I'm a Mets fan. I have no great love for Roger Clemens. Naturally I eagerly awaited this book, and bought it on day one. I had fond memories from Jeff Pearlman's expose about the '86 Mets (
Bad Guys Won, and his tell-all about Barry Bonds (
Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero).
For the most part, "Rocket" hits its points and hits them well. Clemens used steroids to milk an extra eight or nine years out of a career that was about to end naturally; Clemens lied to the media about nearly everything; Clemens choked in big games, usually by exiting playoff games several innings too early.
"Rocket" takes as its starting point Clemens' Peter Gammons-ghosted autobiography,
Rocket Man, printed after the 1986 Cy Young/MVP dream season. Come to find out, many items from Roger's self-described past never happened. There was no idyllic Texas childhood, not when Roger spent his first 13 or 14 years living in Dayton, Ohio. Clemens was neither drafted by the Minnesota Twins nor scouted for other professional sports.
For proof of Roger's bad character, Pearlman reportedly interviewed about 500 people. You'll need an encyclopedic baseball memory to remember who a lot of them were -- for instance, Mike Figga, a teammate for two games on the 1999 Yankees, or Pat Dodson, who hit .202 over three years with the Red Sox. Pearlman subscribes to what might be called the "little man" theory of history -- he interviews the back ends of the rosters of Clemens' various teams, to see how Roger treated those far, far beneath him on the superstar track.
The problem Pearlman runs into is that he goes after Clemens not just on the easy targets, but on the below-the-belt ones, too. It's not enough for him to prove that Clemens lied about Brian McNamee and Mindy McCready. He also derides Clemens' native intelligence and mocks his devotion to his mother. Finally, printing the entire current home address for Clemens' troubled older brother is something that I can't believe made it past Legal.
However, Pearlman has a breezy, sarcastic prose style that makes all his books fun to read. He also does his research. Most baseball biographies uncritically retell game anecdotes that, it turns out, never happened (check out
Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends: The Truth, the Lies, and Everything Else for a look at how easily such stories are disproved). Pearlman here relays a story from Rick Cerone that could not possibly have happened -- Cerone describes in suspiciously clear detail what happened the first time he caught Clemens in 1988. However, according to Retrosheet, the game really did happen that way. In every detail. Props to Pearlman for doing his homework, and extra mad props to Rick Cerone, just for being Rick Cerone.
Of course, at the same time Pearlman does uncritically relay a story Clemens told about his failed audition for Joe Torre and Bob Gibson, then of the 1981 New York Mets. I'd love to have seen that story debunked, but Pearlman just lets it sit there, presumably true. Say it ain't so!
