I normally like Mike Lupica, but this is an atrocious column, particularly the harsh words for Roger Clemens on the basis of Clemens’ comments on Vioxx.
Bonds will be back to living in the real world, … the one where your numbers go down as you get older and not up. Unless you’re a witch.
To now, Roger Clemens hasn’t existed in that world, either. … Clemens better understand he’s a suspect now because he’s gotten stronger as he’s gotten older the way Barry Bonds has, his pitching accomplishments as dramatic in their own way as Bonds’ prodigious home run numbers.
Clemens is a suspect now partly because people like Lupica bandy around claims of his increased strength in the press without necessarily justifying it. Most stats seem to indicate that Clemens has not been increasingly strong, even if his most recent season was very impresive for a 41-year-old. Clemens’ ERA+ for the last few years has been 97, 137, 128, 101, 112, 145. That’s 3 fairly ho-hum seasons, and 3 good ones. Only once over the last six seasons (i.e. the seasons after he turned 35) has he pitched above his career ERA+ of 141. In none of those seasons did he K more than his career average of 229. In none of those seasons did he pitch more than his career average of 238 2/3 innings. His K/9 rates dropped, albeit by only a minuscule amount (career K/9: 9.59; last 6 years, 9.55). True, he has two Cy Youngs in that period, but he had five Cys before that period and an MVP award.
So his late-career pitching hardly shows him getting “stronger as he’s gotten older”. You could argue that Clemens might have taken something to make the usual age-related declines less steep, I suppose, but what we seen in Clemens is a slight decline from a very high peak, not a Bonds-like surge of awesomeness in his dotage.
Admittedly, even the original Selena Roberts article on Clemens and Vioxx noted that Clemens’ mention of Vioxx “was either a candid admission by a renowned pitcher about his fragile age or a kind of masking agent for prior use of steroids”, but at least Roberts turned it into a comment on the current state of affairs in baseball, rather than an implied accusation.
The sad thing is, now everyone who has a sudden fall-off in performance at a late age is a suspect these days. Since I’m ornery, unless anything else happens to make me change my mind, I’ll be happy to give Rajah the benefit of the doubt. Heck, he’s 41. His performance could fall off the cliff any time for any number of reasons, the way Willie Mays dropped 50 OPS points from his age 41 season to that final creaky age 42 one. (Mays stats)
In David Pinto’s musing on whether you can count Vioxx as a “performance enhancer”, insofar as it helped Clemens pitch every five days, there’s this interesting comment:
Clemens has made this statement [on Vioxx] after the FDA commission that was looking into COX-2 inhibitors recommended that Vioxx be put back on the market, and Merck has said they may do so.
It’s likely that during this season, Vioxx will be available again, and Clemens should know this. So why set himself up with an excuse that might evaporate in a month?
Makes sense to me. I mean, if Clemens was using and was worried about being caught, he could’ve just retired, an idea which he’s been flirting with for a while now anyway.