Roger Clemens joined Big Cat, PFT Commenter and Shane Bacon on Pardon My Take this week, and the headline moment was Clemens finally getting into it on the Mike Piazza bat incident from Game 2 of the 2000 World Series. This is the play that's followed him for over 2 decades: Piazza's bat shatters on an inside fastball, the barrel skitters toward the mound, and Clemens picks it up and fires it toward Piazza as he's running down the line. MLB fined him $50,000 for it, and it's been relitigated basically every time these 2 cross paths in public since.
Clemens sat in the PMT chair and walked through his side of the bat-throwing sequence.
The backstory matters here. Clemens had hit Piazza in the head with a pitch earlier that same 2000 season, a beaning that gave Piazza a concussion and knocked him out of the All-Star Game. So by the time October rolled around and the Yankees and Mets were playing in a Subway Series for the first time since 1956, every pitch Clemens threw at Piazza was going to get read as retaliation, intentional or not. Clemens has always maintained he thought the bat shard was the ball and reacted on instinct. Whether or not you buy that, Joe Torre has said for years that Clemens was so shaken up by the fallout that he cried about it afterward.
But the bat toss wasn't the only pitching secret Clemens gave up on the show. He also got into how easily hitters can pick up a pitcher's tells, and what he personally did to keep hitters from figuring out what was coming next. For a 7-time Cy Young winner who made a living off deception and location, that's the kind of granular, insider stuff that fans have been dying to hear for years.
Clemens explained how pitchers give away pitch-tipping tells and what he did to disguise his own.
It's a big get for PMT in a week already stacked with content, with the guys also covering Home Run Derby buzz, MLB All-Star Week, and Spain's World Cup semifinal win over France. Landing a guest with Clemens's resume, and getting him to actually go there on Piazza instead of dodging it like he usually does, is the kind of interview that cuts through a crowded sports calendar.
Big Cat teased the episode rundown himself, previewing the Clemens sit-down alongside Shane Bacon's Open Championship breakdown and the usual Hot Seat/Cool Throne and Mount Rushmore bits.
Big Cat laid out the full episode rundown, with Clemens as the headline guest.
Clemens rarely does long-form interviews where he's asked to relive the Piazza moment in detail rather than just give the same 3-sentence non-answer he's leaned on for 20-plus years. Getting him on a couch with Big Cat and PFT, joking around before pivoting into the real stuff, is exactly the format that gets a guy like that to actually open up. Whether this becomes the new go-to Clemens interview clip whenever the Piazza incident resurfaces remains to be seen, but it's certainly the most detailed he's been on it in a while.