The golden age of Roger Clemens

HOUSTON -- To grasp the magnitude of Roger Clemens's homecoming, Houston Astros owner Drayton McLane tells this story about the biggest Texas baseball legend of them all, Nolan Ryan.

''We were here not long ago for the 80th birthday for `41,' former President Bush," said the folksy McLane, keeping an eye on the television in a function room in Minute Maid Park while his team played outside. ''There were 40 great athletes in this room. The president came in, 41's son, and guess who he walked up to? He walked up to Nolan. He is by far the most popular person in Houston.

''He's what Texans are all about. Tough, played 27 years, strikeouts. That's what they love."

They love Clemens, too, even though he spent the first 20 seasons of his career pitching in distant outposts -- Boston for 13 years, Toronto, then New York -- before being wooed out of retirement by McLane and the Astros.

And on Tuesday night, Clemens can expect a rousing reception as the likely starting pitcher for the National League in the 2004 All-Star Game in Houston. ''He's home, he's a Texan, and Texans love their own," McLane said. With his 42d birthday just weeks away, it is a fitting tribute for Clemens, who has earned the start with his performance on the field this season.

He took the mound yesterday in Los Angeles seeking his 11th win, which would tie him for the league lead, against just two defeats. His earned run average, the leading barometer of a pitcher's effectiveness, was 2.62, fifth lowest in the league, and his strikeout total of 121 was fourth best. Opposing batters were hitting just .215 against him.

``We knew he wasn't over the hill," said Astros manager Jimy Williams, denied the opportunity to manage Clemens during his tour in Boston when the club allowed Clemens to leave as a free agent, less than a month after Williams was hired in November 1996. ``You never know what you're going to get with anybody, much less him, but he has been outstanding, he really has.

``He still has what I call a lot of youthful exuberance in his voice. He's been a lot of fun to be around."

How much has Clemens been embraced by his new team? In addition to the suite Clemens was given for his wife, Debbie, and their four sons - Koby (17), Kory (16), Kacy (9), and Kody (8) - the Astros gave him a block of seats behind home plate, which on many nights he gives to friends or his charitable foundation. The previous occupants?

``Those seats used to belong to Kenneth Lay," said John Sorrentino, the Astros' vice president of ticket sales and services, dropping the name of the recently indicted chief of the bankrupt energy company Enron, which was forced to give up its naming rights to the ballpark. ``I'd held them for two years, waiting for the right person."

Unfinished business

When he walked off the mound last October in Game 4 of the World Series, as cameras flashed throughout Pro Player Stadium and the players from both teams, his New York Yankees and the Florida Marlins, ascended to the top of their dugouts to applaud, Clemens truly believed his career was over. He had his World Series rings, won in 1999 and 2000 with the Yankees. He had 310 victories, exceeded by only a handful of pitchers, all in baseball's Hall of Fame, and 4,099 strikeouts, leaving him third on the all-time list.

He had been voted winner of the American League's Cy Young Award an unprecedented six times as the league's best pitcher. His place in history as one of the game's greatest had long been assured.

"There were tears in my eyes when I came off the mound in Game 4," he said here last week, sitting on top of the bench in the home dugout. "That was sincere."

That night, Clemens was "99.9 percent" sure he would retire.

"I'm glad that I left open that percentage point," he said, "because you never know."

On Tuesday, the likelihood is that Clemens, less than 10 months removed from retirement, will throw the game's first pitch for the National League in a ballpark no more than 15 minutes from his home.

Jack McKeon, the Marlins manager who is directing the NL squad, is expected to announce his starting pitcher tomorrow, but choosing Clemens would represent the confluence of perfect showbiz timing and a man's just reward.

Clemens was the winning pitcher for the AL in the 1986 All-Star Game in Houston's Astrodome, where he threw three perfect innings. That year, he won his first 14 decisions (in 15 starts) and led the AL with 24 wins.

He was less than a month from his 24th birthday.

Now, with his 42d birthday Aug. 4, Clemens is having a season almost as dominating. He won his first nine decisions, holding the game's premier slugger, Barry Bonds, without a hit and the rest of the San Francisco Giants to just one in seven innings in his Astros debut.

Clemens now has 320 career wins, 14th on the all-time list and just four behind Ryan and Don Sutton, and 4,220 strikeouts, passing Steve Carlton for No. 2 all time with only Ryan's unreachable 5,714 whiffs ahead of him.

"[Teammate] Jeff Bagwell asked me the other day in Chicago, when I was fighting tooth and nail, `How do you do it? That intensity you take to the mound for all these years, how do you do it?' " Clemens recalled.

"Bernie [Williams, the Yankee center fielder] asked me that last year -- `How do you keep your intensity, game after game?'

"I don't know how to answer. It's just there."

This season's numbers could be gaudier. In five starts in which he did not have a decision, he limited opponents to one run on three occasions, and left a scoreless tie in the other. Clemens, who was supposed to be a complementary piece on a pitching staff that had rising stars in Roy Oswalt and Wade Miller and lefthander Andy Pettitte as its biggest offseason acquisition, has been the indisputable ace of the staff, especially with Pettitte and Miller both sidelined for extended periods by injuries.

"We didn't do this for show, obviously," said Gerry Hunsicker, the Astros' general manager. "There was a special relationship between Roger and the city because he lived here, but we obviously felt that, given what he did last year [17-9, 3.91], he still had a lot left in the tank.

"So we expected him to be a very solid pitcher for us. But no, I did not anticipate that he was going to be the guy to carry the club like he has so far. He obviously takes great care of himself. He's in great shape. If you didn't know he was 41, he looks a lot younger out there when he's pitching."

Road leads home

It took a unique set of circumstances for Clemens to decide he wasn't ready to limit his pitching to his sons and their friends. In addition to coming home, there was his relationship with Pettitte, his closest friend on the Yankees, a fellow Texan, and his offseason workout partner. There was Houston's determination to land Pettitte, whom the Yankees tried to re-sign. And there was the Astros' willingness to accommodate Clemens's desire to spend more time with his family.

Under the terms of his agreement with McLane, Clemens does not have to go on the road with the team, instead flying to meet it the day he is scheduled to start. It is an unprecedented arrangement.

"I struggled with it philosophically at first," Hunsicker said. "But the more we talked it through, and talked to his agents [the Houston-based Hendricks brothers, Alan and Randy], I thought, `This isn't a guy who's going to flaunt it. This isn't a guy who's going to take advantage of the situation.' I could see he cared about being perceived as a team guy.

"It hasn't been an issue. Unless guys are upset with it privately, it really hasn't been an issue. I think everybody is just so thrilled that Roger came out of retirement to pitch for us. And he genuinely comes through as a team player. These guys know he cares about them."

Bagwell, a Connecticut kid who was in the Red Sox' minor league system when Clemens was a half-dozen years into his Sox career, was a Clemens fan then, and maybe a bigger one now. "I've known Roger for a long time," he said, "but it's still special to have him in the same uniform."

Pettitte signed with the Astros in December. Until then, Clemens said, he planned to fly a couple of times a month to New York to watch his friend pitch, as well as do some broadcasting work for the YES Network. By then, however, McLane already had become smitten with signing Clemens, too. He arranged through the Hendricks brothers to visit Clemens in the pitcher's home.

"I have personal relationships with everybody I do business with," McLane said. "That's what I get paid for. So they arranged for me to go over to the house and meet him. He certainly didn't give me any encouragement then, but I still felt we had a good chance."

McLane would make his sales pitch repeatedly in the following weeks, almost willing Clemens to imagine the Ryan-like possibilities.

"Roger is probably one of the most intense people I've ever met," McLane said, "and I've met thousands of people in all kinds of businesses all over the world. And Roger thinks things through.

"He was done. He had thought everything through, and he was psychologically retired. He'd taken all the bows in the American League cities. He'd taken that huge bow in the World Series game.

"But he wants to win. I think one of his reluctances was he'd been such a magnificent player, he didn't want to come back and not do well."

But McLane also issued Clemens a challenge.

"Nolan pitched great here, but he didn't go to the World Series and win," McLane said of Ryan, who pitched until he was 46 and wore the uniform of both Texas teams, the Rangers and Astros. "That's what I told Roger. `You gotta win.'

"We've been playing since 1962 and we've never been to the World Series. The Rangers came to Dallas in 1972, and they've never been. I said to Roger, `Just think of the excitement in Texas if you help us to the World Series and we win.' I think he liked the challenge."

An immediate impact

With the Astros meeting his conditions to be with his family, Clemens decided he was willing to put his body on the line for one more season. For all his apparent invincibility, that decision had become more difficult as he's gotten older. Last week, he spoke of pitching with an undisclosed injury in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, when he outdueled Curt Schilling, holding the Diamondbacks to one run before the Yankees lost on Luis Gonzalez's broken-bat hit off Mariano Rivera in the ninth.

"My mother was crying after that game, not because we lost, but because she knew how much pain I was in," said Clemens. "My clavicle was hurting me like you wouldn't believe."

But Clemens, who has a history of groin and hamstring injuries, said his arm has actually felt better the last couple of years. On Jan. 12, he signed a contract for $5 million, with an additional $1.4 million in attendance incentives. Pam Gardner, the team's president of business operations, told reporters it was the greatest day of her life.

"It was monumental," Sorrentino said. "There were rumors that we were going to sign him that day, and that morning our telephone lines lit up like Christmas trees. For 2 1/2 days, it tied up the phones of the entire organization."

The Astros are on track to draw over 3 million fans this season, an increase of at least a half-million over 2003. Sorrentino said the season-ticket sales base has climbed from 15,000 to more than 20,000, in part to the All-Star Game but also because of Clemens, whose jersey sells out as soon as it arrives in the team's souvenir shops. Halfway through the season, the Astros have had 14 sellouts; last season they had seven.

"It has far surpassed anything we could have hoped to have," McLane said.

Clemens, Sorrentino said, has become the face of the franchise, and an extremely cooperative one at that, willing to do the glad-handing and picture-posing that comes with being the team's most marketable personality. "It's been a balancing act," Clemens said, "but I knew that coming in here. The biggest pressure still is trying to win."

For all of Clemens's excellence, the Astros have had a disappointing season. They are in fifth place in the National League Central, 10 1/2 games behind the Cardinals. But on Friday, McLane quashed any notion that he would entertain trading Clemens, and said he was still optimistic the Astros could win the division or make it to the playoffs as a wild-card entry. "It's a long, hard season," McLane said, "but we still have time."

Should the Astros fall short, Sorrentino insists that Clemens's presence already has helped erase the memory of one of the darkest days in team history.

"In 1988, [owner] John McMullen didn't re-sign Nolan, and he went to the Rangers and threw a couple more no-hitters," Sorrentino said. "That left a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of people. This exorcises the ghost of Nolan Ryan."

Only another legend would do.