A few weeks ago, after his (well-paid), disastrous finale against the Indians, The Rocket trudged off the mound and virtually all of us knew he was destined for the Hall of Fame. Now, look at this brilliant assessment from Boswell at Wash Post link
An excerpt:
"Now, Roger Clemens joins Barry Bonds in baseball's version of hell. It's a slow burn that lasts a lifetime, then, after death, lingers as long as the game is played and tongues can wag. In baseball, a man's triumphs and his sins are immortal. The pursuit of one often leads to the other. And those misdeeds are seldom as dark as their endless punishment.
Shoeless Joe Jackson, an illiterate outfielder who hit like a demon in the 1919 World Series, but neglected to blow the whistle on his crooked teammates, died with his good name as black as their Sox. Pete Rose, who bet on his team, but never against it, finally confessed. It could be good for his soul, and buys him dinner at my house any night, but may never get him into Cooperstown. Now, they have company: two giants of our time, just as humbled, though no less tarnished."
1 comment:
While I recognize that Boswell is paid to write columns, mostly about baseball, so he had to write something, I think we should all take a deep breath, and let this sink in for a few days. I haven't read the report yet, much less had a chance to digest it. (And I say this as someone who has long pointed out that Clemens was being lionized while Bonds was being demonized, and if you looked at photos, they had both gone through the same sort of physical transformation.) But what do we know about Clemens' accuser?
I agree that we will look at some players and their records differently in the future. However, this is not at all like the Black Sox or Pete Rose. In this story, players did some illegal things to make themselves better players, which is the exact opposite of the Black Sox, where some players agreed to not put forth their best effort, and at least one player knew about it and did nothing. Rose put himself in a position where he could cause his team to lose a game, and he personally could illegally benefit from that.
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