A fascinating look at Roger Clemens, in the words of those who have had to face him at various times in his career, from All Stars (Cal Ripken, Jr., Torii Hunter) to rookies and even Clemens' eldest son.
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From the Back Cover
As the most feared pitcher of all time, Roger Clemens has won more than 350 games in his 20-year baseball career, struck out more than 4,500 batters (the second highest total in the history of the game), and earned a record seven Cy Young awards. Along the way, he’s hit 150 batters, knocked down hundreds more, and stared down every batter who tried to dig in against him.
Facing Clemens explores what it’s really like to face the Rocket Man. Author Jonathan Mayo has interviewed scores of players, including Ken Griffey Jr., Chipper Jones, Luis Gonzalez, Torii Hunter, Cal Ripken Jr., and even Clemens’s own son, Koby Clemens, for a batter’s box view of the Rocket bearing down from the mound.
About the Author
Jonathan Mayo is a Senior Writer for MLB.com, the official Web site of Major League Baseball.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By Aaron Israel
Format:Paperback
Jonathan Mayo's analysis of Clemens would be a remarkable achievement in its own right, generously offering up honest analysis and insights into some the most intriguing personalities in Baseball. On its own right, Mayo's interviews reveal a side of these stars that most sports journalists either gloss over or miss altogether. All of this is true in its own right, but when you consider that Mayo wrote this book months before the whole story on Clemens broke out, then one can really see that this book is destined for history. Going forward, any other author will forever be tainted by the "scandal" side of Clemens and all the spurious conjecture and speculation. Lost forever is the opportunity to objectively view Clemens through the untainted lense that he will forever be viewed by history, whether he is proven innocent or not.
As such, baseball fans and in particular, Yankees fans, owe a debt of gratitude to Mayo for serving up what future baseball historians will no doubt recall as the last authoritative look at Roger Clemens the athlete, both for physical prowess, as much as if not more so for the terrific mental focus and awareness that he was able to bring to his game.
Mayo's intimate portrayal of Clemens is a masterful display of writing for his ability to draw us sympathetically towards the story without cheapening the experience by trying to convert that moment into sympathy for Clemens himself which has been so frequently done by lesser authors.
I would have liked to see some photos of Clemens particularly with his son as that story was the one that really stood out from the others. I can't recall another interview where Clemens revealed as much about this intimate side of his family.
Food for thought for the second printing...
As such, baseball fans and in particular, Yankees fans, owe a debt of gratitude to Mayo for serving up what future baseball historians will no doubt recall as the last authoritative look at Roger Clemens the athlete, both for physical prowess, as much as if not more so for the terrific mental focus and awareness that he was able to bring to his game.
Mayo's intimate portrayal of Clemens is a masterful display of writing for his ability to draw us sympathetically towards the story without cheapening the experience by trying to convert that moment into sympathy for Clemens himself which has been so frequently done by lesser authors.
I would have liked to see some photos of Clemens particularly with his son as that story was the one that really stood out from the others. I can't recall another interview where Clemens revealed as much about this intimate side of his family.
Food for thought for the second printing...
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Jonathan Mayo's book, Facing Clemens, uses a deceptively simple but effective technique in discussing the pitching of Roger Clemens. He talks to the hitters who faced him and has them discuss the pitches he threw them, how effective the pitches were, and what they tried to do to get quality at bats against Clemens.
The book is especially pertinent because of the many false stories about Clemens invented and passed around in the years of the charges against him for enhancing his pitching by allegedly taking anabolic steroids and Human Growth Hormone. Those charges collapsed in a heap last year when he was acquitted for perjury in federal district court in Washington, D.C. Important factors in that acquittal were the testimony of his former catcher in Toronto, Charlie O'Brien, who testified under oath that Clemens was so honest that he would not even use scuffed baseballs, and of his manager in Houston, Phil Gardner, who explained Clemens's complex arsenal of pitches, including his deadly split finger fastball, developed in Toronto in 1997.
This testimony was in stark contrast to the myth that Roger Clemens was a power pitcher, a fastball or nothing guy, who declined by 1996 in Boston and was revived only by taking anabolic steroids in Toronto and New York between 1998 and 2001. In fact, Roger Clemens was a control pitcher from his earliest days, a kid with perfect command of the plate. He had no legitimate fastball until a defect in his pitching motion was discovered at San Jacinto Junior College and had no curve ball to speak of until a pitching coach at the University of Texas realized he did not hold the ball correctly.
Many baseball authorities consider Clemens the greatest pitcher in the 142 year history of the game. He won the Cy Young Award for best pitcher seven times, the most ever. He won 354 games and lost 184, a superlative winning percentage of .658. He ranks No. 3 in career strikeouts, with 4,672.
Contrary to his reputation as lousy in the post season, Clemens actually performed better as the level of difficulty and pressure increased throughout his career. His E.R.A. declined from 4.8 in first round divisional games to 3.8 in second round championship games to a stingy 2.37 in the World Series. His strikeouts per game rose from 5.8 in first round games to 7.8 in second round games to 8.16 in six World Series games. His walks per game declined from 3.5 in first round divisional play to 2.9 in championship round games to 2.0 in the World Series. And Clemens never lost a World Series game. He was 4-4 in first round games, 5-4 in divisional championships, and 3-0 in the World Series.
Because Clemens never pitched a single no hitter or a perfect game his dominance over a generation is understated. In 9 of the 14 seasons in which he did not win the Cy Young Award he was either on the disabled list or pitched only partial seasons. To put it another way, when Roger Clemens was healthy and pitched a full season, or as they say in employment law, was "ready, willing, and able" to work, he won 7 Cy Young Awards in 15 years, an astonishing accomplishment.
He had the consistency of a Swiss clock. In 21 American League seasons his strikeout to walk ratio was 2.96 per game. In three National League seasons in Houston it was 2.97 per game. Clemens's ability to throw strikes was so regular, in fact, that in years 14-24 his number of walks per year was within a hundredth of a percent of what it had been in his first 13 years in Boston, 65.846 to 65.818.
Clemens achieved this consistency even though the ravages of age eventually affected his durability. In innings pitched and games completed he declined across the board in years 14-25. In his first 13 years in Boston, Clemens averaged 213.5 innings a year. In 11 seasons in Toronto, New York, and Houston his innings per year fell to 194.5, or almost an inning less in every game. In the first half of his career he averaged 7.7 complete games, compared to 1.6 complete games in the second half of his career.
Consistency, in fact, is the essence of baseball. It is a sport where you have to adjust mentally all the time. Nobody did it better than Roger Clemens. By the time he reached the Toronto Blue Jays in 1997 he worked with an expanded arsenal of pitches. His coach at Texas, the legendary Cliff Gustafson, said in 2011 that Clemens lost a little, but not much, from his fastball, until the very end of his 24 year career. It was the year that Clemens developed his most feared pitch, the one he was still able to get batters out with at age 50 in a Texas varsity alumni game, the split fingered fastball. But let Cal Ripken tell you about it.
"I remember the last few years he was with the Red Sox, and I don't know if he had some arm problems or what, his fastball came back a little bit to more of a hittable speed. So his control had to be more on. He couldn't rely on just rearing back and throwing the ball past you in the strike zone as regularly as he did before. Maybe he went through a little bit of a dead-arm period, maybe the innings he logged started to wear on him a little bit. I did notice in Boston toward the end, his fastball did come back a little bit to a normal range."
Ripken explained Clemens's basic arsenal. "He went high in the strike zone and with a breaking ball. Over time, he had a curveball that he threw every once in a while in the mid part of the plate. Then when he developed that split-fingered changeup, that was a really good pitch for him, midway through his career."
Yet David Magadan, who faced him both in college at Alabama, and later on several major league teams, dismissed the notion that Clemens was all fast ball when he was young. Magadan was the top college baseball player in 1983 and batted against Clemens in the College World Series. He had struck out only 6 times all year. Clemens struck him out twice.
"We were kind of expecting that he was going to have a good fastball," Magadan said. "It was the other stuff, the break of his breaking ball, the tight rotation of it, it's something that sticks in my mind. I remember he threw me a breaking ball and I swung through it. I can remember I thought to myself, I've never seen a breaking ball like that, that good. I can remember it like it was yesterday."
Magadan talked about facing Clemens at the Major League level. "A lot of times he got me out with the split. It wasn't a strikeout splitter; it was almost like a two-seamer that you hit off the end of the bat. Or a high, up-and-in fastball that jams you. He just got me out a lot of different ways. I usually had success against power pitchers. I liked guys who threw hard, but he wasn't like that. He was a power pitcher who could pitch and that's what made him tough."
Chipper Jones, probably headed to baseball's Hall of Fame, describes how Clemens pitched him. "He knows I'm a good fastball hitter. He knows that most times I'm sitting dead and red and he fed me a steady diet of off-speed stuff in the World Series. He wasn't going to let me hurt him and he didn't. He kept throwing me the split, but he kept throwing me the split for a strike. You have to respect the 94-95 miles per hour fastball because guys like me don't want to get beat with the fastball. He kept throwing me splits down in the zone and I kept beating them into the ground."
"He was less willing to challenge hitters, but he was still effective," Jones said. There was the split and the development of the cutter. The last couple of years, he's been a completely different pitcher. Obviously, he can still paint the 93, 94 on the outside corner, but he's developing a backdoor cutter, where if he falls behind in the count, he can paint that on the outside corner, which locks up a lot of hitters. Always in the back of your mind now, you better have that split. You have to make him throw it up in the zone. If it starts just above the knees, you're out."
Jones concluded, "He makes you work so hard during an at bat just to make contact, to put the ball in fair territory. If you get on base or get a base hit, you feel like you just hit a home run. At the end of the game, you're s o mentally drained because you're trying to think along with him, trying to work so hard to play a chess match with him. More times than not, he wins."
Julio Franco, who could still hit major league pitching in his 40s, observed, "One thing that separated him was that he wasn't scared. Your first time in the big leagues, you're scared even if you throw hard. But he was in command of his emotions on the mound."
"Every year you saw him, you could see the progress," Franco said. "Every time you saw him, he was walking the ladder. Every time you saw him, he was more dominating. He was more fearsome...This guy would make you uncomfortable at the plate. You knew you couldn't catch up to the fastball. Then when you were ready for the fastball, he'd throw you the curveball, so that there was no way you could see it. It was frustrating."
Franco describes seeing Clemens's split finger fastball for the first time in Toronto in 1997. "He was still throwing hard, but he got smarter. He lost 2 or 3 miles per hour off his fastball. His velocity was down. A smart pitcher like that has all this experience throwing fastballs 93, 94, he comes in with the split-finger that made him a better pitcher than he was before. He knew he couldn't rely as much on his fastball, but he had a good curveball and now the split-finger he can throw either way to righties or lefties. That's what baseball is all about, readjusting."
Franco last hit against Clemens in 1997. Ten years later, in 2007, Clemens's final season in the majors, he watched Clemens on television and analyzed what he saw. Read more ›
The book is especially pertinent because of the many false stories about Clemens invented and passed around in the years of the charges against him for enhancing his pitching by allegedly taking anabolic steroids and Human Growth Hormone. Those charges collapsed in a heap last year when he was acquitted for perjury in federal district court in Washington, D.C. Important factors in that acquittal were the testimony of his former catcher in Toronto, Charlie O'Brien, who testified under oath that Clemens was so honest that he would not even use scuffed baseballs, and of his manager in Houston, Phil Gardner, who explained Clemens's complex arsenal of pitches, including his deadly split finger fastball, developed in Toronto in 1997.
This testimony was in stark contrast to the myth that Roger Clemens was a power pitcher, a fastball or nothing guy, who declined by 1996 in Boston and was revived only by taking anabolic steroids in Toronto and New York between 1998 and 2001. In fact, Roger Clemens was a control pitcher from his earliest days, a kid with perfect command of the plate. He had no legitimate fastball until a defect in his pitching motion was discovered at San Jacinto Junior College and had no curve ball to speak of until a pitching coach at the University of Texas realized he did not hold the ball correctly.
Many baseball authorities consider Clemens the greatest pitcher in the 142 year history of the game. He won the Cy Young Award for best pitcher seven times, the most ever. He won 354 games and lost 184, a superlative winning percentage of .658. He ranks No. 3 in career strikeouts, with 4,672.
Contrary to his reputation as lousy in the post season, Clemens actually performed better as the level of difficulty and pressure increased throughout his career. His E.R.A. declined from 4.8 in first round divisional games to 3.8 in second round championship games to a stingy 2.37 in the World Series. His strikeouts per game rose from 5.8 in first round games to 7.8 in second round games to 8.16 in six World Series games. His walks per game declined from 3.5 in first round divisional play to 2.9 in championship round games to 2.0 in the World Series. And Clemens never lost a World Series game. He was 4-4 in first round games, 5-4 in divisional championships, and 3-0 in the World Series.
Because Clemens never pitched a single no hitter or a perfect game his dominance over a generation is understated. In 9 of the 14 seasons in which he did not win the Cy Young Award he was either on the disabled list or pitched only partial seasons. To put it another way, when Roger Clemens was healthy and pitched a full season, or as they say in employment law, was "ready, willing, and able" to work, he won 7 Cy Young Awards in 15 years, an astonishing accomplishment.
He had the consistency of a Swiss clock. In 21 American League seasons his strikeout to walk ratio was 2.96 per game. In three National League seasons in Houston it was 2.97 per game. Clemens's ability to throw strikes was so regular, in fact, that in years 14-24 his number of walks per year was within a hundredth of a percent of what it had been in his first 13 years in Boston, 65.846 to 65.818.
Clemens achieved this consistency even though the ravages of age eventually affected his durability. In innings pitched and games completed he declined across the board in years 14-25. In his first 13 years in Boston, Clemens averaged 213.5 innings a year. In 11 seasons in Toronto, New York, and Houston his innings per year fell to 194.5, or almost an inning less in every game. In the first half of his career he averaged 7.7 complete games, compared to 1.6 complete games in the second half of his career.
Consistency, in fact, is the essence of baseball. It is a sport where you have to adjust mentally all the time. Nobody did it better than Roger Clemens. By the time he reached the Toronto Blue Jays in 1997 he worked with an expanded arsenal of pitches. His coach at Texas, the legendary Cliff Gustafson, said in 2011 that Clemens lost a little, but not much, from his fastball, until the very end of his 24 year career. It was the year that Clemens developed his most feared pitch, the one he was still able to get batters out with at age 50 in a Texas varsity alumni game, the split fingered fastball. But let Cal Ripken tell you about it.
"I remember the last few years he was with the Red Sox, and I don't know if he had some arm problems or what, his fastball came back a little bit to more of a hittable speed. So his control had to be more on. He couldn't rely on just rearing back and throwing the ball past you in the strike zone as regularly as he did before. Maybe he went through a little bit of a dead-arm period, maybe the innings he logged started to wear on him a little bit. I did notice in Boston toward the end, his fastball did come back a little bit to a normal range."
Ripken explained Clemens's basic arsenal. "He went high in the strike zone and with a breaking ball. Over time, he had a curveball that he threw every once in a while in the mid part of the plate. Then when he developed that split-fingered changeup, that was a really good pitch for him, midway through his career."
Yet David Magadan, who faced him both in college at Alabama, and later on several major league teams, dismissed the notion that Clemens was all fast ball when he was young. Magadan was the top college baseball player in 1983 and batted against Clemens in the College World Series. He had struck out only 6 times all year. Clemens struck him out twice.
"We were kind of expecting that he was going to have a good fastball," Magadan said. "It was the other stuff, the break of his breaking ball, the tight rotation of it, it's something that sticks in my mind. I remember he threw me a breaking ball and I swung through it. I can remember I thought to myself, I've never seen a breaking ball like that, that good. I can remember it like it was yesterday."
Magadan talked about facing Clemens at the Major League level. "A lot of times he got me out with the split. It wasn't a strikeout splitter; it was almost like a two-seamer that you hit off the end of the bat. Or a high, up-and-in fastball that jams you. He just got me out a lot of different ways. I usually had success against power pitchers. I liked guys who threw hard, but he wasn't like that. He was a power pitcher who could pitch and that's what made him tough."
Chipper Jones, probably headed to baseball's Hall of Fame, describes how Clemens pitched him. "He knows I'm a good fastball hitter. He knows that most times I'm sitting dead and red and he fed me a steady diet of off-speed stuff in the World Series. He wasn't going to let me hurt him and he didn't. He kept throwing me the split, but he kept throwing me the split for a strike. You have to respect the 94-95 miles per hour fastball because guys like me don't want to get beat with the fastball. He kept throwing me splits down in the zone and I kept beating them into the ground."
"He was less willing to challenge hitters, but he was still effective," Jones said. There was the split and the development of the cutter. The last couple of years, he's been a completely different pitcher. Obviously, he can still paint the 93, 94 on the outside corner, but he's developing a backdoor cutter, where if he falls behind in the count, he can paint that on the outside corner, which locks up a lot of hitters. Always in the back of your mind now, you better have that split. You have to make him throw it up in the zone. If it starts just above the knees, you're out."
Jones concluded, "He makes you work so hard during an at bat just to make contact, to put the ball in fair territory. If you get on base or get a base hit, you feel like you just hit a home run. At the end of the game, you're s o mentally drained because you're trying to think along with him, trying to work so hard to play a chess match with him. More times than not, he wins."
Julio Franco, who could still hit major league pitching in his 40s, observed, "One thing that separated him was that he wasn't scared. Your first time in the big leagues, you're scared even if you throw hard. But he was in command of his emotions on the mound."
"Every year you saw him, you could see the progress," Franco said. "Every time you saw him, he was walking the ladder. Every time you saw him, he was more dominating. He was more fearsome...This guy would make you uncomfortable at the plate. You knew you couldn't catch up to the fastball. Then when you were ready for the fastball, he'd throw you the curveball, so that there was no way you could see it. It was frustrating."
Franco describes seeing Clemens's split finger fastball for the first time in Toronto in 1997. "He was still throwing hard, but he got smarter. He lost 2 or 3 miles per hour off his fastball. His velocity was down. A smart pitcher like that has all this experience throwing fastballs 93, 94, he comes in with the split-finger that made him a better pitcher than he was before. He knew he couldn't rely as much on his fastball, but he had a good curveball and now the split-finger he can throw either way to righties or lefties. That's what baseball is all about, readjusting."
Franco last hit against Clemens in 1997. Ten years later, in 2007, Clemens's final season in the majors, he watched Clemens on television and analyzed what he saw. Read more ›
By PatrickG
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
From reading the description, I expected this book to be focused heavily on insight from the hitters' perspectives regarding what it's like to step into the batter's box to face Roger Clemens. While there certainly was some of that, it seemed to focus much more on the opposing hitter and what sort of results he was able to achieve (or could not achieve) against Roger Clemens. Buy a cheaper used copy of this book and it will be worth your money.
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