It's May 19th....

Please tell us this is a waste of time, Roger. I'm begging you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/sports/baseball/28yankees.html?ref=sports

Orioles 4, Yankees 0
A New Low for Clemens and the Yankees

By TYLER KEPNER
Published: June 28, 2007
BALTIMORE, June 27 — It feels like falling off a cliff, Joe Torre said Wednesday night after another loss, and the metaphor is appropriate. The Yankees had reached a high point before this trip, but suddenly they are plunging to depths never experienced in Torre’s 12 years as manager.

Roger Clemens allowed four runs, seven hits and three walks in six innings. He failed to strike out a batter for the first time in 200 starts.

The Baltimore Orioles, who were in such disarray that they fired their manager last week, throttled the Yankees’ offense for the second night in a row. The score was 4-0 on Wednesday, when Roger Clemens worked six innings and failed to strike out a batter for the first time in 200 starts.

Then again, Clemens could have pitched the game of his life and he still would not have won. The Yankees scratched out only two hits in seven innings against Erik Bedard and did not put a runner in scoring position until the ninth inning.

“I see this lineup,” Clemens said. “I know they can play and they can hit. Just like Andy and I have talked about, we are used to that.”

Clemens and Andy Pettitte spent the past three seasons in Houston, helping carry an Astros team that often struggled to score. They had reason to believe the Yankees’ hitters would treat them better, but this offense lacks punch, too.

The Yankees scored five runs in three losses last week in Colorado. After a victory on Friday in San Francisco, they left 16 runners on base in a loss on Saturday. In their past three games, they have scored four runs.

In all, the Yankees are 1-7 on this trip, and 36-39 over all. Torre canceled batting practice for Thursday, and signs in the clubhouse told the players they did not have to report until 6 p.m., about an hour before game time.

The last time Torre did that, in Toronto on May 30, the Yankees began a 14-3 stretch that seemed to vault them into playoff contention. They can only hope for similar results.

“We’re going to try to get that formula back that we had north of the border,” Torre said. “I don’t know what it’s going to do. It’s just something different.”

The Yankees praised Bedard, who has a 2.10 earned run average since the end of April and struck out eight, including the first four hitters he faced. He worked in and out and complemented a hard fastball with a biting curve.

But there was also a sense that this was not just about the dominance of a blossoming left-hander. This was about the steady breakdown of a big-name offense. Torre said the hitters “have to be tougher outs,” and his players agreed.

“We couldn’t even create any opportunities,” Hideki Matsui said through an interpreter. “A game like that, I would think it’s the offense that just didn’t do the job.”

A night after Pettitte cautiously questioned whether teammates cared as much as he did, Torre wondered aloud if the hitters were showing enough fight. He said the mood on the bench was feisty, but the players’ confidence was shaken.

“We just need to fight our way out of it,” Torre said. “We can’t go out there on our heels.”

In a way, Torre seemed to be defending Clemens, who is 1-3 with a 5.42 E.R.A. in his four starts. Asked about the lack of strikeouts, Torre admitted it was odd but said that, in the 97-degree heat, Clemens was mainly pitching to contact to conserve his energy.

But Clemens frequently fell behind in counts, and the Orioles swung and missed at only 4 of his 93 pitches. He pumped his fist twice and slapped his thigh, Tug McGraw-style, after retiring Brian Roberts on a grounder to end the fifth with two runners on. But the shutout disappeared in the sixth.

On his first pitch of the inning, Clemens said, he overextended his arm as he threw the ball and stepped in a hole on the mound. (Torre said Clemens hit his knee with his elbow.) A trainer visited Clemens but Torre did not, and Clemens said later, “It’s not even worth talking about.”

Still, by the time Clemens got his next out, he was losing, 4-0. Chris Gomez singled, Nick Markakis walked, and Ramón Hernández drove in a run with a hard chopper through the middle.

That brought up Aubrey Huff, who had gone 143 at-bats without a homer, the longest stretch of his career. The count went to 1-1, and catcher Jorge Posada shifted his feet to the left, setting up a target on the outside corner.

Instead, Clemens left a 90-mile-an-hour fastball over the middle, and Huff pounded it on a line to left-center. It traveled an estimated distance of just 368 feet, but it made it to the first row of seats for a three-run homer that broke the game open.

“You’re aggressive in that situation,” Clemens said. “You don’t run from that situation. You stay aggressive, and Aubrey got a ball with some backspin on it and shot it out of here.”

Clemens got out of the inning, but he was through for the night, and Brian Bruney worked a scoreless seventh. Mariano Rivera pitched the eighth, staying sharp for the day he will be called in to protect a lead, a day the Yankees are desperate to see.

INSIDE PITCH

Roger Clemens had gone 200 starts with at least one strikeout, dating to a 2000 start for the Yankees when he left after one inning with a groin injury. But he had gone 600 starts since his last one of at least six innings with no strikeouts. That came July 21, 1987, for Boston, when he shut out the Angels on five hits.

 

"THE GREATEST MOMENT IN YANKEE HISTORY!!!!!!!!!"

 

http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/b...th_28m_pact_roger_has_started_somethin-3.html

With $28M pact, Roger has started something he can't finish

BALTIMORE - The problem here is that Roger Clemens did this to himself. Respectable isn't good enough because of the price tag he may as well have had sewn to his uniform when he squeezed the Yankees for every last dollar of that ridiculous contract they were desperate enough to give him.

He was never going to live up to it, not back in the American League at 44 years old, soon to be 45. And now he begins to pay for it.

After all, Clemens gave the Yankees a solid start last night, going five scoreless innings before the Orioles got to him in the sixth for the four runs that gave them a 4-0 victory.

He may have escaped with considerably less damage, too, if not for the cozy dimensions at Camden Yards that turned an opposite-field fly ball from Aubrey Huff into a three-run home run.

Throw in the fact that the pressure was mounting with every inning, as the Yankees looked helpless against Erik Bedard, and you could make a case for Clemens being a hard-luck story last night.

Just not at $1 million or so a start.

Sorry, Roger. You took the money, you get what comes with it.

Never mind free enterprise and all of that. You've made enough money to keep generations of Clemenses in burnt-orange Hummers for centuries to come. You didn't have to insist on a prorated $28 million to put the pinstripes on again.

Clemens was never going to be a savior for this club. He is what he is, a six-inning pitcher who is showing his age more than ever, with a fastball that has lost some pop even from last year.

If you needed proof of that, here it was as he failed to record a strikeout in a start for the first time since he lasted only an inning seven years ago against the Red Sox.

Still, this was a night when the Yankees needed a gem to stop yet another free-fall, and the contract says Clemens ought to be able to deliver, especially during times of crisis.

He didn't run from such responsibility, saying, "It's my fault. When the guys are scuffling, you're supposed to get it done."

Accountability doesn't help the Yankees right now, however. The way they're going, they look like they'll need a miracle of some sort to win the wild-card race, never mind catch the Red Sox.

In fact, as the Yankees sink back to their pre-winning streak level of bad baseball and empty at-bats, you have to think now those nine straight games they won a couple of weeks ago were largely the result of playing the White Sox, Pirates and Diamondbacks.

Yes, they beat the Red Sox four out of six, but they needed Alex Rodriguez's heroic home run against Jonathan Papelbon and some friendly floaters from knuckleballer Tim Wakefield to make that happen.

And they happened to catch the Mets in a confidence crisis of their own in taking two of three in the second half of the Subway Series.

Now the Yanks have lost seven of eight games against three sub-.500 teams on a road trip that may be determined as the cause of death when the autopsy is performed sometime in the coming months.

Even Joe Torre sounds alarmed - or at least as alarmed as he ever sounds.

"The puzzling part is that we just fell off a cliff," he said last night, "after we felt we were in gear."

Perhaps even more telling, even though Torre has pulled his team out of similar funks in each of the last two seasons, he admitted this feels different.

"This is the toughest time," he said.

The obvious problem is offense, as the Yankees have now scored 14 runs in the seven losses on this road trip, and Bobby Abreu, Robinson Cano and Hideki Matsui have returned to their early-season woes.

The bullpen is the other huge problem, one with no obvious answers. All of which means that Clemens, even at 1-3 with a 5.32 ERA, is way down the list in terms of causes for concern.

As Torre said, speaking of the Yankees starters, "We're certainly pitching well enough to win."

Still, the fact that Clemens is hovering around 90 mph with his fastball has to be worrisome to the Yankees. He said he'd gain velocity as he continued to pitch, but he's made four starts now, and he surely had to feel loose on a night when the game-time temperature was 97 degrees.

On the other hand, when his splitter is sharp and his fastball is hitting 90, Clemens has enough to win. He's just not the dominant Rocket of old.

All of which means that if The Rocket had come back after three years in Houston at a discount price because he felt the tug of some old friends in need of help, his effort last night in stifling heat might be labeled gutsy.

Not now. He raised the stakes by taking the money. Respectable isn't good enough.

 

what took you so long?? i've been dreading this for about a month now!

 

Yeah, I just had a bad feeling as of about a month or so ago.

My older boy really likes the Sox a lot. But for his brief life they've been good and haven't been disappointing. He's kinda waking up now to the whole identity of the Boston Red Sox.