No. It contained a get-well gift for 8-year-old Kate Shaughnessy, who’d just been diagnosed with leukemia. There was an autographed baseball from Clemens and the big white bear. Kate smiled and named him/her Clementine. And Clementine stayed in her room until she graduated from college.
I thought of Clementine last week when the news broke that Clemens was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that he lied to Congress when he testified that he never used performance-enhancing drugs.
Clemens is probably going to prison and that’s his own fault. It’s obvious that he won’t get much sympathy from Red Sox Nation, but I am here to tell you that the Rocket was not the face of evil when he pitched at Fenway Park from 1984-96.
Things ended badly for Clemens in Boston (where have we heard that one before?). He was barely more than a .500 pitcher over his last four seasons with the Sox and it stung when he went to Toronto and won back-to-back Cy Young Awards after Sox GM Dan Duquette announced that the pitcher was in the twilight of his career.
In a final act of Boston betrayal, Clemens became a member of the hated Yankees and won a championship in the Bronx. That’s one of the reasons one could hear so much local cheering when the feds came after the Rocket last week.
I think Clemens used PEDs. I think he lied his butt off when he went before Congress in February of 2008. And I think he’s going down, just like Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby, and Marion Jones.
But I don’t think he was the worst thing that ever happened to the Red Sox. And he was not always hated around here.
I was there for the good days at the beginning. In 1986 Clemens rescued the moribund John McNamara Sox (81-81 in ’85), winning his first 14 decisions en route to a 24-4 Most Valuable Player season. He was 23 when he struck out 20 Mariners in a game at Fenway April 29. In August of that season, I wrote a column comparing him favorably to Larry Bird. It seems hideous now, but nobody complained then.
