When you’re a kid, certain things seem to be magnified — you’re attention to detail of your favorite baseball card; the batting stance or pitching motion of your favorite player; the details of the uniform of your favorite team, etc.
This pretty much describes much of my fandom when it came to Roger Clemens. I’m now a man pushing 40 years old, but I remember all of those things. The 1991 Topps Clemens card is my favorite, I can still mimic Clemens’ delivery, and his gray road jersey — the one with his name stitched onto a name plate — is one I always wanted.
As a kid I always dreamed of owning a jersey with the name “Clemens” emblazoned on the back, and unlike today, such items weren’t readily available. Yes, they existed, but my family could not afford them, and I really didn’t even know where to find them.
So I did the next best thing … I made my own. I used washable markers and various T-Shirts to create my own “jersey” which I wore while I played ball outside. It’s kind of silly to admit this many years later, but this was what I did to feel like I was closer to the game.
I followed Clemens as a he went from my favorite team to Toronto and through his first stint in New York. Hell, I was there in Oakland on Opening Day 1999 when The Rocket took the mound for the first time as a Yankee — it was bitter sweet seeing him as a Yankee, but it was still special. During that time I still didn’t own a Clemens jersey or even a shirsey.
But in 2004, after Clemens signed in Houston, I was able to afford my own jersey, an authentic stitched jersey purchased via MLB.com. It was expensive, but the jersey was the first one I owned with his name on it — and it was authentic, not a knock-off sold on eBay by a mass seller.
While that jersey was and is still awesome, it didn’t quite scratch the itch from my childhood. I still wanted a Red Sox jersey. In the years since my youth, there have been many real and fake Clemens jerseys for sale, but many of them were the 1986 version that featured just his number, or the home white jersey which also was just a jersey number on back. What I wanted was that gray road jersey with his name on a name plate stitched onto the back. And while I have seen one or two offered for sale in the past, one of them was clearly a newer fake with wrong materials, and the other was not my size … and it sold for crazy money.
But that all changed last week when I found an antiques dealer on eBay based out of Massachusetts who had for sale the jersey of my dreams … and it was in my size. Needless to say I won the jersey at auction — for way less than I expected to pay — and it has since arrived. And let me tell you it is glorious, better than I could have ever imagined. The jersey is authentic, and on top of that, it is an original Russell Athletic Diamond Collection jersey, not a recent knock-off or remake. I cannot express how happy this garment makes me right now.
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