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League Championship
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Monday, October 23
Incident continues to cast dark cloud over Series
By Jayson Stark
ESPN.com
NEW YORK -- It started out as the great Subway Series. It's turned into a Mike Tyson fight.
There have been other years where one swing of the bat changed the World Sereis. This time around, it's one heave of the bat.
One misguided heave of Mike Piazza's shattered bat by Roger Clemens on Sunday night, and now all of a sudden we need to send out a search party to comb the five boroughs of New York for any sign of actual baseball talk.
|  | | Clemens hurls the broken bat toward the first-base line and Mike Piazza. |
It's The Broken Bat That Devoured the World Series. And it continued to chew up everything in its path Monday.
The Yankees' 14-game World Series winning streak? What's that? The Mets losing two straight games started by Al Leiter and Mike Hampton? That must have happened when we weren't looking. El Duque looming as the Yankees go for the kill Tuesday in Game 3? Get back to us later.
No, it was all Roger all the time Monday, which made it a day for talk about investigations and explanations instead of runs, hits and errors.
And there was no bigger story than the revelation by the commissioner's office that it is "reviewing" the whole affair.
Sandy Alderson, MLB's executive vice president for baseball operations, said Monday that discipline czar Frank Robinson was "reviewing the situation to try to determine whether or not some action should be taken."
It might seem unusual for the powers that be to consider disciplinary action in the case of a player who wasn't even ejected by umpires at the time. But Alderson said that is something that actually "is done quite frequently during the season."
Alderson said Robinson would "review the umpires' reports, interview the umpires, interview the participants, review the videotape -- anything we can assemble that helps to explain the incident."
All of the interviewing was supposed to be done some time Monday. And Alderson promised "an announcement, one way or another . . . as soon as feasible."
"This review was not taken at the request of the Mets," he said. "It was initiated internally. Frank said (during the game) that this was the kind of situation he usually reviews."
Yankees manager Joe Torre reported he'd spoken to Robinson and said that if there was an investigation, "I'd welcome that." But he probably wouldn't welcome it as much as the Mets, a group that didn't sound Monday as if it were ready to throw Clemens a testimonial dinner.
Piazza, for one, suggested it might be time for Robinson to look at Clemens' behavior in general.
Asked whether other players should be "comfortable" with Clemens' "state of mind," Piazza said: "Now that I've had time to think about it, I do believe his actions should be looked at by Frank Robinson, or whoever is in charge of conduct."
Meanwhile, Piazza's teammate, Lenny Harris, said that if Clemens had pitched at Shea, "he definitely would have gotten one at the head."
"That's the way I think baseball should be played," Harris said. "You hit a guy in the head, we hit you in the head. An eye for an eye."
Then there was Mets reliever Turk Wendell, who said he wished manager Bobby Valentine had pulled his team off the field on the spot.
"It's too late to do anything now, in my eyes," Wendell said. "Someone said last night that Bobby should have taken us off the field and let the commissioner rule right then and there. It would have been a real gutsy thing to do. But I would have liked to have seen it done."
Valentine, though, nixed that idea, saying that to do that "would have been a farce to the game of baseball at any time -- in the World Series, in particular."
And he may be right. But the question is: Could it possibly have been any more of a farce than what happened -- or what this Series has turned into since that bat went flying?
Clemens continued to plead innocence Monday, but in such bizarre fashion that it was hard to believe he was talking about the same incident everyone else was.
In response to a questioner who mentioned that no one else could recall seeing anything like this, Clemens -- now back to his story that he was just trying to clear the bat fragments off the field for the batboys -- replied: "Oh, I've done it before. I've had times where the batboy would just run out and I'd give him the bat."
If you just heard that statement without having seen the pictures, you might envision a guy calmly gathering up bat debris to keep the field litter-free and take some strain off his buddies, the bat boys.
But if you did see the pictures -- and by this time, even most Americans living in caves have seen them -- you know the batboys were more likely to be ducking for shelter than running over to take the bat from their favorite assistant, Clemens.
Clemens again talked Monday about how emotional he was during the first inning -- because "everyone was waiting to see Mike hit off me, for some reason."
Yes. You heard that right. He really did say "for some reason."
When the media swarms around his locker persisted in examining the illogical holes in all his explanations, Clemens said: "I can't control how people react. I can just tell you what my feelings were. And you take it any way you want."
Hey, no problem there.
Finally, Clemens issued a sincere plea for World Series peace, saying: "I hope this doesn't become a distraction." But we think we recall the seismologists in '89 saying they hoped that earthquake didn't become a World Series distraction, too.
Down the hall, Piazza showed up at Shea on Monday expecting he could just work out and "move on." Next thing he knew, he was back in the interview room, picking the whole deal apart one more time.
Some of his teammates -- particularly Mike Hampton -- questioned why Piazza had been so, um, diplomatic when he started in Clemens' direction. But Piazza said that rather than invite him to bring it on, Clemens looked "unsure and confused and unstable." So he saw no reason to start launching haymakers.
After the infamous beaning in July, Clemens tried to call Piazza a few days later. But Piazza wouldn't return the call, saying Monday he "didn't think it was very sincere."
And if Roger is listening, Piazza said he's not interested in any apologies this time, either -- not that Clemens himself has determined there is anything to apologize for.
"An apology is only as good as where the source is coming from," he said. "So I could care less about an apology or anything else. Like I said, it was a stupid situation."
But it was a situation that wasn't getting any brighter Monday. In the clubhouse, his teammates tried to get past the subject, only to find it kept roaring back for more.
Harris said he wanted to mix it up with Clemens on the spot Sunday -- but never got the chance.
"I had three Yankees on top of me," he said. "He was like in the witness-protection program. So I couldn't get him."
But Harris was just as outraged over Clemens' act the day after as he was at the time.
"Mike plays the game like a professional," Harris said. "He wouldn't hurt a cricket. He's the nicest guy in this clubhouse. . . .Mike ain't never done nothing to Roger."
When someone replied that he had, actually -- that he'd hit a grand slam off Clemens in June -- Harris snapped: "Hey, a lot of guys hit grand slams off pitchers. They don't do that. But I guess Roger's different. He's special. You can't hit a home run off Roger Clemens -- because he'll hit you in the head."
But the pitcher Piazza caught Sunday night, Hampton, sounded disappointed that Piazza hadn't taken care of business when he had the chance. Asked if the Mets had shown professionalism by not throwing punches or getting themselves ejected, Hampton didn't exactly agree.
"I guess that's a good sign," he said. "Or a bad sign. I don't know."
Hmmm. How, he was asked, could it have been a bad sign?
"It's a challenge, man," said Hampton, who plays basketball with Clemens over the winter. "Different people react in different ways. Somebody throws a bat at me, I'm gonna fight. But some people aren't that way. Me, I'm a hot-tempered guy."
Asked why he didn't retaliate by plunking someone himself, Hampton shrugged: "The way I see it, it's between two guys. If something's going to be done, that's the time to do it."
And on and on it went, thundering on like this year's version of Jim Gray Meets Pete Rose. Hardly anyone seemed to notice that both teams worked out, announced pitching match-ups (it's Denny Neagle for the Yankees in Game 4, by the way), changed lineups (no Chuck Knoblauch at second base at Shea), etc. etc. etc.
But some signs of baseball life were detected by sporting biologists. Too bad you needed a microscope to see them, because the rest of the world was seemingly hypnotized by Roger-ama.
"This is supposed to be a real magical, special time," Wendell said. "But this has taken away from that."
"Unfortunately," Piazza said, "this is a situation that has taken prominence over the ballgame."
"This is the World Series," Clemens said. "I don't want this to be bigger than the games we're playing."
Yeah, well. No one does. But it's a little late now to get this particular yolk back inside this particular egg.
This mess is out there. Now it remains to be seen how each team deals with the task of either turning the page or using it for fuel.
"We can go on and on and talk all day about this," Harris said. "But we've got to throw it away. We're behind 2-0. We've got to find a way to win tomorrow instead of talking about yesterday."
But as all sides were discovering Monday, yesterday was a shadow hanging over them all -- and it was a shadow big enough to block out the sun, the World Series and the whole darned city that never sleeps.
Jayson Stark is a senior writer at ESPN.com.
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