Tom Terrific and the Pheenom

By John Leo

In Boston, June brings the traditional end to the basketball and baseball seasons. The normal result is a Celtic triumph and a Red Sox collapse, but there are exceptions: sometimes the Celtics do not win, and every now and then the Red Sox schedule their collapse for July or even August. This year, however, in defiance of memory and common sense, Red Sox fans, those annually jilted romantics, are tempted to hope again. Here it is July, and the first- place Red Sox have not yet folded. Says Sportswriter Peter Gammons: "People are excited right now, but they don't want to give their heart and get burned."

In fact, getting burned is what being a Red Sox fan is all about. Many Bostonians will go to their graves muttering about Bucky Dent's pop-fly home run, Johnny Pesky's incompetent relay or the team's primal curse: the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees to raise money for damn-fool Broadway shows. Still, there is grudging ground for hope in 1986. Wade Boggs, baseball's best hitter, has been flirting with .400 all year. Boston's pitching staff has the best earned-run average in the league. Rich Gedman has turned out to be a catcher. Jim Rice is having one of his best years, and the arrival of Don Baylor from the Yankees has added punch and the first sign of clubhouse leadership in anyone's memory. To the amazement of all, the Sox in a mid-June visit to Yankee Stadium, usually a favored site for the yearly crack-up, swept three games and in Baltimore mugged the surging Orioles three in a row. Said Oriole Manager Earl Weaver: "I'm going to jump in the pool and hope I don't come up," perhaps the first time that Weaver has ever threatened suicide before the All-Star break.

Aside from averting the June swoon, the biggest story in Boston is the arrival, from vastly different trajectories, of two of the best pitchers ever to wear the Red Sox uniform: Roger Clemens, 23, and Tom Seaver, 41. Last week, two days after being traded from the Chicago White Sox, Seaver made his first start for Boston, labored mightily against the Blue Jays, and hung on to win, 9-7; it was his first victory since April 23. The next night Clemens pitched ( superbly against the same Jays, giving up three hits and striking out eight, but lost, 4-2; it was his first defeat of the year after 14 straight wins, one short of the American League record.

Clemens is a true pheenom, the first for Boston since Jim Lonborg, who won 22 in 1967, wrecked his career in a skiing accident and became a dentist. Clemens almost went the way of Lonborg: he missed much of last year with arm and shoulder injuries and after surgery began spring training throwing like an old man. By April 29, however, he threw hard enough to strike out 20 Seattle Mariners in a nine-inning game, breaking by one K a major-league record held by Seaver, among others. When Cooperstown asked for his glove, cap, uniform and spikes, Clemens phoned his family and said, "I'm in the Hall of Fame!" and promised an early visit to the baseball museum to observe his former equipment. With a fastball timed at 93-to-97 m.p.h., he has a legitimate shot at winning 30, a feat accomplished just once (Denny McLain in 1968) in more than a half-century.

Many in baseball have accepted the notion that Seaver and Clemens are very nearly the same person, separated only by rising and fading skills. Both are serious, straight-arrow college men with a boyish streak, power pitchers who push off the rubber violently for extra force. Seaver, the pitching world's most vocal apostle of leg power, relies on the muscles of his ample thighs and buttocks to launch his pitching motion. The difference is that Seaver, who came up in 1967, when power pitchers were still normal size, drives low and ends up with his right knee rubbing the ground. Clemens, at 6 ft. 4 in., is your basic huge modern pitcher who seems to be throwing straight down at the batter.

Seaver arrived in Boston bristling with modesty. At a press conference, he even made a winning lurch toward self-abasement (he has pitched "like an idiot" lately, he said, taking note of his absent-minded efforts on the mound while trying to escape the White Sox). After his first game in a Boston uniform that night, he led the charge out of the dugout to congratulate his victorious teammates. A former student of public relations at the University of Southern California, he presumably knows that no one wears a leper's bell quite so loud as a newly acquired Hall of Fame pitcher in his 40s with a 2- and-6 record. The truth seems to be that Seaver was imported partly, perhaps mostly, as a talisman, a real-life Series winner in Red Sox dress. Significantly, he came in exchange for Outfielder Steve ("Psycho") Lyons, who spent most of the year as an evil omen, once committing the final out of a game attempting to steal third base with the tying run at first and Wade Boggs at bat.

On arrival, what would Seaver say to Clemens? Just two things, replied the aging superstar: "At home, I'll tell him what time the game starts. On the road, I'll tell him what time the bus leaves." This was an artful reference to Tom Terrific's supposed ability to wreck a pitching prospect by offering helpful advice. At Cincinnati, he was accused of turning all the young pitchers into leg-pushing little Seavers. The charge was hotly denied by John McNamara, manager of the Reds from 1979 to 1982 and now manager of the Red Sox. In Chicago, a fine pitching staff did indeed fall apart, though apparently without any help from Seaver. Still, the fear of Seaver's destroying Clemens with pitching tips fits well enough as a typical Red Sox nightmare. "Say, Roger, in your loss the other day, I noticed you were opening up too quickly. When your mechanics are correct--well, here, let me just show you . . ."