1. Welcome to SportsJournalists.com, a friendly forum for discussing all things sports and journalism.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register for a free account to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Access to private conversations with other members.
    • Fewer ads.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Verducci On Clemens

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Boom_70, Feb 23, 2008.

  1. jaredk

    jaredk Member

    What's Verducci doing "training with" Clemens?

    Be the guy's buddy in sweat. Or be a reporter doing your freakin' job. You can't be both. SI should have told Verducci he's never writing another word about Clemens.

    It's sad that a sportswriter as bright and observant as Verducci can get all giddy about a Clemens workout, as others have done on the Bonds and McGwire regimens. Haven't we learned that steroids help you work out beyond ordinary human limits? That they shorten the down time between workouts by healing muscle more quickly? Instead of citing extraordinary workouts as the cause of prolonged athleticism, they should be cited as evidence of probable steroid use.
     
  2. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    jared, You see no value in a story about going through a workout with Clemens? How many writers could pull that off physically? Should Verducci not have done his five days of spring training with the Blue Jays story either? ... even though he can pull it off authentically with more credibility than 99 percent of writers and he has the ability to bring home the experience for readers?
     
  3. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    Dead on JaredK. I find it interesting that in original SI story Verducci makes no mention of the fact that he worked out with Clemens.
     
  4. jgmacg

    jgmacg Guest

    Which "original" story? The one after the Mitchell Report?
     
  5. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    This story which ran in SI
    t's All About The Power;

    In his final season, Roger Clemens stalks his landmark 300th win by making certain that his 40-year-old body can still bring the heat

    BYLINE: Tom Verducci

    SECTION: BASEBALL; Pg. 70

    LENGTH: 5194 words




    The hard rectangular case is black, with silver steel
    reinforcements at its edges and a silver steel handle on top. It
    is the size of a small suitcase. It stands, seemingly obedient,
    at home and away, day and night, at the foot of the locker of New
    York Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens. Stenciled in large white
    figures on the side is the code E-22. On each corner are smaller
    letters, also stenciled in white: M.I.B.

    For four days the case remains shut, serving as an occasional
    table on which to rest mail, a bottle of water, a baseball cap or
    some other accoutrement of the mostly mundane life of a starting
    pitcher. Everything changes on the fifth day. This is Clemens's
    day to pitch. Like a soldier wearing camouflage paint into
    combat, he sports two days of prickly stubble on his face. He
    puts on his number 22 game jersey, which he does only on days
    that he pitches. The jersey is kept under lock and key the rest
    of the year.

    Clack-clack! Clemens throws open the metal clasps to the case.
    "Everybody look away!" he says. "You'll get blinded! Y'all
    hitters, you'll forget everything you know about hittin' if you
    look in."

    He sets the case down on its side and pulls it open. What's
    inside? Opponents want to know. "Do me a favor," Texas Rangers
    shortstop Alex Rodriguez tells a reporter. "Ask him what drives
    him."

    Teammates also want to know. "There's got to be something in his
    inner being," says centerfielder Bernie Williams, who recently
    asked him how he maintained his intensity throughout two decades
    in the majors. "There's got to be something driving him that's
    bigger than the game itself."

    What's inside a man who turns 41 in two months and who after more
    than 60,000 pitches still can throw a baseball with a ferocity
    that even 95 mph fails pitifully to measure? What's inside the
    greatest pitcher alive? Blasphemy be damned: Maybe his career has
    been better than those of the dead, too--the communion of diamond
    saints who never knew integration or the shock-and-awe slugging
    of today's players.

    Clemens's next win will be the 300th of his career, a milestone
    that only 20 other men have reached. One of them, Tom Seaver,
    once said he was proudest that he could have finished his career
    with a 100-game losing streak and still have a winning record.
    Seaver was 106 games over .500. Clemens (299-154) is 145 games
    over .500, better than every 300-game winner but six, all of whom
    have been dead for more than a quarter century: Cy Young, Christy
    Mathewson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Kid Nichols, John Clarkson
    and Lefty Grove. Clemens's .660 winning percentage is better than
    that of every 300-game winner except the long-departed Mathewson
    and Grove. His relative ERA, which measures a pitcher against his
    league while considering ballpark factors, is better than those
    of all 300-game winners except Grove and Walter Johnson.

    Clemens's greatest accomplishment, however, is that he is leaving
    the game exactly as he entered it 19 seasons ago. More than 4,000
    innings after his first throw, he remains the consummate power
    pitcher. He is Dick Clark with a nasty heater. "It's not fair,"
    Mike Borzello, the Yankees' bullpen catcher, tells Clemens.

    "What?" Clemens says.

    "When you leave, you should be able to give your stuff to
    somebody else."

    The Upper East Side of Manhattan on a Thursday morning is a good
    place to begin to understand what's inside a man Hollywood would
    call a stock Texan. Raw, rainy and bleak, its blacktop shimmering
    wet under a low ceiling of gunmetal gray clouds, this is the New
    York of antique-silver gelatin prints. The weather is perfect for
    cabbies, awful for nannies pushing plastic-hooded strollers and
    of no consequence whatever to aging aces with the stuff young
    pitchers dream about.

    Clemens has gotten his 299th win by beating the Red Sox 4-2 in
    Boston the previous night. The last of his 100 pitches was a
    dive-bombing 89-mph splitter to strike out Doug Mirabelli with
    the tie-breaking run at third base in the sixth inning. That was
    four pitches after Clemens took a line drive off the back of his
    pitching hand that ripped the skin off a knuckle, turned his
    middle finger numb and made the hand swell. Not once did Clemens
    rub or examine the back of the hand, which already sported a
    month-old burn mark from an iron. ("What can I say? I'm
    domesticated," he says.)
     
  6. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    Verducci had no problem asking questions about Barry Bonds:

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  7. armageddon

    armageddon Active Member

    Boom: I'm several years older than Raja and that description is close to home for me.

    Well, my fastball is a lot s-l-o-w-e-r. ;D

    Other than the heater I could make similar statements about my conditioning and I've never used anything -- ever.

    If Verducci asks the question, Raja says: No, I've never used anything.

    How far you want the guy to push it, if he has no evidence?

    And as another poster noted, trying to do his workout or that of any athlete is a GREAT idea for a story.
     
  8. broadway joe

    broadway joe Guest

    I'm with Boom here. I don't understand how someone who wrote as extensively about the steroid and HGH problem as Verducci did could turn around and gush over Clemens' work ethic and training regimen without ever addressing the elephant sitting in the middle of the room. I want to know if he ever asked Clemens the obvious questions, and if not, why not? Somewhere, whether it's in the magazine or an online column or a mailbag, this is a glaring hole in his work that he ought to address.
     
  9. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    At a time when there was speculation about many MLB players it certainly would have been appropriate to at least raise the question with Clemens.
     
  10. BYH

    BYH Active Member

    The question was asked of Barry. He always said no.

    People, including Verducci, kept pushing it.

    Yet he took Roger at his word, and continues to write about the story without wondering if he was fooled.

    So many other writers have wondered if they were fooled, and none of them had the access or platform Verducci had (and has). Disappointing that he will not put himself thru the same self-analysis he asks of Selig, et al.
     
  11. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    Verducci is looking like the the Judith Miller of the steroid scandal.
     
  12. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    People didn't keep "pushing it" with Bonds and not with Clemens because of their hatred of Bonds and a willingness to give Clemens a free pass (Clemens isn't really all that beloved by anyone). There was nothing tangible suggesting that Clemens used. Bonds, on the other hand, had a home run record that put a veiled suspicion over him--at the time, steroids were still associated with power hitting way more than with pitching; remember the surprise when pitchers started to get busted after testing began?--and then he had Balco, followed by Game of Shadows, which is when the "pushing it" really ramped up. Absent of anything tangible, though, you can't keep hounding someone about your guesses about their steroid use. Remember the outrage when Rick Reilly asked Sammy Sosa to pee in a cup? Everyone knew Sosa was using, but there was no Balco or Mitchell Report to give justification for pointing a finger at him.

    You are holding Verducci to an unfair standard. Verducci was relatively close to Clemens--in a writer/player sort of way. But it wasn't like he had Clemens under 24-hour surveilance, or should have, and should have known every illicit activity Clemens was up to. You can't be expected to know what a guy is doing in private and lying about. Of course Verducci shouldn't be held to the same standard as Roger Clemens or Bud Selig. Clemens is the only one responsible for his actions. And Verducci isn't the commissioner of baseball. He's an outsider who writes about baseball. He can only fairly write about what he knows. We knew about Balco when SI did that Bonds/asterisk cover that Boom posted as some sort of proof of a double standard. No one had any knowledge of Clemens using until the Mitchell Report came out, though. If they had done a Clemens/asterisk type of cover without the Balco or Mitchell Report evidence, the same people criticizing writers like Verducci right now would have been calling for a libel suit.
     
Draft saved Draft deleted

Share This Page