Inning-by-inning runs, with totals for runs, hits and errors.
Team	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
BOS	0	0	0	0	4	0	1	0	0	5	10	2
CLE	1	0	0	3	0	1	0	2	–	7	12	0

IV · THE GAME · MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL

Roger Clemens

Pitcher · 15 May 1984 · Boston · Toronto · New York Yankees · Houston · 4 August 1962, Dayton, Ohio

Three hundred and fifty-four wins across twenty-four seasons, but the first appearance was a defeat in a near-empty stadium on a Tuesday night in May.

At a glance

Career: 709 games · 354 wins · 184 losses · 4,672 strikeouts · 3.12 ERA
Debut: 15 May 1984, aged 21, at Cleveland Municipal Stadium
Last game: 16 September 2007, for the New York Yankees
Seasons: 24 seasons · 1984–2007

Look closer

The debut was a loss, and a lopsided one in hits
On 15 May 1984 the Boston Red Sox made ten hits to Cleveland's twelve, committed two errors to Cleveland's none, and lost 7–5. The game took two hours and fifty-five minutes in front of 4,004 people. Cleveland scored once in the first, three times in the fourth, once in the sixth, and twice in the eighth. Boston's four runs in the fifth inning narrowed the gap briefly, but Cleveland never had to bat in the ninth — the dash in that half-inning means the home side was already ahead.
Two seasons stand apart from the rest
In 1986 Clemens won twenty-four games and lost four, with an earned run average of 2.48 across 254 innings. In 2005, nineteen years later, he won thirteen and lost eight, with an ERA of 1.87 across 211.1 innings. Those are the two lowest ERAs in the table. The 1986 season also produced 238 strikeouts and ten complete games; the 2005 season produced 185 strikeouts and one complete game. The gap between them is the entire shape of the career: the Boston years from 1984 to 1996, two with Toronto, five with the Yankees, then three with Houston.
Complete games fell away after the middle of the career
The Boston years from 1984 to 1996 show 107 complete games across 381 starts. The seasons from 1997 to 2007 show eleven complete games across 326 starts. In 1987 and 1988 Clemens completed eighteen games and then fourteen; in 2001, 2002 and 2003 he completed none at all. The shift is not gradual — it happens in the move from Boston to Toronto in 1997, when complete games drop from six to nine to five to one, and then mostly vanish. Whether this reflects a change in how Clemens was used or a change in how starting pitchers generally were used is not recorded here.

The story

On 15 May 1984 Roger Clemens made his major-league debut at Cleveland Municipal Stadium in front of 4,004 people. It was a night game. Boston made ten hits to Cleveland's twelve, committed two errors to Cleveland's none, and lost 7–5. Cleveland scored in four separate innings — one run in the first, three in the fourth, one in the sixth, two in the eighth — while Boston's scoring was more concentrated: four runs in the fifth, one in the seventh. The game took two hours and fifty-five minutes. Cleveland never batted in the ninth, which is why that half-inning shows a dash rather than a zero: the home side does not bat when it is already ahead.

The career that followed lasted twenty-four seasons and produced 354 wins, 184 losses, 4,672 strikeouts, and an earned run average of 3.12 across 4,916.2 innings. Clemens started 707 of the 709 games he appeared in, completed 118 of them, and recorded 46 shutouts. He played for four clubs: the Boston Red Sox from 1984 to 1996, the Toronto Blue Jays in 1997 and 1998, the New York Yankees from 1999 to 2003, and the Houston Astros from 2004 to 2006, with a final season back at the Yankees in 2007.

The season-by-season table shows where the numbers rise and where they fall away. The Boston years include two seasons with twenty or more wins: twenty-four wins in 1986 and twenty-one in 1990. The 1986 season also produced an ERA of 2.48 and 254 innings pitched, the highest total in any single season. The Toronto seasons, 1997 and 1998, show twenty-one wins and then twenty, with ERAs of 2.05 and 2.65. The Yankees years are less consistent: the win totals range from twenty in 2001 to thirteen in 2000 and 2002, and the ERAs range from 3.51 to 4.60. The Houston seasons show eighteen wins in 2004, thirteen in 2005, and seven in 2006. The 2005 season produced an ERA of 1.87 across 211.1 innings, the lowest figure in the table.

Strikeouts remained high across most of the career. The 1988 season produced 291 strikeouts, the 1997 season 292, the 1998 season 271. Even in the 2006 season Clemens struck out 102 batters in 113.1 innings. The last season, 2007, was shorter — eighteen games, seventeen of them starts, 99 innings — and ended on 16 September.

Complete games, by contrast, fell away sharply after the middle of the career. The Boston years from 1984 to 1996 show 107 complete games; the seasons from 1997 to 2007 show eleven. In 1987 Clemens completed eighteen games, in 1988 fourteen. By 2001, 2002 and 2003 he completed none at all. Whether this reflects a change in how Clemens pitched, how he was managed, or how starting pitchers generally were used in the later part of the period is not recorded in the statistics themselves.

Why it mattered then

A pitcher who could work deep into games and strike out batters at a high rate was valuable in any era, but the way that value was deployed changed across the span of this career. In the mid-1980s a starting pitcher was expected to finish what he started when the game was going well: Clemens completed eighteen games in 1987, fourteen in 1988. By the early 2000s that expectation had shifted. Clemens made thirty-three starts in 2001 and completed none of them, thirty-three starts in 2003 and completed one. The strikeouts remained — 213 in 2001, 190 in 2003 — but the innings were distributed differently. Whether this was a change in Clemens or a change in how managers used their starters, the table does not say. What it does show is that a pitcher could remain effective across both models: the 2001 season produced twenty wins and three losses, the 2005 season an ERA of 1.87. The career spanned not just twenty-four seasons but two different ideas of what a starting pitcher was supposed to do.

Why it matters now

The career total of 354 wins is a count that no active pitcher is close to matching, not because talent has declined but because the role has changed. A win requires a starting pitcher to work at least five innings and leave with the lead intact, and modern starters are pulled earlier and more often than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. Clemens completed 118 games across his career; in recent seasons entire leagues have sometimes completed fewer than twenty in a year. The strikeout total, 4,672, is easier to approach under current usage patterns, because strikeouts accumulate whether a pitcher works five innings or seven. But the win total is a relic of a different structure, and it will likely remain one. The career is a marker not just of what one pitcher did but of what pitchers generally were asked to do, and how that ask changed while he was still playing.

The surprising detail

The two seasons with the lowest earned run averages are nineteen years apart. In 1986 Clemens posted a 2.48 ERA across 254 innings; in 2005 he posted a 1.87 ERA across 211.1 innings. The 1986 season came in his third year, when he was twenty-three and twenty-four years old; the 2005 season came in his twenty-second year, when he was forty-two and forty-three. The gap between them is the entire middle of the career, and the later figure is lower than the earlier one. Whether this reflects changes in league-wide offensive levels, changes in how Clemens was used, or something else is not recorded here, but the raw figures sit oddly together: the pitcher's lowest ERA came closer to the end than to the beginning.

What is disputed

The statistics here come from the MLB Stats API and represent the league's current official totals. Scoring practices and statistical definitions changed across the twenty-four seasons covered, and some categories were compiled retrospectively from contemporary game records. The figures are those published by Major League Baseball today, not independently recomputed.

Remember this

354 wins across twenty-four seasons, but the debut was a loss in front of 4,004 people at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

Test yourself

Boston scored four runs in the fifth inning of the debut game but still lost 7–5. Using only the linescore, what explains why those four runs were not enough?

Go deeper

Image: Rdikeman at the English Wikipedia. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0. Source.

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