The Rocket Concedes Nothing

Emerging, finally, from an exit at Yankee Stadium, Roger Clemens strode into the last hour of golden daylight last Saturday. He wore black slacks, a royal blue dress shirt and a fresh pruning from the team barber. Down below, in a corridor outside the Yankees' clubhouse, a handful of yellow-shirted security guards were able to smile at last. One of them clicked open a pen and ran a line of black ink through clemens on a sheet of paper listing all of the New York players. Clemens's name, again, was the last to be crossed out, some two hours after the Yankees' 11-8 win over the Mets had ended. Only now could the guards go home.

The same scene had unspooled the previous night: Clemens left well after midnight, having pitched with a ditchdigger's ethic into the seventh inning against the Mets before working with sons Kacy, 12, and Kody, 11, in the indoor batting cage. Saturday's postgame included two hours of hot and cold treatments on his legs, followed, after he left the stadium, by dinner and then a postdinner weightlifting session. Before the series finale on Sunday he put in extra work on fielding comebackers, throwing to bases and hitting.

By now, his fourth season since he prematurely announced his retirement at the 2003 World Series, it's obvious that Clemens is in no hurry to leave baseball and that he plays the game on his terms. Those terms, of course, include his generous contract, which will fetch him roughly $17.4 million to make about 22 starts for the Yankees, and allow him, as he did the previous three years with the Houston Astros, to leave the team between starts. (It should be noted, however, that Clemens has told Yankees officials his absences will be infrequent. Since he was added to the roster on June 9, he has yet to leave the team and planned to make the entire nine-game swing through Colorado, San Francisco and Baltimore that began on Tuesday.)

And though six weeks from turning 45, with leg muscles that twang like steel guitar strings and a limited cache of high-caliber fastballs, Clemens still brings the sensibilities of a dictator to his job. More than ever, the pitcher is a control freak. "Hey, if I know I'm out there for 15 pitches and I need to light up the radar gun, I'll light it up for you," Clemens says, "but I want to be out there for seven, eight innings and 110 pitches. The best line I can give you, and Jorge [Posada] and I talk about it, is when we come out of that bullpen we look each other in the eye and say, 'We're going to play our game, and if we're forced to change, then we'll make adjustments.' And you make them on the run. And that's if [hitters] force you to change. And that takes a lot. I'm pretty hardheaded."

Not once in the 216 pitches that Clemens threw in his first two starts back with the Yankees did the Rocket's heat exceed 92 mph. His four-seam fastball sits in the 89-to-91 range, his two-seamer a tick or two below that. Armed, however, with a vicious split-fingered fastball that's as good as ever and the aforementioned hardheadedness-- Clemens is a staunch power pitcher the way Strom Thurmond remained a staunch conservative to the grave-- Clemens concedes nothing. Whatever velocity he may have lost since his prime years is compensated for with conviction and command.

Take, for instance, the first inning last Friday, which Yankees manager Joe Torre called, "vintage Roger." The Mets put runners at first and second with no outs for the 3-4-5 hitters: David Wright, Carlos Delgado and Paul Lo Duca. Seventeen pitches later, none of which topped 91 mph or left the infield, Clemens got through it unscathed. He jammed Wright on a four-seamer for a fielder's choice; whiffed Delgado on a splitter and dismissed Lo Duca with a two-seamer, inducing another ground ball. In each case he went to two or three balls on the hitter before finishing the at bat.

Clemens lasted one out into the seventh inning while allowing two runs and striking out eight, but he still lost, 2-0, because Mets starter Oliver Perez was even better. It was the first time in seven years that Clemens lost a game in which he had allowed no more than two earned runs while striking out at least eight. He had been 28-0 in his last 40 such games and 142-17 over his career.

The Yankees had rolled out 11 starting pitchers (including five who made their major league debuts) while going 21-29, the sixth-worst 50-game start in the franchise's 107-year history. Clemens, even at 44, offers a known quantity for the Yankees, who, by week's end, had climbed to 35-32. He rarely allows his team to fall out of a game, a navigational ability that seems, in fact, to be improving with age.

Since 2005, for example, Clemens has allowed three earned runs or fewer in 89% of his starts (47 of 53). Few pitchers, regardless of age, are better at executing must-have pitches than Clemens. From his rookie year in 1984 through '02, the season during which he turned 40, Clemens held hitters to a .218 average with runners in scoring position. Since then, he has held hitters in 618 such at bats to a .170 mark, the lowest in the game (minimum: 300 at bats).

"If there's anything I can tell young pitchers," Clemens says, "it is to understand that when you get up in the morning and you're taking your shower and you're pitching that night, you know you're probably going to have second and third with one out, and you're going to have to get out of it. I mean that's what you do. We're paid to pitch out of it.