Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Piazza are on their way to the Baseball Hall of Fame after receiving over 75 percent of votes from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America on Wednesday. One of the 30 other players who didn’t make it was pitcher Roger Clemens, who in his fourth year of eligibility received just 45.2 percent of the votes.
The 354-game winner, who along with Barry Bonds has been linked to steroids over the past decade, released a statement on yet another failed attempt to get into baseball’s most hallowed grounds, per Fox 26’s Mark Berman:
With six years of eligibility remaining, Clemens seems like someone who has come to the realization he will never make it into the hall. Instead, he still seems defensive about the issue of performance-enhancing drugs, directing his comments at former teammate Roy Halladay, who tweeted this earlier on Wednesday:
Halladay was teammates with Clemens for just one year, his rookie season in 1998, before Clemens went to the New York Yankees.
The topic of PEDs, though, is something that has gotten Clemens in trouble since 2005.
After being called out in Jose Canseco’s book, which claimed he took steroids, Clemens’ name surfaced two years later in 2007 as a part of the Mitchell Report, a document listing 77 baseball players—including fellow Hall of Fame candidate Bonds—who used PEDs.
Fighting the testimony made by trainer Brian McNamee, Clemens wound up on Capitol Hill in 2008, denying that he took any substances. An inquiry turned into perjury case in 2011, which was declared a mistrial later that year.
It’s these events that are keeping the seven-time Cy Young Award winner out of the Hall of Fame. In any other era, 354 wins, ranked ninth on baseball’s all-time list, and 4,672 strikeouts, ranked third, would be more than enough for an invitation to Cooperstown, New York. But now, Clemens will have to wait and see if his percentage will continue to climb high enough to eclipse the 75 percent mark.
Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com
Clemens timeline courtesy of the Washington Post.
Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com