Sage advice from Rocket
Once fiery just like Price, Sale
HOUSTON — Small children and young adults in the reading audience will not remember this, but Roger Clemens used to be quite the handful — on and off the mound.
Striding off the rubber, he was a ruthless, flame-throwing cyborg who intimidated opposing batters with an arsenal of pitches that included high 90s fastballs he enjoyed spotting a couple of inches from a batter’s chin.
He could lose control, too, especially with his emotions. With a short fuse and gunpowder pouring out of his ears, Clemens waged battle with not only himself, but batters, umpires and the media.
Since we are all settling down after hyperventilating (guilty here) over David Price’s flap with the media last week, consider that episode would barely register back in the heyday of Clemens.
This is, after all, a guy who once got ejected in the second inning of an ALCS start and a guy who once threw hamburger buns at a Boston Herald columnist.
So, with Clemens working the game from the WEEI radio booth last night in his hometown and Pedro Martinez not available, who better to ask than Clemens about what a pitcher needs to focus and stay in control when pitching for Boston.
“You embrace (the media),” said Clemens before donning his headset. “I learned it’s a little different brand of baseball in the East. People are very prideful. I didn’t just learn how to drive in New England when I was 21 years old, I learned a lot. I had my bumps in the road.
“I think it’s because you want to do so well all the time and when you don’t, I think it gets at you a little bit. If you’re a prideful man, you want to do well — that’s your job, that’s the way I was brought up.”
Sometimes that pride gets in the way, sometimes it can be channeled in your favor. It’s up to the pitcher to decide which it’s going to be, said Clemens.
“It’s no different than the talk I gave to the Astros this year: ‘Be as nasty and tough and tenacious as you can be on the field, and be the nicest person off the field, but you’ve got to really play with a chip on your shoulder to advance in this league,’ ” said Clemens.
Being able to focus is key. If a player does not have it, he can find it.
“You have to develop a great routine, you have to have something you can count on, even when you’re going good or bad,” said Clemens. “You go through the three things — the physical part and all the work that really makes you mentally strong. For me I knew I was doing the work, so I know if I went out there and had my (butt) handed to me I understood it was because I was leaving the ball over the middle of the plate too much. It wasn’t because I was staying out late, or I wasn’t doing my work. I eliminated all those distractions during the season for sure, and then the mental part of the game is so important to me.
“And the last part is your emotions. I pitched with emotion. A lot of time when I knew I was lethargic I would think about my mother or my grandmother being ill and I’d use emotions. In 24 years, I showed my (butt) out there a handful of times but like my mom told me, ‘I don’t have a problem with that because you care.’ And I did, I cared about my work.”
Clemens can see that both Price and Chris Sale care. Focus ebbs and flows, but when it’s tied to discipline, it should flow in the right direction.
“I just look for guys with that many years in — I won’t mention names, but I had guys come to our club I was on, and they had five, six years in, I’d watch them warm up or go through their in-between work and they never had a set routine,” said Clemens. “I don’t know what (Sale’s) routine is but I’m pretty sure he has a set routine. The comments I can only draw from, somebody like David Price — he has a routine that he can count on also.”
Clemens said that whenever Sale has started to fill bushels of strikeouts early in starts, he gets texts from friends saying, “He’s after your (20-strikeout) record, you better turn the TV on.”
A special adviser to the Astros, Clemens certainly has divided loyalties these days. But he acknowledged that the Red Sox are in a good place with talents like Price and Sale on the staff.
“I think it’s fantastic because (Price) can stub his toe a little bit and you’ve got another guy who can stop a losing streak very quickly,” said Clemens. “You need somebody to go with you. If you can win 18 to 20 games — I did it many times but didn’t have anybody to go with me for the ride and you go home and watch the playoffs on TV.”