NEW YORK. Concerned by the failure of their young pitchers to deliver this spring, New York Yankees' manager Joe Girardi and pitching coach Dave Eiland have agreed on a novel therapy--romantic liaisons with teenage country singers of the sort that fueled the Hall of Fame career of hard-throwing right-hander Roger Clemens.
Mindy McCready: Guaranteed to lower your ERA
"We checked with the Elias Sports Bureau," said Eiland, whose young ace Phil Hughes is 0-4 on the season with a 9.00 earned run average. "They have confirmed that an affair with a teenage country singer increases a pitcher's ground-ball outs and first-pitch strikes, so we're gonna go with that."
Clemens: "I know where you live, and I'm comin' after your Shania Twain CD's!"
Clemens, a seven-time Cy Young Award winner, allegedly began an illicit sexual relationship with country singer Mindy McCready when he was 28 and she was 15. McCready is a country singer whose biggest hit was "Guys Do It All the Time", which Clemens interpreted as an overture upon hearing it on the clubhouse stereo system after a game against the Texas Rangers in 1996.
McCready: "Okay, let's get your running in, then some long toss, then a glass of white zinfandel with Mindy."
Clemens had been declared to be in the "twilight of his career" by then-Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette at the end of the season, but he went on to win 162 games with the Toronto Blue Jays, the Yankees and the Houston Astros. "I may have confused 'twilight' with 'dawn' or maybe 'high noon'," Duquette later explained.
LONDON. Amy Winehouse, the neo-soul singer whose drug habit plays a prominent role in both her life and her work, today urged seven-time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens to enter rehab, saying it was his only hope to turn his life around.
Winehouse: "Exercise is like really important."
"People think I don't care about sports, and I don't," Winehouse said by telephone from her home in London, where she was caught on film yesterday snorting cocaine, smoking crack, and sticking Mike 'n' Ike candies up her nose. "I know what it's like to have your innocent recreational drug use exposed to the white hot glare of tabloid journalism."
Mike 'n' Ike: If you can't resist, snort 'em, don't shoot 'em.
Clemens was named 82 times in the Mitchell Report, the document that memorializes the investigation conducted by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell into steroid use in major league baseball. Former New York Yankees trainer Brian McNamee claims he injected Clemens with Winstrol, an allegation that Rusty Hardin, the pitcher's attorney, denies. "Roger never used Winstrol," Hardin said. "He smoked Parliament Lights at the end of his career, and Camel Filters in the box when he was just starting out."
"Who's the skank?"
Winehouse's biggest hit is "Rehab", in which she recounts her resistance to drug rehabilitation. Clemens's biggest hit remains a 1986 game against the Seattle Mariners in which he struck out 20 batters in a nine-inning game while pitching for the Boston Red Sox. Mitchell's greatest hit is the saying "I like blankies too much," which he has used to defuse tension at the Iran-Contra Committee hearings, the Northern Ireland peace talks, and Bud Selig's Friday night polka soirees.
COLUMBUS, Ohio. Twelve year-old Robbie Bennett has been a star for every baseball team he's ever been on, from T-ball to "Dad Pitch" to Little League. A pitcher, Robbie's walls are plastered with posters of Roger Clemens in the uniforms of the four major league clubs the seven-time Cy Young Award winner has played for. "He was my hero," Robbie sniffles. "Now I think he's a stupid Froot Loop," he says as he throws himself on his bed and sobs into his pillow.
Roger Clemens
The reason for Robbie's tears is the revelation by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell that Clemens received shots of anabolic steroids in the buttocks to maintain his overpowering physique and become perhaps the greatest starting pitcher in baseball history.
"I thought I could stay fat like Clemens just by eating Twinkies and French fries," Robbie says when he is asked why he's crying. "Now I find out I have to get shots in the butt."
Eric Gagne
For young Timmy Merlino, the announcement that his idol Eric Gagne had signed with the Milwaukee Brewers was the best news he'd heard in a long time. "He was the first autograph I ever got," Timmy says as he looks down at a plastic-wrapped baseball card of Gagne while with the Dodgers that bears the fireballing right-hander's signature.
But that trophy is tarnished now that it has been revealed Gagne took human growth hormone. "It appears," said Mitchell at yesterday's press conference, "that Eric Gagne's record-breaking string of blown saves in the summer of 2007 was fueled by illegal drugs."
George Mitchell
Young fans are baseball's future, and major league executives expressed fear that yesterday's revelations could depress attendance for years to come. "Once kids hear about the drugs, they'll want to stay home and smoke dope instead of coming out to the games," predicted Bob Hohler, Director of Baseball Operations for the Houston Astros. "Unless they're Cubs fans, in which case they'll come out to the park and get high."
Greater than any economic effect is the loss of innocence, as children begin to see players such as Josias Manzanillo, Kent Mercker and Steve Woodward, all former members of the Boston Red Sox, as something less than the immortals they were considered in their playing days. "You mean to tell me," says Bobby Hammond of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, "that I could take performance-enhancing drugs for years and still suck?"
ALAMEDA, California. HomeQuest Financial, a subprime lender that has been cited for loan and foreclosure abuses in a number of states, today announced that it would set up a charitable fund tied to individual performances in baseball's postseason play as a way to give back to homeowners who have suffered during the current housing market collapse.
"There's the hammer, it's going--going--gone!"
"We realize in retrospect that maybe we could have done things just a teensy bit differently," says HomeQuest CEO Martin Upchurch. "If we had known people weren't going to repay our loans, we would have charged them bigger fees upfront."
Don Larsen's World Series no-hitter.
Under the program, HomeQuest will donate $100 for every balk, $200 for every batter who hits for the cycle, and $300 for each no-hitter thrown during the post-season, beginning with today's NL Wildcard playoff game between Colorado and San Diego and ending with the final out of the World Series.
"Peavey's got a no-no going into the 8th. Don't jinx it by saying anything."
"It's a way for us to say 'Thank you' to all of those familes who vacated their over-leveraged houses peaceably so we didn't have to resort to extreme measures," Upchurch says. "We really appreciate it when we don't have to rent German Shepherds to secure our properties."
"That wasn't a balk. Clemens started to pitch, then got bored and went home to Houston."
But, a reporter asks, balks, no-hitters and hitting for the cycle are extremely rare events, meaning that HomeQuest's exposure is minimal at best. Does Upchurch really expect the dispossessed to benefit much from a program that is so narrowly tailored?
"Talk to the people in marketing," he says. "I'm more of a big picture guy."
Boston Herald: Sox Hope to Lure Clemens Back to Boston With Slick Video
HOUSTON. Free agent pitcher Roger Clemens today rejected an overture to rejoin the Boston Red Sox, the team he began his career with, despite an expensive video presentation ordered up by Tom Werner, the Hollywood producer who is the team's chairman.
"They must think just because I'm from Texas I'm some kind of rube," Clemens said. "That was one cheesy film they put together." Clemens criticized the screenplay, which imagines the six-time Cy Young Award winner returning to Boston in a gauzy, sentimental story line reminiscent of "Lassie Come Home," as well as Werner's directorial style.
"He didn't give the actors any room. It had a very tight, scripted feel to it," Clemens said. "Also, what's up with the voice-over narration? Who was that supposed to be? Oliver Wendell Holmes' 'brooding omnipresence'?"
The film, entitled "Rocket Come Home," won praise from the high-brow French film magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema. "I do not know why zee Rocket ees so peesed off," said reviewer Jean-Claude Stendahl. "He ees portrayed verry seempathetically, even when he has un cramp du brain and throws le bat at Mike Piazza."
Sox officials fell back on a tried and true marketing lure for Boston when they heard that Clemens was unmoved by the film, boasting about the region's many prestigious colleges and universities. "Big deal," was Clemens' reply. "Every winter when the Charles River freezes some genius from MIT drowns trying to walk across on the ice. How smart is that?"
Clemens, whose children are named "Koby", "Kory", "Kacy" and "Kody", said he might consider a return to Boston if the region would accommodate his love affair with the letter "K", the baseball scorekeeping symbol for a strikeout. "If the Governor of Massachusetts changed his name from Mitt to 'Kitt' Romney, maybe I'd think about it."
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
