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Pedro and Roger have got a lot of nerve

Wallace Matthews

February 28, 2008

In the famous words of Curt Schilling, circa November 2001, Mystique and Aura weren't qualities the Yankees could rely on, merely "dancers at a nightclub."

Seven years later, the ladies of the night have left the building, replaced by two insidious gentlemen, Chutzpah and Hubris. These days, Chutzpah hovers over Port St. Lucie. Hubris has taken up residence in Kissimmee.

Chutzpah is having the audacity to murder your parents and then begging for leniency because you are an orphan. Hubris is actually believing you can get away with such a claim.

Right now, Pedro Martinez is Chutzpah. Roger Clemens is Hubris.

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In Mets camp, Martinez, fresh off the triumph of a good bullpen session, coyly dangles a feeler for a contract extension. Already, he has pocketed $42 million from the Mets, with another $14 million coming for 2008, and the next important game he pitches for them will be the first.

He hasn't been able to complete a full season since 2005. He is coming off rotator cuff surgery and will turn 37 on Oct. 25, or just about the time the Mets expect to be in the World Series. Will Pedro be there with them? Not likely, considering his past two seasons. Still, he throws a few practice pitches past cardboard cutouts and thinks he is entitled to a raise.

That, my friends, is chutzpah.

A hundred miles to the northwest, Roger Clemens churlishly chides reporters for following him to Astros camp. But he is the only one missing the story there, the one that says this season, The Rocket has a better chance of finding himself in a jail cell than a dugout. Yesterday, Congress asked the Justice Department to read Clemens' testimony and determine if he should be indicted for perjury.

"Wow," Clemens contemptuously says to reporters seeking a comment, "You guys need to get a life."

That, my friends, is hubris. Or, chutzpah in its terminal form.

They couldn't be more different as people. Pedro is good-natured, fun-loving, not at all a wise guy or a bully. Clemens' facial expressions run the gamut from glower to glare, and he has never met a (smaller) man, or woman for that matter, he couldn't try to intimidate.

And yet one quality they share is an incredible sense of entitlement, the unshakeable belief that because they once were great pitchers that the world now owes them something, in perpetuity.

For Pedro, it is the relatively harmless desire for one more fat contract. For Clemens, it is the absurd insistence that despite having potentially broken the laws of baseball and the United States, he should be allowed to "move forward," modern baseball parlance for "just let me get away with it."

Both, of course, had plenty of enablers along the way. Coming off the Art Howe debacle, the Mets needed Pedro the way baseball needed steroids after the 1994 work stoppage. He was a goodwill gesture to their fans, a means to show them they meant business. And, oh yeah, a way to sell a few season tickets. The last thing the Mets expected was to get much real pitching out of him, and they were absolutely right.

But now, Pedro thinks his past performances, which are now way back in his past, entitle him to one more winning ticket in the Fred Wilpon Lottery. Thankfully, Omar Minaya, whose hurry-up-and-wait attitude landed the Mets Johan Santana, seems to be pursuing the same strategy with Pedro.

"I think it's fair that we at least allow some time for him to pitch," Minaya told our David Lennon on Tuesday. In other words, let's see where he is come Memorial Day. In the rotation or on the DL?

Over the past five years, Clemens has had Drayton McLane and, of course, George Steinbrenner, to reinforce his own feelings of invincibility. When a guy hands him $18 million for a half-season of work, you can't blame Clemens for thinking he can do whatever he wants, whenever he feels like it, including lie under oath to a congressional committee.

When Pedro says he's "going fishing" in the offseason, he's not talking trout. He's fishing for offers. It may be a veiled threat, but it's a threat just the same. Lock me up now, he is telling the Mets, or you may not get a chance after the season is over. Now that's chutzpah.

Clemens, on the other hand, thinks he's never going to be locked up, no matter what he does, what he says (or doesn't say), what he lies about. When he tells the media to "get a life," he misremembers that covering the actions of a potential felon is still a far more honorable way to live than actually being one.