We were in for a shock. Clemens signed with the Toronto Blue Jays and won his first 11 games. I hustled up there to figure out how we all could have been so wrong. The Clemens I encountered was almost unrecognizable. He was Stallone-buff, and he once again possessed a 97mph fastball. He credited a fierce work ethic that he insisted he had maintained in Boston, too—“the 7 a.m. runs, the long workouts that you folks don’t see before I even get to the ballpark.” It was the start of a rejuvenated career that would establish him as the greatest pitcher of the modern era.
But last week, after a 21-month investigation into drug use in baseball, former senator George Mitchell offered an alternative explanation: in his report to Major League Baseball, he labeled Clemens a drug cheat who took steroids in Toronto and later for the New York Yankees. If true, Clemens’s career becomes every bit as asterisk-worthy as that of Barry Bonds, baseball’s career home-run king, who was also fingered in the report. Indeed, Clemens and Bonds, the pitcher and hitter who defied Father Time, may now stand together as the enduring symbols of the game’s disgrace.
Clemens’s attorney, Rusty Hardin, said in a statement that the pitcher is left without recourse against “what he strongly contends are totally false allegations.” Baseball, Mitchell said, needs to get away from its past to progress to a better future. But his report seems destined to keep us mired in that messy past for a while to come—with Clemens smack in the middle of it. The case against him, based largely on one trainer’s account, probably wouldn’t stand up in court. But in the court of public opinion, it could bring a life sentence.
