As I said, sometimes you get lucky.
I would guess that I was not the only writer or broadcaster similarly smitten by Roger Clemens during spring training 1984. He had arrived in Winter Haven, Fla., amid great fanfare following an abbreviated romp through the Red Sox farm system the previous summer. In 11 appearances for Winter Haven and New Britain, he had gone a combined 7-2 with 53 hits and 12 earned runs allowed in 81 innings. Two months and change after pitching Texas to the NCAA championship at the College World Series, he led New Britain to the Eastern League crown by allowing one earned run in 17 innings in two postseason starts, capped by a three-hit shutout of Lynn to clinch the title.
So here he was, making his big league exhibition game debut against the Detroit Tigers, who would get off to a record 35-5 start and win the World Series the following October. The first three steppingstones on Roger's long, long, and, as yet, unfinished march to Cooperstown were Chester Lemon, Larry Herndon, and Glenn Wilson, eventual accumulators of a combined 4,307 hits, 420 home runs, and 1,955 runs batted in. Roger Clemens dispatched them on 10 pitches. How fictional is that? It was K-K-K right from the get-go, long before he knew he'd be the father of Koby, Kory, Kacy, and Kody (wonder what four female Clemenses would have been?).
So I gushed. Who wouldn't?
Roger Clemens makes the press uneasy. Nobody wishes to be cited in years to come as one of the starry-eyed scribes who back in the spring of '84 went off the deep end on the subject of a kid who had yet to pitch an inning of major league baseball; a kid, who, as history would reveal, never made it. But neither do writers wish to be cited as the one ignorant, stubborn holdout afraid to acknowledge the obvious. It would be something akin to being a Larry Bird doubter in the spring of 1979.
That's it. I promise to stop quoting myself.
