2026 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee Candidate: Roger Clemens

The following article is part of my ongoing look at the candidates on the 2026 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, use the navigation tool above. An introduction to JAWS can be found here.

Like Barry Bonds with regards to position players, Roger Clemens has a reasonable claim as the greatest pitcher of all time. Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and Grover Cleveland Alexander spent all or most of their careers in the Deadball Era, before the home run was a real threat, and pitched while the color line was still in effect, barring some of the game’s most talented players from participating. Sandy Koufax and Tom Seaver pitched when scoring levels were much lower and pitchers held a greater advantage. Koufax and 2015 inductees Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez didn’t sustain their greatness for nearly as long. Greg Maddux didn’t dominate hitters to nearly the same extent.

Clemens, meanwhile, spent 24 years in the majors and racked up a record seven Cy Young awards, not to mention an MVP award. He won 354 games, led his leagues in the Triple Crown categories (wins, strikeouts, and ERA) a total of 16 times, and helped his teams to six pennants and a pair of world championships.

Alas, whatever claim “The Rocket” may have on such an exalted title is clouded by suspicions that he used performance-enhancing drugs. When those suspicions came to light in the Mitchell Report in 2007, Clemens took the otherwise unprecedented step of challenging the findings during a Congressional hearing, but nearly painted himself into a legal corner; he was subject to a high-profile trial for six counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to Congress. After a mistrial in 2011, he was acquitted on all counts the following year, and in March 2015, he settled a defamation lawsuit filed by former personal trainer Brian McNamee for an unspecified amount. But despite those verdicts and resolutions, the specter of PEDs hasn’t left Clemens’ case.

Amid two decades of Hall of Fame-related debates over hitters connected to PEDs — most prominently Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez, and Alex Rodriguez — it’s worth remembering that the chemical arms race involved pitchers as well, leveling the playing field a lot more than some critics of the aforementioned sluggers would admit. The voters certainly didn’t forget that when it comes to Clemens, whose share of the vote during his 10 years on the writers’ ballot approximated that of Bonds. Clemens debuted with 37.6% of the vote in 2013 and only in ’16 began making significant headway, climbing to 45.2% thanks largely to the Hall’s purge of voters more than 10 years removed from covering the game. Like Bonds, he surged above 50% — a historically significant marker towards future election — in 2017, benefiting from voters rethinking their positions in the wake of the election of Bud Selig. The former commissioner’s roles in the late-1980s collusion scandal and in presiding over the proliferation of PEDs within the game dwarf the impact of individual PED users and call into question the so-called “character clause” contained within the voting rules.

As with Bonds, Clemens’ march towards Cooperstown stalled following the November 2017 open letter from Hall of Fame Vice Chairman Joe Morgan, who pleaded with voters not to honor players connected to steroids. In his final five years on the BBWAA ballot, Clemens gained just over 11 percentage points, going from 54.1% to 65.2% and falling nearly 10 points short of election.

Like Bonds, who rose from 53.8% to 66% over the same span, Clemens went from the writers’ ballot to the 2023 Contemporary Baseball ballot without pause. It wasn’t hard to see which direction their candidacies were headed when the Hall appointed three of the era’s most outspoken players on the subject of PEDs, namely Jack Morris, Ryne Sandberg and Frank Thomas, to the committee. The purpose pitch designed to knock their candidacies down did just that; both players received “less than four votes” out of 16, with their actual shares going unreported, as is custom for those below a certain threshold. Earlier this year, the Hall introduced a rule whereby any candidate receiving five or fewer votes on an Era Committee ballot is ineligible to be included during the next cycle three years later, and any candidate for whom that happens twice will become permanently ineligible. Given the Hall’s heavy-handedness in assembling Era Committee panels with visible tilts for or against certain candidates, we can’t dismiss the possibility that the institution aims to bury Clemens as well as Bonds.

Contrary to legend, Clemens did not emerge whole from the Texas soil. He was born August 4, 1962 in Dayton, Ohio, the fifth child of Bill and Bess Clemens. When he was less than four months old, Bess took her children and left Bill; she married a man named Woody Booher when Roger was three, but five years later, he died of a heart attack.

Lacking a true father figure, young Roger took after Randy, the second-oldest of his brothers, 17 years old at the time of Woody’s death. Randy starred as a shortstop and shooting guard in high school, and instilled in Roger a simple philosophy: “Either win or you’re a failure,” as Jeff Pearlman summarized in The Rocket That Fell To Earth, his 2009 biography.

By the time he reached high school, Roger was burly and combative but hardly intimidating; Pearlman described him as “a soft-tossing control artist” with the physique of “a Weeble.” Roger’s athletic development didn’t accelerate until he got permission from his mother to move to Sugar Land, Texas to join Randy, whose own athletic career had been stalled by substance abuse (he was kicked off the Mississippi College basketball team due to marijuana possession and would later deal with cocaine addiction). After Roger’s strong sophomore season at Sugar Land’s Dulles High School, Bess moved to Houston, where Roger attended Spring Woods High School. He pitched and played first base, and was a defensive end on the football team and a center on the basketball team. His conditioning and throwing mechanics improved, but he did not attain athletic stardom in high school.

Spring Woods’ coach Charlie Maiorana guided Clemens to San Jacinto Junior College, where he came under the tutelage of first-year coach Wayne Graham, who recognized Clemens’ drive and helped him convert his inner rage into a more violent, forceful delivery; his fastball speed jumped from 84 mph into the 90s. From Joe Posnanski at The Athletic:

It seems that Randy had taught his younger brother to be smooth on the mound, to be graceful, and Graham had to break the kid of that habit. He wasn’t dancing out there. He was pitching.

“ROGER!” Graham would shout every time he watched Clemens pitch. “FINISH!”

That was the word between them. Finish. If you ever watched Clemens pitch in the big leagues, this was the part that would stand out. There was still a gracefulness to his motion, a fluidity, yes, but when it came to the end, the part when he threw the ball, he brought violence. There was no holding back with Roger Clemens, and he got that from Wayne Graham.

Scouts took notice; Clemens was drafted by the Mets in the 12th round but chose not to sign. Without even telling Graham — who was at the outset of a career that would make him a college coaching legend — that he was leaving, he departed for the University of Texas, where he earned All-American honors twice and pitched the Longhorns to a College World Series championship in 1983. The Red Sox tabbed him with the 19th pick of that year’s draft.

After dominating at three different levels for a total of 17 minor league starts, the 21-year-old Clemens debuted in the majors less than a year after being drafted, facing Cleveland on May 15, 1984 (he was cuffed for 11 hits and four runs in a 5.2-inning no-decision). He went 9–4 with a 4.32 ERA for Boston, but more impressively, struck out 8.5 hitters per nine in his 133.1 innings, a rate better than the official American League leader (Mark Langston, 8.2 per nine). Limited to just 15 starts the following year due to shoulder soreness, he was diagnosed with a torn labrum by a then-obscure orthopedist named Dr. James Andrews, who repaired the tear arthroscopically — a novel treatment for the time.

Eight months later, Clemens was back in action, and at 23, he put together his first outstanding season in 1986. In his fourth start, he set a major league record by striking out 20 against the Mariners; he didn’t walk anyone, and allowed just three hits and one run.

He wound up leading the AL in wins (24) and ERA (2.48), and ranked second in strikeouts (238) and WAR (8.8). That latter mark trailed only Milwaukee’s Teddy Higuera, but Clemens’ edge in the traditional numbers and his role in leading Boston to an AL East title helped him capture not only his first Cy Young (unanimously, even) but also AL MVP honors.

Clemens made three good starts and two lousy ones in the postseason, throwing seven strong innings in Game 7 of the ALCS against the Angels, and departing Game 6 of the World Series against the Mets after seven innings and 134 pitches with a 3–2 lead and the Red Sox six outs from their first championship since 1918. Alas, fate intervened in the form of sloppy relief work by Calvin Schiraldi (an ex-college teammate of Clemens who had been traded to Boston in November 1985), a wild pitch from Bob Stanley, and a groundball through Bill Buckner’s legs. You know the rest.

Clemens followed that effort up in 1987 by winning 20 games, tossing seven shutouts among his 18 complete games (!) and racking up 9.4 WAR — league-leading figures in each category — en route to a second straight Cy Young. In 1988, he struck out a league-leading 291 and spun eight shutouts, helping the Sox to another AL East title.

His 1989 season was less notable (a garden-variety 5.7 WAR season, still fourth in the league), but he followed that up with the first of three straight ERA crowns; his 1.93 mark in 1990 was almost full two runs better than the AL’s 3.91 figure. He also went 21-6 and led the league with 10.4 WAR that year, but he finished second to Oakland’s Bob Welch in a ridiculously upside-down Cy Young vote; Welch had gone 27–6 with a 2.95 ERA — more than a full run higher, in a much more pitcher-friendly park — in a season worth 2.9 WAR. The Red Sox won the AL East, but after throwing six shutout innings in Game 1 of the ALCS against the A’s, Clemens was ejected in the second inning of Game 4 by home plate umpire Terry Cooney, who claimed the pitcher cursed at him and called him “gutless.” The ejection came amid a three-run rally that would provide all of the offense Oakland needed to complete a four-game sweep.

Clemens won his third AL Cy Young in 1991, leading the league in innings (271.1), ERA (2.62), strikeouts (241), and WAR (7.9). The award made him the fifth pitcher to take home at least three Cy Young awards, after Koufax, Seaver, Steve Carlton, and Jim Palmer; at age 29, Clemens was the first to do so before turning 30. He slipped to third in the voting in 1992 despite again leading the AL in ERA (2.41) and WAR (8.7); that last figure was half a win more than Cy Young winner Dennis Eckersley and runner-up Jack McDowell combined.

No pitcher threw more innings than Clemens from 1986-92 (1,799.1), and no one was within 20.0 WAR of him during that span; Frank Viola’s 37.6 ranked second to Clemens’ 58.1. High mileage began taking its toll, however. Clemens served stints on what was then the disabled list in 1993 (groin) and ’95 (shoulder), averaging just 28 starts, 186 innings, 10 wins and 4.5 WAR from 1993-96, about half his annual value over that previous seven-year stretch.

Camouflaged by a 10–13 record and a 3.63 ERA (still a 139 ERA+), Clemens’ final year in Boston was actually an outstanding one. He led the league in strikeouts for the third time with 257, and his 242.2 innings were his most since 1992. On September 18, in what proved to be his third-to-last start for the Sox, he tied his own major league record by striking out 20 Tigers, again issuing no walks.

While the baseball world remembers Boston general manager Dan Duquette’s infamous declaration that the 34-year-old Clemens was in “the twilight of his career,” that statement didn’t surface until after the Red Sox lost a bidding war for his services. In December 1996, the Blue Jays made him the game’s highest-paid pitcher by signing him to a three-year, $24.75 million deal; Boston reportedly offered a three-year, $17.5 million deal with an option for a fourth year. It was in the wake of Clemens’ departure that Duquette offered his sour grapes farewell: “The Red Sox and our fans were fortunate to see Roger Clemens play in his prime and we had hoped to keep him in Boston during the twilight of his career… We made him a substantial, competitive offer, by far the most money ever offered to a player in the history of the Red Sox franchise.”

Clemens lived up to his new deal, winning back-to-back Cy Young awards and Triple Crowns. His 1997 campaign (21–7, 2.05 ERA, 292 strikeouts, 11.9 WAR) was by far the better of the two seasons, though his 8.1 WAR the following year led the league as well. That 11.9 WAR season in 1997 is tied for fourth among all pitchers since 1915, behind Dwight Gooden (12.2 in 1985), Carlton (12.1 in 1972), and Alexander (12.0 in 1920), and alongside Walter Johnson (1919) and Eddie Cicotte (1917). On July 5, 1998, he became just the 11th pitcher to reach 3,000 strikeouts — and the first in 12 years — when he punched out the Devil Rays’ Randy Winn.

Clemens’ rebound caught the eye of Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who had long coveted the now-36-year-old righty. On February 18, 1999, shortly after pitchers and catchers had reported to spring training, the defending world champions sent starting pitcher David Wells, reliever Graeme Lloyd, and reserve infielder Homer Bush to Toronto in exchange for Clemens. Hampered by a hamstring injury, he spent three weeks on the DL and posted a career-worst 4.60 ERA during the regular season, but he fared better in the postseason, save for an early exit against the Red Sox in Game 3 of the ALCS at Fenway Park; his 7.2 innings in Game 4 of the World Series against the Braves helped New York complete a sweep to sew up its second of three straight championships.

Clemens’ stint with the Yankees extended four more seasons. Though not as consistently dominant as he was in Toronto, he helped the Joe Torre-led team win pennants in 2000, ’01 and ’03. In the first of those years, he was knocked around in two Division Series starts by the A’s but responded with a 15-strikeout, one-hit shutout of the Mariners in the ALCS and eight innings of shutout ball in Game 2 of the World Series against the Mets. That latter performance was overshadowed by his bizarre confrontation with Mike Piazza, in which Clemens hurled a broken bat barrel across the slugger’s path as he ran down the first base line, with benches emptying and the tabloids having a field day.

Aided by outstanding run support (5.7 per game), Clemens won a sixth Cy Young with a 20–3, 3.51 ERA season in 2001, though his 5.7 WAR ranked fourth; teammate Mike Mussina (17–11, 3.15 ERA with an AL-high 7.1 WAR) got a raw deal, finishing fifth in the voting. Clemens struggled early in the postseason, totaling just 13.1 innings through his first three starts, but he hit his stride in the World Series. With the Yankees trailing the Diamondbacks two-games-to-none, he whiffed nine in seven strong innings and allowed just one run in a Game 3 win, then struck out 10 in 6.2 innings in Game 7, though New York ultimately lost.

Clemens entered the 2003 season seven wins shy of 300 for his career, and 91 strikeouts shy of 4,000. He collected wins in six of his first 10 starts while striking out 67 in 64.2 innings, but he was roughed up in his next two turns, and got poor run support in the one after. On the rainy night of June 13 against the Cardinals in Yankee Stadium, he attained both milestones, striking out Edgar Renteria to become just the third pitcher to 4,000 (after Nolan Ryan and Carlton), and throwing 6.2 innings of two-run ball with 10 strikeouts to become the 21st pitcher to reach 300 wins.

In the 2003 postseason, after a dud start in Game 7 of the ALCS against Boston, Clemens had a strong outing against the Marlins in Game 4 of the World Series, but the Yankees fell to Florida in six. At 41 years old, he announced his retirement, but when friend and former Yankees teammate Andy Pettitte signed with the Astros, he was lured back. Pitching in the National League for the first time, Clemens recovered some of his dominant form, winning his seventh and final Cy Young award in 2004 by going 18–4 with a 2.98 ERA and 218 strikeouts, his highest total since 1998. He won yet another ERA crown with a 1.87 mark in 2005. After helping Houston come within one win of a World Series berth in 2004 (his six-inning, four-run performance in Game 7 of that year’s NLCS wasn’t a career highlight), the team won the pennant the following year. Alas, he had just one good postseason start out of three, plus a strong three-inning relief appearance that garnered a win in the Astros’ 18-inning Division Series clincher against the Braves. He left the World Series opener against the White Sox after just two innings due to a hamstring strain, and Chicago eventually completed the four-game sweep.

Convinced that his aging body wouldn’t withstand the grind of another full season, Clemens continued to dabble with retirement, sitting out spring training and making 19 starts with a 2.30 ERA for Houston in 2006 and 17 with a 4.18 ERA for the Yankees in ’07. But any designs the 45-year-old had on furthering his career were put on hold when he was named in the Mitchell Report that December. Based upon information obtained from McNamee, who served as the Blue Jays’ strength and conditioning coach in 1998 and then moved on to the Yankees in 2000, the report alleged that Clemens began using Winstrol (a steroid) in mid-’98 after learning about its benefits from Toronto teammate Jose Canseco, and that he used various steroids and human growth hormone in 2000-01. McNamee, who also served as a personal trainer for Clemens and Pettitte in the 2001–02 offseason, claimed to have administered multiple injections to Clemens and to have stored the used syringes in empty beer cans. In 2012, Pettitte testified that Clemens admitted using HGH in a conversation the two pitchers had in either 1999 or 2000.

Clemens challenged the findings in the Mitchell Report, and two months later, he had his day in front of Congress. Seeking to cast doubt on the report and on the testimonies of both Pettitte and McNamee, the Rocket and his counsel went a weak 1-for-3, painting a picture of McNamee as a fairly disreputable character seeking to avoid jail time of his own. The Department of Justice opened a perjury investigation into Clemens’ testimony, and in August 2010, he was charged with six felony counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to Congress. The case dragged on until June 2012, when he was acquitted on all counts.

In the midst of the Mitchell/McNamee mess, in May 2008 the New York Daily News reported that Clemens had carried out “a long-term affair” with country singer Mindy McCready that dated back to when the pitcher was 28 years old and the singer just 15. The pitcher denied that the relationship was sexual, and in November 2008, the singer told Inside Edition that they met when she was 16, and that the relationship didn’t turn sexual until “several years later.”

Allegations that Clemens had other affairs surfaced as well, and made their way into McNamee’s defamation suit against him, which was settled by the pitcher’s insurance company in 2015. “Roger Clemens did not contribute a penny to the settlement,” said Clemens’ attorney, Chip Babcock. “Nor did he release any claims against Mr. McNamee.” Still, that appears to have ended the matter.

Meanwhile, in the summer of 2013, at age 50, Clemens mounted a brief comeback with the Sugar Land Skeeters of the independent Atlantic League, with son Koby catching him in two starts. Despite widespread speculation that he would pitch another game for the Astros — thereby bumping his Hall of Fame eligibility back another five years, distancing himself from the controversy — he did no such thing.

…

There’s little question Clemens has the numbers — traditional and sabermetric — for the Hall of Fame. His 354 wins rank ninth all-time, the second-highest total of the post-1960 expansion era behind Maddux’s 355. His 4,672 strikeouts rank third behind the totals of Ryan and Randy Johnson. His seven Cy Young awards are two more than Johnson, three more than Carlton or Maddux, and at least four more than any other pitcher. He led his leagues in wins four times and placed in the top five seven other times. He led in ERA seven times and finished in the top five on five other occasions. He led in strikeouts four times, ranked second five times, and was in the top five 16 times.

Clemens was similarly dominant in WAR, leading his league seven times, and placing in the top five another six. His 139.2 career WAR ranks third behind Walter Johnson (164.5) and Young (163.8), and is nearly twice the total of the average Hall of Fame starter (73.3); the only other post-World War II pitchers above 100 are Seaver (109.9), Maddux (106.6), Randy Johnson (101.1), and Warren Spahn (100.1). Clemens’ adjusted peak WAR — that is, his best seven seasons, each prorated to a maximum of 250 innings so as not to overly favor ancient pitchers who threw hundreds more — of 64.0 ranks second, behind only Walter Johnson. His 102.6 S-JAWS ranks third behind Walter Johnson and Young; Seaver is the only postwar pitcher within 20 points of his 102.8. To borrow Bill James’ praise of Rickey Henderson: Cut Clemens in half and you’d have two Hall of Famers.

For those who want to play the “He was a Hall of Famer before he touched the stuff” game, consider just what Clemens did in Boston. In 13 seasons pitching for the Red Sox, he notched 192 wins with a 3.06 ERA (144 ERA+) and 2,590 strikeouts; his JAWS line for those years alone (80.7 total/60.0 peak/70.4 JAWS) would be above the Hall of Fame standard for starting pitchers, ranking 24th, just below Robin Roberts (70.5). That ranking doesn’t even include Clemens’ Cy Young-winning 1997 performance with Toronto, around which there are no PED allegations.

The PED allegations do muddy the waters, but to these eyes, the timing matters. Clemens never failed a drug test, and the Mitchell Report’s accounts date to the time before MLB began testing players for PEDs or penalizing them; Clemens is not known to have used them once testing was in place. It’s also worth noting that the findings of the report didn’t hold up in court, with the credibility of star witness McNamee of major concern. That’s not to say that Clemens is as pure as the driven snow. He’s a reflection of the era in which he pitched, and by the guidelines I’ve laid out in this series, I don’t see anything in his case that puts him in the class of Rafael Palmeiro, Ramirez, or Rodriquez, whose Hall of Fame-caliber numbers were trumped — at least in the eyes of the voters — by clear violations of MLB’s drug policy (failed tests in the case of Palemeiro and Ramirez, obtaining steroids through the Biogenesis Clinic in the case of Rodriguez).

The candidacies of Clemens and Bonds started slowly, but between the 2016 elimination of long-inactive voters from the Hall of Fame electorate and the election of Selig via the 2017 Today’s Game Era ballot, they appeared to reach a turning point. The Today’s Game committee is different from the BBWAA, but multiple BBWAA writers served on it, as did eight Hall of Famers. Selig received 15 out of 16 votes despite the stains on his résumé, namely a role in three years worth of collusion against free agents (which yielded a $280 million award to the players union) and the blind eye he turned to the proliferation of PEDs as commissioner. Any assertion otherwise on the latter front rings false given that, as acting commissioner, Selig must have known about the FBI’s Operation Equine, an early 1990s investigation into PED distribution that included McGwire and Canseco. Special agent Greg Stejskal told baseball’s security chief, Kevin Hallinan, about the investigation in 1994, and it defies belief that such a revelation wouldn’t have made its way to Selig. Despite all of that, the Today’s Game committee felt that Selig met the “integrity, sportsmanship, [and] character” standards within the voting rules, which some BBWAA voters have used to justify voting against Bonds, Clemens et al.

Susan Slusser, then the Oakland A’s beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and a past BBWAA president, was one of the first to grasp the ramifications of Selig’s election, tweeting, “Senseless to keep steroid guys out when the enablers are in Hall of Fame. I now will hold my nose and vote for players I believe cheated.” NY Sports Today’s Wallace Matthews, the New York Post’s Ken Davidoff, the New York Daily News’ Peter Botte and the Boston Globe’s Peter Abraham were among those voicing similar sentiments regarding the hypocrisy of electing Selig but not at least the pre-testing era candidates. Of that quintet, only Abraham and Davidoff had voted for Bonds and Clemens in 2016; all but Mathews (who abstained from voting) included him in 2017.

That Clemens and Bonds reached the 50% threshold — a strong indicator of future election — in 2017 is what likely compelled Morgan to send his letter to voters. As I noted in Bonds’ profile, Morgan’s belated, simplistic, and disingenuous plea ignored baseball’s long history of amphetamine abuse — and amphetamines are most definitely PEDs, illegal without a prescription since 1970 — and the presence of such users in the Hall of Fame, to say nothing of the strong possibility that steroid users have already been inducted as well.

The letter slowed both candidates’ momentum. Even while newcomers supported Clemens at about an 84% clip from 2017 onward, those votes were largely offset by attrition, while the holdouts were shielded by the Hall’s 2017 decision to reject a BBWAA resolution to publish every ballot (two weeks after the election results were announced). A typical cycle saw about a 20-point spread between published ballots and private ones; in 2022, Clemens’ final year on the writers’ ballot, 68.3% of public ballots included him — still not enough for election — but only 51.4% of unpublished ones did (the splits were similar for Bonds):

One year after their eligibility on the BBWAA ballot lapsed, Clemens and Bonds were both included on the 2023 Contemporary Baseball ballot, a fluke of timing that the Hall would make a rule to prevent going forward, instituting a one-year waiting period. Pulling from what I wrote for Bonds’ profile:

Much of the focus was on first-year candidate Fred McGriff, whose 493 career homers and other accomplishments had been largely overshadowed during his 2010–19 BBWAA ballot run by the likes of McGwire, Bonds, and other sluggers; he received less than 25% of the vote in his first nine cycles before jumping to 39.8% in 2019. Not only did the Hall tip its hand towards McGriff by including former teammate Greg Maddux, Chipper Jones, and Kenny Williams, as well as former Blue Jays executive Paul Beeston, on the committee (though Jones was scratched due to illness) — a move that fit in with various committees’ long tendency towards cronyism — it included Morris, Sandberg, and Thomas. The result was the unanimous election of McGriff; better-than-expected showings by Don Mattingly and Dale Murphy, two short-career candidates who hadn’t escaped “less than” territory in three previous Era Committee appearances, but who have been regarded as particularly wholesome relative to the PED users; and four or fewer votes for Bonds, Clemens, Albert Belle and the PED-linked Palmeiro. It wasn’t hard to spot the Hall’s fingerprints on the results, to say the least.

In March of this year, the Hall introduced its rule making any candidate receiving five or fewer votes on an Era Committee ballot ineligible for the next cycle three years later; any candidate for whom that happens twice “will not be eligible for future ballot consideration.” The 2023 results do not count towards that total, but with the Hall having demonstrated its ability to affect the proceedings with its choice of panelists, the permanence of that outcome is disconcerting, even given the board’s tendency to adjust its Era Committee rules every few years. It’s not hard to envision the board seeing this as its off-ramp from considering Bonds, Clemens, et al. One skipped cycle wouldn’t be the worst thing, as the cohort of candidates who made their greatest marks on baseball from 1980 onward has deserving ones who can’t buy ballot space — Lou Whitaker and Dwight Evans haven’t gotten another shot since finishing ahead of Mattingly and Murphy on the 2020 Modern Baseball ballot. Still, since no Committee election takes place in a vacuum — the candidates are in competition for ballot space that with the 2022 format change became even more scarce — two-and-through feels a bridge too far.

Warts and all, I still support the candidacies of Clemens and Bonds. Having spent over two decades writing about PEDs in baseball, I’m firm in my belief that pre-testing era players should not be singled out for a complete institutional failure where the owners profited far more than the likes of McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, and Clemens.

However, I now have a problem. With every election cycle, as I take readers through the cases of each candidate, I keep one eye on the amount of space I have on my ballot, actual (as in the case of BBWAA ballots, since I’m a voter) or theoretical. Through the first seven candidates of this series, I’ve recommended Bonds and Gary Sheffield on the basis of their playing careers (Sheffield’s PED allegations date to the pre-testing era as well), and Fernando Valenzuela for his role as a modern-day pioneer who brought generations of Mexican American and Latino fans to baseball. I’m recommending Clemens as well, but that’s four candidates, and voters only have three spaces. Since I don’t actually get to cast a vote, my problem is purely hypothetical, but if forced to choose, a combination of pragmatism and personal preference has me leaning towards including Bonds, the all-time home run leader; Sheffield, whose PED links include a plausible explanation that may make him an easier choice for some (he testified before a grand jury that he did not know that the cream given to him by trainer Greg Anderson was an illegal steroid); and Valenzuela, whose case as a pioneer is unlike any other on the ballot and who also happens to be an all-time favorite player of mine. That would leave Clemens the odd man out on my ballot, though I could certainly understand a Bonds-Clemens-Valenzuela choice under the circumstances. My hope would be that if Bonds gets in this time, voters would include Clemens the next, though in actuality I suspect both will fall far short on this ballot.

As I said regarding Bonds, the Hall of Fame has never been a church. A pantheon that has room for Selig alongside segregationists, amphetamine users and other miscreants can surely withstand the inclusion of Roger Clemens, perhaps the game’s greatest pitcher of all time.