Roger Clemens: I Would Wear Red Sox Hat If Elected to Hall

Roger Clemens apparently never read Thomas Wolfe. He thinks he can go home again in a Red Sox hat.

On Thursday, Clemens was interviewed on 98.5 The Sports Hub’s “Toucher & Rich,” and was asked which hat would he wear if he were elected to the Hall of Fame. Clemens replied, “It would obviously be a Boston (Red Sox) hat. That’s where I got my start and my nickname. It’s where I grew up.”

Asked later on the Boston show about his lack of support in Hall of Fame voting, widely attributed to charges that he used PEDs in his career, leaving him stuck receiving no more than 37.6% of the vote, Clemens said:

I’m not worried about it. I don’t confuse my career with my life, or refuse to let one person define what who I am as a person. The guys that are voting are great. It’s their opinion and they have a right to do what they want to do. I have zero control over it. I know how I did it; I did it right. I did it to the fullest and I loved it. That’s all you can do as an athlete when you go out and perform not only for your teammates but your fans and the city you play for. “It’s an award. Go ask any of my teammates; that’s what means the most to me. I love that I got to play 13 years at Fenway Park, right there where Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski ran around. It was awesome. That’s something you can never take away from me. I don’t worry about rumors that are carried by haters or anything like that.

Clemens won 192 games in his thirteen years with the Red Sox, along with seven Cy Young Awards in his storied career in which he won 354 total games, has seven years left on the Hall of Fame ballot.

Boston fans, disillusioned with Clemens after he left for Toronto and then New York, watched bitterly in 1999 at the All-Star Game in Fenway Park during the “Greatest Players of the 20th Century” introductions, as Clemens, who had only been with the Yankees for three months, wore a Yankees cap, rather than wear the team he was most associated with, as the other players did.

Would Red Sox fans forgive Clemens?

“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood,” Thomas Wolfe famously wrote in You Can’t Go Home Again, “back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”