Whatever happened to…Matt Clement?

One of the last photos I took of Matt (from behind the screen, four rows behind home plate)

I have other venues in which I write, but this is the place where I write the most. It helps me get in a writing groove when I get stuck. At least, it usually does. I popped open the laptop tonight and found myself blocked. I wrote this post over at the Sox Sistahs blog (I wrote it there instead of here because I’m determined to get the sistahs back to writing more often!) to help unclog my brain…but it didn’t help much. So I’m looking around various sports sites and I stumble upon this story about Matt Clement. (From four days ago – sheez where the hell have I been?) The St. Louis Cardinals released him earlier this week.

Well, that sucks.

From the moment he joined the team in 2005, I liked Clement. He didn’t have an easy job…joining the rotation the season after the first World Championship in 86 years, and the world seemed to expect the least from him. After a meh season that included getting one in the ear from a Carl Crawford liner (totally irrationally, that incident made me dislike Crawford from that moment on. Yes, I know that Crawford didn’t do it on purpose. I KNOW it’s irrational!) Clement will probably be best remembered for pitching game 1 of the 2005 ALDS in Chicago. I have no desire to relive that game, so let’s just say it didn’t go well.

It went so poorly that I was convinced that the fans were going to terrorize the guy when he came back to Boston. I also figured he probably felt like hell about the whole thing. So I wrote him a letter. I know you all think I’m nutty, but I don’t make it a habit to write letters to players. Sure, we send the postcards, but I don’t sit down and write letters. The closest I’ve come lately is a blog entry I wrote when Kyle Snyder was released. (Which, admittedly, is one of my favorite pieces that I’ve ever written. It might not be the best written, but I wrote it with so much emotion that I was almost embarrassed by it and then thought “screw it, it’s staying” and I’m glad I did.)

With Clement, I took one look at this photo: it just killed me. My heart broke for the guy. So I sent him a letter. Basically saying, you can only do your best and sometimes your best isn’t good enough but that doesn’t make you a bad person, or unworthy of your position on the team. I have no idea if he even got it, but it made me feel better to write it.

Then Clement came back in ’06 and, pretty much, imploded. The media and the fans were convinced he was just a head case, affected, more deeply than he would publicly admit, by getting hit with the Carl Crawford line drive. I argued with many people in 2006 because I didn’t believe it. I was convinced there was something physical wrong with the guy that they weren’t finding. And as it turned out, I was right.

So Clement had his surgery and last year was, technically, a member of the Red Sox even though he never pitched an inning. He rehabbed and the St. Louis Cardinals were hoping his repaired arm would give their rotation a boost, but it wasn’t meant to be.

Matt Clement is a man without a team right now. Released because he’s been unable to get back to even close to what he was before his shoulder was injured.

Crap, that’s depressing.