Do steroid charges tarnish Clemens’ legacy? YEA: If true, they represent Rocket’s descent from grace

If all the charges are true, and if Roger Clemens loaded up on steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs toward the latter stages of his career, then yes, indeed, his legacy is tarnished.And that’s because he didn’t become great ? an immortal, if you will ? until after he left the Boston Red Sox.Clemens, at the end of 1996, had 192 wins and 111 losses. During his last four years with the Red Sox, he was a very ordinary 40-39, and he seemed to be heading toward – as Dan Duquette so ironically put it at the time – “the twilight of his career.”Obviously, the comment – made when Clemens was entering free agency – stung The Rocket. He signed with the Toronto Blue Jays and his career skyrocketed (if you’ll pardon the pun) from there. From the time he left the Red Sox until his retirement, he won another 162 games while losing only 73.What caused such a dramatic resurgence? The feeling always was that Clemens was so angry over Duquette’s comments that he reapplied himself with regards to conditioning, and got a whole lot smarter about pitching.But trainer Brian McNamee’s accusations really have to make you wonder. And so do a lot of other Clemens incidents – which can be seen now in an entirely different perspective.For example, Clemens, in 1990, blew up at umpire Gerry Cooney and got himself thrown out of an American League championship game against the Oakland Athletics. By 1990, Clemens had established himself as one of the great hotheads of our time, so – outrageous as it was – it wasn’t all that surprising.But now that McNamee has come forth with his charges, you wonder, don’t you?And how about the whole 2000 World Series incident when he picked up the broken end of Mike Piazza’s bat and threw it at him as he ran to first base? It may be too easy – and almost to the point of being libelous – to flat-out attribute these incidents to “roid rage,” but, come on now, you really do have to wonder.Clemens, with the Red Sox, was a very good pitcher who, if you judge him by the standards the Baseball Writers Association of America has established, hadn’t excelled consistently enough, or long enough, to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. He perhaps would have made it the same way as Jim Rice did, but it may have taken a few ballots to get him there.I say it’s what Clemens did after he left the Red Sox, when he seemed to get better with age (just like his boyhood idol Nolan Ryan), that put him in the elite category. At the age of 39, he won 21 games. And when he was 42, in 2004, he won 18.If those numbers were artificially induced, there’s no way you can make the claim that his legacy isn’t tarnished. Of course it is.There’s a school of thought that says none of this matters. Who cares if the players took steroids? If, by taking steroids, they entertained us better, and provided us more thrills, and gave us more things to talk about, then so what? Pro sports and entertainment are one and the same (thanks in good part to ESPN), so it’s all good. Right?Wrong. It may be all good for the moment. But baseball is a game rich in history, and even if you feel that sometimes the game takes itself way too seriously in that regard, it does, and should, treat its legacy with reverence. And how can you ever say Clemens compared favorably with the likes of Walter Johnson, Bob Feller, or even Nolan Ryan, if he bulked up artificially to climb into that stratosphere?Steve Krause is sports editor of The Item.