FJM, What Gives?

Still waiting for Fire Joe Morgan (at right) to take on Roger Clemens' agent who, if you haven't heard or don't care, has put out an 18,000 word report "clearing" Clemens of taking steroids by citing--get this--statistics. Oh sssssssnap!

Actually, the media has distilled it down for all us not-readers and has zeroed in on this piece of "evidence" as the key point: Clemens' ERA was lower than the league average for 21 of his 23 seasons. There's a bitchy little thing about averages, though, and it is that roughly half of all the pitchers in his league were also below the average ERA during that span. Because, see, except for a few outliers, most everybody is going to be right around whatever the league average ERA is, some above and some below.

Of course, nobody is actually talking about what Clemens' ERA was in any given year, and those numbers would tend to cast doubt on his agents' case, because the ERAs themselves are so far away from what everybody else was doing that he's either Jesus Christ with a splitter, or he's a doper.

Let me help:

In his first full season as a starter, 1986, Clemens not only won the Cy Young Award but also posted a 2.48 ERA. In the American League. That's amazing! He was 24 years old.

The next 6 seasons, he posted an ERA of 3.13 or lower, including an unreal 1.93 in 1990 (of course, he also pitched a period-low 228 innings that year, too).

In 1993, he had the worst season of his career: 11-14 with a 4.46 ERA--which was still lower than the AL league average of 4.64, but a funny thing happened around 1993: ERAs across baseball jumped dramatically, almost as though the very game itself had been redesigned to produce more runs...and the inflation lasted, well, until now. See for yourself (scroll down to pitching stats--the jump in ERA for both leagues is incredible).

Clemens then had two injury-plagued years before appearing in 34 games for Boston in 1996, at which point the Red Sox must have figured he was about done and they let him go to the Blue Jays...where he won 20 games each of the next 2 seasons and also back-to-back Cy Young Awards. Boston, a team that really liked Roger Clemens, thought he was washed up. And then he became reborn as the best pitcher in baseball for one of the worst teams in baseball. His ERAs in Toronto, compared to the league averages, were 2.05/4.53 and 2.65/4.61, respectively. A 2.5-point difference between actual and average ERA? How is that possible?! If I were his agent, I don't think I would want people looking at this stuff!

Then he went to the Yankees and had 3 pretty mediocre years and 2 very good years before signing with the Houston Astros, a fairly crappy team, and experiencing a post-Boston-like comeback for the second time in his career. You know, it's weird how when a team Clemens wants to play for, like the Red Sox or Yankees, tells him to take a hike he suddenly becomes the best pitcher in the game again for the next few seasons.

In Houston, Clemens averaged a 2.33 ERA in 3 seasons while pitching his home games in one of the best hitters' parks in baseball. In 2005, he posted a 1.87 ERA (NL league average was 4.23) in 211 innings. He was 43 years old. And based on those 3 seasons, he got another contract with the Yankees.

Given his career numbers, Clemens either pitches wonderfully for short periods and doesn't have any clue how he does it, and those periods happen to coincide with being traded or released by teams he wants to play for, or else he uses steroids. You really could say "ERA, his ass!"