America at Large/George Kimball: Roger Clemens had just finished his warm-up pitches and was about to face the first batter of the game on Monday afternoon when umpire Bill Miller, at the direction of Boston manager Grady Little, approached the mound, and after a cursory inspection of the baseball glove the pitcher was wearing, ordered him to replace it - immediately, we can likely assume, increasing its eBay value by a $100,000 or so.
Just 20 pitchers in baseball history have won 300 games, and Clemens, seeking to become the 21st, had made no small production out of it. Now in his fifth season with the Yankees, the 40 year-old Texan was pitching before a holiday-afternoon sellout crowd of 55,093, most of whom had braved a two-hour rain delay in order to witness the historic event. Clemens had at his own expense flown in not only his entire extended family, but a number of old friends and former team mates as well.
That the quest for 300 would come against the Red Sox, the team in whose employ he won his first 192 games before departing somewhat rancorously for Toronto seven years ago, only enhanced the drama, as did the fact that the upstart Boston team had arrived in the Bronx occupying first place in the American League East, a game-and-a-half ahead of the uncharacteristically slumping Yankees.
Clemens, probably on the advice of his agents, had decided to honour the occasion by wearing a specially-tailored glove. A patch commemorating the event, with the number "300" embossed in gold on a white background, had been sewn onto the black glove. It was to the patch that Little objected.
The next morning several New York newspapers echoed the complaint of Clemens' Yankee team mates that the Red Sox manager had been nit-picking by complaining about the glove, but a cursory glance through the baseball rule book confirms that it was in direct violation of at least three regulations Rule 1.11 (e) clearly states that "No part of the uniform shall include a pattern that imitates or suggests the shape of a baseball". Rule 1.15 (a) stipulates that "The pitcher's glove shall be uniform in colour, including all stitching, lacing and webbing". And Rule 1.15 (b) specifically says that "No pitcher shall attach to his glove any foreign material of a colour different from the glove".
In other words, umpire Miller should have been duty-bound to order Clemens to lose the glove even if the Red Sox hadn't complained about it.
Since the Red Sox proceeded to shell Clemens in a game they won 8-4, thus postponing the assault on No 300 until next Sunday in Detroit, the matter would seem moot, but the lingering question becomes: What happens to the glove? Or gloves.
We have absolutely no way of knowing this to be true, but the well-founded suspicion of those more conversant with the vagaries of the sports memorabilia market is that Clemens' locker was probably overflowing with "No 300" gloves. Had he ordered as many as nine of them, for instance, he could have worn a different one each inning, and thus have been in a position to grandiosely donate one to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, one to the Yankees' trophy case, one to his agents, keep one for his own billiards room, and still have had enough left over to earn the equivalent of a year's salary by floating them on the memorabilia market.
Having the glove disqualified before the first pitch might have frustrated this plan, but it probably made the contraband glove (with an accompanying "certificate of authenticity" signed by Clemens) worth more to collectors than if he'd actually worn it in the game.
It is probably worth noting that a day after the umpire banned Clemens' No 300 glove, a pair of West Coast scoundrels named Patrick Hayashi and Alex Popov, who have spent the past 597 days locked in a bitter court battle with one another, jointly announced that they had hired Leland's, the memorabilia auctioneers, to dispose of the baseball with which Barry Bonds hit his record-breaking 73rd home run two years ago, and that, moreover, the auction would be conducted on the 25th June, on live television, as part of ESPN's SportsCenter.
When Bonds hit his historic home run at San Francisco's PacBell Park in September of 2001, it was caught, initially, by Popov, who lost control of the baseball in the subsequent scrum, after which it was retrieved by Hayashi.
The dispute over ownership wound up in court, where Judge Kevin McCarthy, in a Solomonic ruling, ordered the pair to either resolve the matter between them or dispose of the baseball and split the profits, which are expected to reach seven figures.
"I mean, once it became clear that the ball wasn't going to the Hall of Fame, or Bonds' glove compartment, we knew that good sense and dignity would finish tied for 15th again," wrote San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ray (Ratso) Ratto of the sordid affair.
"And that's fine. Good sense and dignity are overrated, anyway. Marty Appel, the PR man for Leland's, once held a news conference, while he was the PR man for the Yankees, to announce that pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson were swapping wives, and you can't buy that kind of publicity even with Catherine Zeta-Jones' 73rd home run ball."
You'd have thought that at the very least Hayashi and Popov would have acknowledged their venality, but at Tuesday's press conference the pair of them actually claimed that they were selling to the highest-bidding millionaire collector in order to "honour Barry Bonds". God knows who Clemens will claim he is trying to honour when the black glove with the white "300" patch turns up in the Sotheby's catalogue, but trust me, it will.
