With something shy of fanfare, Roger Clemens’ agents released a report yesterday that evaluates the pitcher’s career from a variety of statistical angles. The report, which runs 43 pages and some 18,000 words, breaks down Clemens’ 24 years of pitching by season, by performance level, by month in some cases, and compares him to hard-throwing peers and near-peers such as Curt Schilling, Randy Johnson and Nolan Ryan.
This report is an incredibly dry piece of work that breaks no new ground at all. It reads like an arbitration brief, which makes sense given that both the Hendricks brothers and consultant Steve Mann have extensive experience in preparing and presenting arbitration cases. You don’t break ground in arbitration cases; you pick a side and you argue it forcefully, using fairly blunt tools.That’s the Clemens Report. The most sophisticated metric in here compares a pitcher’s ERA to the league average, while not adjusting for park or schedule difficulty. There’s a focus on ERA to the exclusion of win-loss record, which is a good thing, and the explanation of the effects of run support on a pitcher’s record is probably the most insightful section of the piece. The value of that is cancelled out by some horrific cherry-picking of endpoints to define Clemens’ peak as a 79-start stretch from August of 1996 through April of 1999, as well as a chart listing Clemens’ best and worst months, presented haphazardly.
There’s no new information contained here. It’s not an analysis, not a study, not an investigation. It packages the facts of Clemens’ career, makes a handful of salient comparisons, and calls it a day.Now, perhaps that’s the point. After all, the goal of the Hendricks’ brothers is to emphasize that Clemens’ career isn’t that unusual relative to other power pitchers of the late 20th century. To the extent that that is his limited goal, he accomplishes it here, dragging in Nolan Ryan’s odd late peak to bolster the argument, and showing that Clemens’ power and endurance has declined, as you would expect, as he’s gotten older.
The problem is the starting premise. This report, which does not once mention the Mitchell Report, Brian McNamee, steroids, HGH or any other buzzwords, exists to refute all of them. However, in the same way that analysts have argued, by and large, that you can’t suss out PED usage from the statistical record, the reverse is also true: you can’t rule it out, either. The statistical record is silent on the effects of PED usage, because we don’t have enough information about said usage to draw conclusions. We don’t know what the stat lines of a PED-enabled pitcher would look like. Until we have a list of players and their complete usage histories, we cannot draw conclusions. The innumerate attempts to do so to date—using names in the Mitchell Report, or assigning blame for statistical spikes to PED use—have sent the discussion in the wrong direction. Analysis is about information, and there’s simply not enough information available.
Clemens’ career path isn’t normal, but the career paths of the greatest players ever aren’t normal. They are marked by the ability to play longer at a high level. That of late we choose to suspect players with excellent longevity of getting there by foul means speaks more about the analysts and the era in which we live than the players themselves.
This report doesn’t change the discussion about Clemens one iota. The statistical record is what it is, and has no bearing on the suspicions created by McNamee’s testimony as published in the Mitchell Report. The case against Clemens remains that testimony. How well or how poorly he refutes it will determine how his fans, his peers and history regard him.
0 comments have been left for this post.
