being right. His sole focus was on getting over, being absolved. It reminds me of Pablo Escobar, the infamous Colombian drug lord who could have lived fat and happy on his cocaine billions, except that he had an insane craving for respectability. He desperately wanted to be elected to Congress, and didn’t care how many bribes he had to hand out or judges and policemen he had to kill in order to do it. As if becoming a Respectable Person would somehow erase the fact that he’d murdered his way to the top.

To this day, I’m still infuriated by the thought that Clemens received absolutely no punishment for this bizarre, dangerous act. (As Posnanski points out, Piazza very easily could have been injured by the shattered bat.) No ejection, no fine, not even a tsk-tsk from Bud Selig. It still blows my mind that someone did this in a World Series game and was allowed to continue to play in that game.

Karma might not really exist, but I like when it makes a select appearance in the lives of folks like Clemens. His life is over, for intents and purposes, and he’s not even 50 yet. Even allowing for Americans’ microscopic memories, and even if steroid use becomes accepted in the future, I can’t imagine his image ever recovering. God, that’s beautiful. There are people more deserving of cosmic payback than him, but he’ll do until they get theirs.

In honor of another instance of Clemens’ spiritual de-pantsing, here’s a trip down Scratchbomb memory lane of The Rocket’s various falls from grace.

Take Your Medicine, 12.13.2007
Wherein I discuss the Mitchell Report and touch on Clemens being exposed for the fraud that he is.

60 Minutes with Roger Clemens, 01.03.2008
Mike Wallace interviews a not-at-all contrite Roger Clemens, with a guest appearance from Hank Steinbrenner.

Roger That, 02.08.2008
An attempt to understand Roger Clemens through old clips from a baseball special called Grand Slam, which you can not watch because Clemens helped shut down my old YouTube account.

Joe Torre Revisits History, 02.04.2009
While promoting his book on Mike Francesa’s show, Joe Torre rethinks his opinion of Roger Clemens, using an amazing piece of equipment called his brain.

Michael More, Roger, and Me, 03.26.2009
Wherein I discuss why I can love Mike Piazza and hate Roger Clemens.

Baseball

The Assassination of Larry Jones by the Coward, His Knee

99_chipper_reed.pngLarry Wayne Jones, known to most people (and himself, for some reason) as Chipper, has a torn ACL in his knee and is out for the rest of the season. At his age, and given his injury history, there’s every reason to think his career may be over. (The mere fact that I’m writing this means he’ll be fit as a stallion by spring training next year and hit 72 homers against the Mets.)

Let’s assume what everyone else is assuming, that his playing days have ended. I should be relieved, even ecstatic about this news. If all the evil I wished on him over the years could be rendered in corporeal form, it would stretch from here to Jupiter. And yet, upon hearing the news, I feel oddly sad.

When it comes to baseball, I can separate my personal feelings from objective reality. And the objective reality is, Chipper Jones may be the best switch hitter ever not named Mickey Mantle or Eddie Murray. Much like Mantle or Ken Griffey Jr., you can only imagine what his numbers would have been like if he hadn’t lost so many seasons to injury. Plus, he played a physically demanding position that is underrepresented in the Hall of Fame. If he never plays another game, he’s still a lock for Cooperstown.

Do I hate him? Oh god, yes. I’ve despised him ever since that immortal (to me) year of 1999, when he clearly delighted in beating the Mets at every opportunity. You could tell he relished the thought of eliminating them from postseason contention, as the Braves nearly did in their last series at Shea that season. When an excruciating extra-inning loss left the Mets two games out of the wild card spot with three games to play, Chipper told the press that Mets fans should “go home and put their Yankee stuff on”.

For that statement alone, if I ever see him in the street, I will hit him in the face with a shovel.

That said, Chipper will be missed because he may be the last of the Great Baseball Villains. He loved being a thorn in a certain team’s side. This was once very common in the game, when rivalries were real and deeply personal, rather than the trumped-up sports hatred of the ESPN era, where The Worldwide Leader inflates artificial rivalries as much as they can even if they haven’t evolved organically. Or obsesses about actual rivalries to the point where everyone becomes sick of them (see: Yankees-Red Sox)

In ye olden days, every team had a villain or two. Someone to boo and project all their hatred on. Dodgers fans hated Juan Marichal. Giants fans hated Don Drysdale. Yankees fans hated George Brett. And everybody hated Barry Bonds. The recent Reds-Cardinals kung fu exposition notwithstanding, we don’t see much of this in baseball anymore.

The mere mention of the Braves fills me with anger. But when I watch them now, there’s very few people who inspire actual anger within me, because all of the villains of the late 90s/early 00s are gone. No more Greg Maddux. No more Brian Jordan. No more John Rocker. No more Eddie Perez or Ryan Klesko or Andruw Jones. Every single one of those guys hated the Mets, and you could tell.

In their place, the Braves are now a team with a disturbing amount of fresh-faced young’uns. Guys like Brian McCann and Jason Heyward and Matt DIaz, guys who just put their heads down and play and just wanna help the team win, by golly. They don’t even have the decency to be hateable. And to top it all off, Bobby Cox is soon to retire. If the Braves didn’t cling to their horribly racist Tomahawk Chop, there’d be nothing to hate about them at all.

Chipper held himself as a beacon of Hate, and he did not mellow as the years went on. He named one of his kids Shea, because he hit so well there, as a giant genetic “fuck you” to Mets fans. He bitched about David Wright winning a Gold Glove. In more recent years, he professed enjoying his visits to New York and even had not-terrible things to say about Mets fans, which I think he did for the sole purpose of driving them nuts.

Earlier this year, I went to a Mets-Braves game with my daughter. When Chipper strode to the plate, the crowd erupted in its customary mocking chant of LAAAAAAAAA-REEEEEE!. 

“Why they saying Larry?” my daughter said, knitting her brow in confusion.

“Because he likes to call himself Chipper, but his real name is Larry,” I explained.

She scowled. “Why?” She sounded annoyed. She had no idea what hell this man had inflicted on the Mets. She just knew, at age three, that a grown man shouldn’t call himself Chipper. So she yelled LARRY! along with everyone else and laughed.

I wouldn’t have had that moment without you, Larry, so thanks. And also, go die.

Baseball

Jerry Manuel’s Mean Team Strategy

jerry.jpgDo you have any details about K-Rod’s altercation with his father-in-law? What was the fight about?

Probably just looked at him funny. You don’t look at Frankie funny. He’ll cut you.

So there was no real cause at all?

No, it was all part of our plan to make the team less nice. All you writers kept telling me we needed to be meaner, so that’s what we’re doing. I told K-Rod he should get in a fight with some family members, maybe yell at his kids in public or something. But he really stepped it up. Gotta hand it to him. Beating up a man 30 years older than you, that’s some big league hustle.

Are you afraid K-Rod might wind up in jail?

Yeah, I’m afraid for the other inmates. He once showed me how you could make a shank using a plastic cup and a piece of dental floss.

He’s really that much a thug?

No doubt. Hell, Mariano Rivera didn’t want to be in the same locker room as him, or so Bob Klapisch says. Just think about some of the skells Mo was teammates with: steroid cheats, wife beaters, vehicular manslaughter enthusiasts…so you figure someone’s gotta be really bad if Mo don’t want nothing to do with him.

So the whole team’s getting a new, mean makeover?

Oh yeah. This is why I really wanted us to trade for Brett Myers, but Omar told me he’s only willing to beat up women.

How is the rest of the team getting meaner?

You saw what David Wright did to his bat last night? That was ’cause he heard the bat was snitchin’. Carlos Beltran’s got a switchblade and couple of throwing stars in that knee brace of his. And Jose Reyes has dropped dancing and taken up krav maga, the deadly Israeli art of self-defense. When you join the team now, you gotta get jumped in. And when we take our next trip to Chicago, we’re gonna have a team dinner where we eat a baby.

You mean a baby cow, like veal.

Nope, a human baby. We’re living outside the bonds of human decency now. We will become the worst humans on the planet, godless fiends, making a mockery of your so-called laws and all you stand for. Your society is nothing but a sham that will crumble the second you meet the hellish likes of us.

Back to the game. Why didn’t you bring in Frankie with two outs in the eighth and the bases loaded as you still clung to a one-run lead?

Because I’m a complete fucking moron.