Wallace Matthews Gets in a Fight with Webster's Dictionary.....

about the meaning of the word "mediocre". It's not a battle you're gonna win, Matthews.

Yanks have a Rocket that's subsonic

Just an excellent play on words.

Is that all there is?

That is the question Yankee fans have to be fearing right about now.

Is that all there is to the 349-victory, seven-Cy Young Award, $28-million, 44-year-old pitcher who was supposed to come in and save the season, like John Wayne turning back a hostile tribe of Comanches?

Since this was written following Friday's 2-0 loss to the Mets, I can only imagine this article is going to be a bunch of nonsense about how Clemens isn't performing well. Lead the way, Mr. Paid-for-ignorant-analysis.

If that is the question you are fearing - and you have plenty of reason to be - then the words of Jorge Posada, who has caught Roger Clemens twice now, will offer no comfort. "What you saw today is pretty much what he is gonna do," Posada said. "He really gave us everything he had tonight."

Wow. Grossly out of context maybe? When your pitcher goes 6.1 innings, gives up 2 runs, walks only 1, and strikes out 8 guys, that's a good start. It's well above average. If Clemens did that every time, he'd have a 2.84 ERA and have the best K/9 ratio of any starter in baseball. Posada's comment was pointing out that the Rocket's outing was a strong effort, and that he expects such strong efforts to continue. And here you are turning this comment around as if Posada was agreeing with you? "He really gave us everything he had" is a compliment, not an implication that this is Clemens' too-low ceiling for how well he will pitch in the future.

If so, the Yankees should ask for some of that money back. Clemens pitched well enough to beat most teams Friday night, allowing two runs in 6 1/3 innings, walking one and striking out eight. It was good enough to beat the Pirates last week.

This makes so little sense that I'm having a hard time justifying responding to it. So 2 runs in 6 1/3 innings is a good start against the Pirates, but not the Mets? And that 2.84 ERA that start translates to? It's better than that of any team in baseball (lowest is Padres at 2.92). Do you READ the shit you write?

But it was not good enough to beat the Mets, not on a night when Oliver Perez, who is working the entire season for less money than Clemens will make for three starts, strings together seven zeros and the Mets' bullpen supplies the final two.

Do you know what kind of outing beats a team that doesn't give up any runs? NONE! No matter how well Roger Clemens pitched (through 9 innings), he could not have won that game. How does this not make sense to you? He failed to outpitch a team that didn't give up a run, so the Yankees should be worried?

As good as Clemens' line was, it was the worst one posted by any of the eight pitchers who worked Friday night. Numbers aside, it was a mediocre performance at best, devoid of the electricity and intimidation that made Clemens one of the most feared pitchers of the last two decades.

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I am literally resisting the urge to pick up my keyboard and hurl it into the monitor.

Let me get this straight. YOU GET PAID TO WRITE THIS SHIT!?!?!?!

So Clemens pitched very well, but because no other pitcher in the game let up a run (in that one game, one, the sample size of games played is one), you have to throw out the numbers and the performance becomes mediocre?

What is the reasoning behind this unexplainable mediocrity? You guessed it. Electricity and intimidation. This start was better than Clemens's career average in earned runs and strikeouts, but you need to throw that out the window, beacuse the Mets hitters were not visibly quivering from the intimidation of the mere 1000 volt charge (down from 6500V back in the day) that Clemens's eyes were shocking into their nervous systems.

This is not what the Yankees were buying when they "lured" Clemens out of a retirement he never really wanted. They thought they were buying the Rocket, a once-every-five-days performer who could lead them out of the abyss they had fallen into. He couldn't be just good, he needed to be great, and not just most of the time, but every time out.

If you told the Yankees, a team that doesn't give a shit about money, before they signed Clemens, that he would put up a 2.84 ERA and strike out 11.8 guys per 9 innings, they would probably have raised their offer for fear of not luring him fast enough. I repeat. The performance that the Rocket delivered Friday was BETTER than his career average performance. It was better than Rocketesque. Maybe he didnt get through the 7th inning, but the bullpen didn't let up any runs, so there's no feasible way to say Clemens let the team down.

But he is no longer that pitcher, no longer that man. In his dotage, the Rocket has become the bottle rocket, capable of the occasional 90-plus fastball - he hit 92 once in the first inning - but mostly living in Mike Mussina territory, high-to-mid 80s and nothing, I mean nothing, over the inside half of the plate.

I've never seen a slow bottle rocket. Who cares about velocity if he's still striking guys out? Most of the point of throwing hard is that it increases the chance of a strikeout.

Can this possibly be the same man who reduced the Mets to jelly in the 2000 World Series, who sawed off Mike Piazza's bat and threw the barrel at him?

Yes. He is the same man, 7 years older. In 2000, he was 37 (and had a higher ERA than this season on a small sample size). If he was pitching worse now, it would be reasonable to assume that it's just because of aging, not because he's a fundamentally different pitcher. But that's just it, Clemens has been BETTER in his 40's than when he was 37. The fact that he's still doing this is unbelievable.

Friday night, Clemens was undone by the smallest, slimmest, sleekest Mets, by Jose Reyes and Carlos Gomez, a couple of kids who rang his doorbell and ran. Between them, Reyes and Gomez combined for five hits, four stolen bases and both runs. Gomez bunted twice for hits on Clemens, and not once was he brushed back, not once was he made to feel that he had offended the new sheriff.

So Clemens pitched bad because:

1) Jose Reyes, who is small and therefore a weak baseball player, got 3 hits off of him, and

2) Carlos Gomez got two BUNT SINGLES, which were Clemens's fault because he didn't throw at Gomez.

Gomez humiliated Clemens, as did Reyes, who twice lined Clemens' only real out pitch, the splitter, for singles, and then rubbed salt in it by crashing a first-pitch hanging curve off the upper deck in right.

When this accounts for literally all the opposing offense in the game, this does not even come close to touching humiliation.

And on the bases, he and Gomez mugged Clemens. In the third inning alone, Gomez stole second, leading to Reyes' RBI single. Then, Reyes stole second and third, only to be stranded by the second of Carlos Delgado's four strikeouts. The only time
either of them tasted dirt was on their headfirst slides.

Last sentence makes no sense. When else do baseball players "taste dirt"?

No mention here of Clemens "humiliating" Delgado. Funny.

"They were running on Rocket and I couldn't do much about it," Posada said.

"Those two guys are fast," Clemens conceded. "Yeah. They're fast."

The same cannot be said of Clemens, whose slowness of delivery is rivaled only by the sluggishness of his fastball. Right now, he is living on the splitter, and on the nights it doesn't split, things are going to get ugly real fast.

Reyes's home run was on a curveball. His two singles were on a splitter. When was the fastball tagged?

Yankees fans better hope. The real fear here is that if his first two starts have shown us just about how good Clemens can be, there are bound to be plenty of starts in which we learn how bad he can be.

Don't bother justifying that, really, it's ok.

And you know more and more teams are going to adopt the approach the Mets used, bunting on the old man with the shaky legs.

Read: More teams are going to be forced to use poorer offensive strategies because they can't hit Clemens very well.

Clemens left the game in the seventh to a mixed chorus of cheers, boos and one large question hanging over him: Does it get any better than this?

Fear the question, fear the answer.

My only fear is that you will never get fired for making absolutely no sense.