The ceremony commemorating the Yankees' final game at the old stadium last September featured appearances by famous Yankees like Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Don Larsen, Reggie Jackson, Tino Martinez, Bernie Williams and David Wells, and a video celebrating the team's greatest players at each position. Conspicuously absent was Roger Clemens, the seven-time Cy Young Award winner, who boasted 354 career victories and 4,672 strikeouts on his stat sheet. It was as though Roger the Rocket — who had become a focus of a federal investigation — had never even pitched for the Bronx Bombers.

This was just one measure of how fast and far the heat-throwing pitcher had tumbled since he was prominently named in former Senator George J. Mitchell's December 2007 report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball.