King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Roger Clemens stays put while Greg Maddux goes to the N.L. West race. Do great players "deserve" to finish their careers with contending teams?

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Aug. 2, 2006 | Do all-time great players somehow "deserve" to finish their careers with good teams, toiling in pennant races? Is it somehow inappropriate for them to play their last games in half-empty ballparks, far from the excitement of October?

I'm wondering these things in the wake of one of the many rumored blockbuster trades that didn't happen Monday, the Houston Astros sending Roger Clemens to a contender, especially the Boston Red Sox but also possibly the New York Yankees or Texas Rangers. The Astros are five games and eight teams away from the nearest playoff spot.

Jayson Stark of ESPN.com wrote an interesting column about the non-deal, arguing that Astros owner Drayton McLane had failed to, as the headline put it, "do the right thing for Rocket."

Citing multiple sources who said a trade of Clemens had been discussed, Stark writes that all McLane had to do was order the trade because it was the right thing to do.

"The owner easily could have done for Clemens what the Cubs did Monday for Greg Maddux," Stark writes, referring to the trade that sent the other active 300-game winner from Chicago to the Los Angeles Dodgers. "There are times when certain people deserve to be rescued from their sinking cruise liners. This year, for those two living legends, was one of those times."

Stark commends McLane for his optimism in apparently thinking that the Astros aren't done, that they can rescue this apparently lost season the way they rescued the last two.

But if that optimism turns out to be unjustified, "the only 343-game winner of the division-play era might well finish his career in a half-empty ballpark in Pittsburgh in the last week of September, for a team with no more to play for than the home team. That scene just won't feel right."

Let's put aside the question of whether the Astros really are toast, and also the question of whether McLane owes Clemens any favors beyond the pro-rated $22 million salary he's giving him to pitch for half a season after spending the spring flirting with the Red Sox, Yankees and Rangers.

Well, I guess you can see my answer to that last question is no.

And let's also put aside the idea that Clemens has already wound up his career in the spotlight of a pennant race and a postseason. Twice.

What I find fascinating is this idea that in some cosmic sense, transcendentally great players are somehow owed the chance to finish their careers in glamorous circumstances, rather than playing out the string on a losing team, in a half-empty ballpark in Pittsburgh, as Stark put it.

Sounds like the start of a country song, doesn't it? In a half-empty ballpark in Pittsburgh/Waitin' for a train ...

I digress.

I'm ready to say that a half-empty ballpark in Pittsburgh is a damn fine place for a great player to end his career.

Next page: Bigger winners than Clemens and Maddux have ended up in last place