From Newsday
Mets' Martinez shedding no tears for Clemens
By Ken Davidoff | ken.davidoff@newsday.com
February 15, 2008
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla.
Just like most prom kings, Roger Clemens has a line of detractors that extends out the door of the ballroom. There are one-sided feuds every which way you turn.
So as spring training kicks off, with Wednesday's congressional hearing on everyone's mind, it's time for those foes to plant a flag of superiority.
"I dominated that era," Pedro Martinez said yesterday at Mets camp, "and I did it clean."
"That era" would be the late 1990s and early 2000s, and although he didn't mention Clemens' name in a passionate soliloquy, you needn't have leaped very far to infer a dig at The Rocket in there.
After all, from 1998 through 2001, Clemens and Pedro stood as the top starting pitchers in the American League, winning two Cy Young Awards each. And Clemens' accomplishments now are very much in doubt.
Clemens really has been baseball's prom king - good-looking, successful, charming and yet full of himself - for some time now. He sounded self-important Wednesday, yet he spoke the truth during one angry moment of testimony: Baseball did lean on him, heavily, whether it needed him to bless the initial World Baseball Classic or to replace Barry Zito on the 2003 All-Star Game roster.
And such love spreads ill will through the ranks. Pedro, who essentially replaced Clemens as the Red Sox's ace - there was a one-season gap, 1997, between their tenures - has taken veiled shots at his predecessor over the years. Last year, while rehabilitating his right shoulder, he announced that he was better than Clemens, bringing up The Rocket's name from nowhere.
Asked about the steroids era, which has cast doubt over everyone's accomplishments, Pedro claimed the moral high ground. By doing so, he turned a longtime negative, his fragility, into a positive.
"The reason Pedro was a prima donna - like one writer one time wrote, 'Pedro's a prima donna' - yeah, I hurt," Martinez said. "I did it clean. I never had anything against the clean game of baseball. That's why I was a prima donna. That's why I hurt. That's why I don't pitch 33 outings every year.
"I have a small frame, and I did it clean, and all I could take was two Aleves, or two Advil, a cup of coffee, a little mangu and an egg, and go out there and let it go. And face everybody that's out there. And you know what? That's the era I dominated. When everybody's [saying] so many bad things about the game ... they've got one that they can talk about. I dominated that era."
Pedro isn't the only elite pitcher smiling today, you can bet. You've got to figure that Randy Johnson, who dominated the National League while Pedro and Clemens went at it in the AL, won't shed any tears over Clemens' downfall.
And although Andy Pettitte clearly has been tortured over his role in this whole mess, Brian McNamee, in his deposition to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, confirmedNewsday's report from last month that Pettitte and Clemens were never as close as the media portrayed them.
"I think Andy kept [Clemens] at an arm's distance, too, because of the way [Pettitte] lived his life," McNamee said.
Clemens, by all accounts, has no problem with Pedro, or the Big Unit, or, until recently, Pettitte. As the prom king, he impacts others far more than they impact him. Oddly, the one player who sticks in Clemens' craw isDavid Wells, his opposite in handedness, physical fitness and demeanor. You can be sure that Wells, still a free agent, is dying to find an employer, just so he can fire away at Clemens to any reporters within earshot.
Pedro will have his challenges this year - his health, fittingly, number one. He'll have to sublimate his ego to share the ace's role with newcomerJohan Santana. He wants to show the Mets they should re-sign him as he enters his walk year.
But he can feel emboldened at the outset, happy to be criticized for cockfighting rather than juicing.
"I did it my way," Pedro said, "and that's the only way I know."
Copyright © 2008, Newsday, Inc.
|
|
|
|
E-mail story
Print
