Roger Clemens joined the ESPN Sunday Night Baseball broadcast crew last Thursday for Opening Night coverage between the defending World Series champion Astros and the Chicago White Sox.
On 670 The Score in Chicago, hosts Danny Parkins and Matt Spiegel weighed in with their thoughts on Clemens’ performance on the mic.
“I came away impressed by Roger Clemens as a broadcaster for someone who doesn’t do it,” Parkins said Friday on Parkins & Spiegel. “But also kind of struck by, this is Roger Clemens.”
Spiegel added that it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Clemens was going to shine in the booth.
“Clemens has always been a good talker,” he said. “And it’s once he got over that defensiveness from the fact that so many of the loathsome things that he’s done in terms of cheating and lying to Congress, he can talk baseball. He’s a guy that people have gone to for decades now to try and learn some of the things that he knows how to do.”
“He’s an authority figure, and he’s Roger Clemens,” Parkins added. “He’s one of the five best pitchers I’ve ever seen in my life. And he’s there and he’s fawning over an ace pitcher. It felt big.”
Spiegel noted that he found it interesting that Clemens joining the booth wasn’t such a turn off for him as it usually is when he tunes in to ESPN baseball coverage and hears Alex Rodriguez.
“I wonder why I’m not as disgusted by Roger Clemens as I am by Alex Rodriguez?” Spiegel questioned. “Because Roger cheated the game as viciously and as directly as A-Rod did.”
“I feel like there’s something a lot more honest about him as a cheater than there is about A-Rod as a cheater,” he added. “Is it also the fact that A-Rod is so weird and so plastic with the entirety of his personality? Is that what it is? I don’t know man.”
