Roger Clemens: Seven Cy Youngs and the Hall of Fame Debate

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 9 min read

Roger Clemens won 354 games, struck out 4,672 batters and took a record seven Cy Young Awards, yet he never reached the Hall of Fame. A look at the numbers, the allegations and the ballot history.

Roger Clemens won 354 games, struck out 4,672 batters, took seven Cy Young Awards and led the American League in the pitching Triple Crown categories twice, and he is not in the Hall of Fame. The historical record, which runs through the 2025 season, confirms every number in that sentence. No other pitcher has won more than five Cy Young Awards, and only two have more strikeouts. By the usual measures of a Hall of Fame pitcher, he is among the best ever.

The reason he is outside the building is a debate about what the numbers mean. Clemens was named in the 2007 Mitchell Report on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, denied it, and was acquitted in a federal trial in 2012. The Baseball Writers' Association of America, which votes on the Hall, kept him on the ballot for the full 10 years and never gave him the 75 percent he needed. This profile separates the career from the argument: first the numbers, then the allegations, then the votes.

From Ohio to Texas and the draft, 1962 to 1984

Roger Clemens was born on August 4, 1962, in Dayton, Ohio, and grew up in Texas. He is listed at 6 feet 4 inches and 205 pounds and threw and batted right-handed. The historical record shows two college stops, San Jacinto Junior College and the University of Texas, and the Boston Red Sox picked him in the amateur draft in the early 1980s. He made his major-league debut on May 15, 1984, and went 9-4 with a 4.32 earned run average and 126 strikeouts in 133 and a third innings as a rookie. In 1985 an arm injury limited him to 15 appearances and 98 and a third innings.

Neither year suggested what was coming. He was a power pitcher with a hard fastball and a split-fingered pitch. What the first two years did show was how often he struck batters out: 126 in 133 innings in 1984, 74 in 98 in 1985, a rate well above the league's.

Boston and the first three Cy Youngs, 1986 to 1992

His breakout season was 1986. Clemens went 24-4 with a 2.48 ERA and 238 strikeouts in 254 innings, won the Cy Young Award and the American League Most Valuable Player award, and was the All-Star Game MVP. In April of that year he struck out 20 Seattle batters in a nine-inning game, a nine-inning major-league record that he matched in 1996 with a second 20-strikeout game, against Detroit. Boston won the AL pennant that year and lost the World Series to the Mets in seven games.

He followed it with a 20-9 season and a second Cy Young in 1987, and 18-12 with 291 strikeouts in 1988. In 1990 he was 21-6 with a 1.93 ERA, and in 1991 he won a third Cy Young with an 18-10 record, 2.62 ERA and 241 strikeouts. In 1992 he went 18-11 with a 2.41 ERA. Between 1986 and 1992 he made five All-Star teams, struck out more than 200 batters in each of the seven seasons and never posted an ERA above 3.13.

The table below lists the seven Cy Young seasons in order.

The lean middle years in Boston, 1993 to 1996

The late Boston years were weaker. In 1993 he went 11-14 with a 4.46 ERA, his first losing season. He bounced back to 9-7 with a 2.85 ERA in the strike-shortened 1994 season, then had a 10-5, 4.18 year in 1995 and a 10-13, 3.63 season in 1996 with 257 strikeouts in 242 and two-thirds innings. The Red Sox let him go after 1996, with the general manager suggesting publicly that his best years were behind him.

Those years gave rise to the argument that Clemens was done. The record says otherwise: he struck out 257 batters in his final year in Boston, and his next two seasons would be among the best of his career.

Toronto: two Cy Youngs and two Triple Crowns, 1997 to 1998

Signed by the Blue Jays, Clemens went 21-7 with a 2.05 ERA and 292 strikeouts in 1997 and 20-6 with a 2.65 ERA and 271 strikeouts in 1998. He led the American League in wins, ERA and strikeouts in both seasons, which the historical record shows as a pitching Triple Crown, and he won the Cy Young Award in both years. The MLB Players Choice Outstanding Pitcher award, a vote of the players rather than the writers, also went to him in 1997 and 1998.

Winning the pitching Triple Crown in consecutive seasons is rare. Walter Johnson won three, but not in consecutive seasons. The only other pitchers on the historical list with back-to-back Triple Crowns are Pete Alexander (1915 and 1916), Lefty Grove (1930 and 1931) and Sandy Koufax (1965 and 1966). Through 2025, Clemens is the most recent pitcher to do it.

New York: the championship years, 1999 to 2003

The Yankees acquired him ahead of 1999. His first New York season was his worst in years, a 14-10 mark with a 4.60 ERA, but the club won the World Series, and it won again in 2000 while he went 13-8 with a 3.70 ERA. In 2001 he was 20-3 with a 3.51 ERA and 213 strikeouts and won his sixth Cy Young Award, although the Yankees lost that year's World Series. He went 13-6 in 2002 and 17-9 in 2003, announcing that the 2003 season would be his last, and the Yankees lost the 2003 World Series to Florida.

Those two rings are his only titles. His postseason line is 12-8 with a 3.75 ERA across 35 games, 34 of them starts, with 173 strikeouts in 199 innings. That ERA is higher than his regular-season 3.12, which is what you would expect when the opposition is playoff teams, and it makes him a very good postseason starter rather than a dominant one.

Houston: retirement, reversal and a seventh Cy Young, 2004 to 2006

Clemens did not retire. He signed with the Astros, in his adopted home state, in 2004, in his early forties, and went 18-4 with a 2.98 ERA and 218 strikeouts, winning his seventh Cy Young Award, the only one of the seven in the National League. In 2005 he went 13-8 with a 1.87 ERA in 211 innings, and the Astros reached the World Series and lost to the White Sox. In 2006 he pitched 19 times, going 7-6 with a 2.30 ERA.

His last season was 2007, back with the Yankees, where he went 6-6 with a 4.18 ERA in 18 games. His final game came on September 16 of that year. The next stretch of his life was off the field.

What the career totals show

Taken as a whole, Clemens finished with a 354-184 record, a 3.12 ERA, 4,672 strikeouts, 46 shutouts, 118 complete games, 4,916 and two-thirds innings and a 1.17 WHIP. His 354 wins are ninth on the all-time list, behind Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Pete Alexander, Christy Mathewson, Pud Galvin, Warren Spahn, Kid Nichols and Greg Maddux. His 4,672 strikeouts are third, behind Nolan Ryan (5,714) and Randy Johnson (4,875), and his 46 shutouts rank 26th.

His .658 career winning percentage is excellent, but a pitcher's record also reflects run support and bullpens, so it is a team number as much as a personal one. His ERA of 3.12 was achieved in a run environment far more favorable to hitters than the one Johnson or Mathewson faced, when the typical pitcher allowed about three earned runs per nine innings or fewer. That is why a simple comparison of ERA across the generations misleads. The historical record does not have wins above replacement, which tries to adjust for such differences, and it has no pitch-tracking data, so the claims here rest on the standard counting stats.

Strikeouts, walks and durability

Three rates explain why the totals are so large. Over 4,916 and two-thirds innings Clemens struck out 4,672 batters, which works out to about 8.6 per nine innings, and he walked 1,580, about 2.9 per nine. He allowed 363 home runs, about 0.7 per nine, in a career that ran through the highest-scoring years of the 1990s and early 2000s. A pitcher who strikes out more than twice as many batters as he walks and keeps the ball in the park does not depend much on his defense.

The second reason is durability. Clemens made 707 starts in 709 games, and the historical record shows him pitching 200 or more innings in 15 different seasons, the last in 2005, when he was 42. Six of those seasons came when he was 35 or older. Few pitchers of any generation have kept their strikeout rate while carrying that workload into their forties, which is why his totals kept growing in the years when the debate about him was growing too.

The allegations and what is documented

In December 2007 the Mitchell Report, an independent investigation of performance-enhancing drug use in baseball commissioned by the commissioner, named Clemens. The report's account of his case rested heavily on his former trainer, Brian McNamee, who told investigators that he had injected Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone. Clemens denied it. In 2008 he testified under oath before a House committee, and in 2010 a federal grand jury indicted him on charges including perjury and obstruction of Congress. His first trial ended in a mistrial in 2011, and at the second, in June 2012, a jury acquitted him on all counts.

Precision matters about what that means. An acquittal means the government did not prove the charges to a jury; it does not settle the questions voters care about, and the Hall's character clause leaves each voter to decide how much weight to give allegations. No failed drug test by Clemens has been publicly reported. There is also a public record of a trainer's claims and of the ongoing public argument over them. Both facts are true, and anyone who writes about him has to say so.

The ballot history

Clemens first appeared on the BBWAA ballot in 2013 and was on it for the full ten years. The votes by year show a slow climb, and the end of eligibility came before he reached the line.

A candidate needs 75 percent of the ballots cast, which in 2022 was 296 votes. Clemens received 257, 39 short. His share rose in each of the last eight years, with the biggest jump, nearly nine points, in 2017. He later appeared on the Contemporary Baseball Era committee's ballots for the 2023 and 2026 classes, which have 16 voters and need 12 votes to elect, and he was not elected either time. The committee process can take up his case again.

Where the debate stands, and what it measures

Supporters of his election argue that the Hall's own history is full of players who broke rules, that the PED allegations were never proven and that the statistical case is overwhelming. Opponents argue that the integrity clause exists for exactly this situation and that a player who was a leading name in the Mitchell Report should not be honored. The ballot history suggests the electorate moved toward the first view over time but not far enough.

The argument is useful for what it shows about how voters weigh the Hall of Fame: a 354-win pitcher who is third on the strikeout list can fall 39 votes short. The historical record cannot settle it, because it carries only the playing record. What it can do is confirm that, as a pitcher, Clemens is among the most productive pitchers who ever played, and that his career spanned four clubs and 24 seasons, with 11 All-Star selections and 12 postseason appearances.

Common questions

How many Cy Young Awards did Clemens win? Seven, in 1986, 1987, 1991, 1997, 1998, 2001 and 2004. No other pitcher has more than five.

Did he ever win an MVP award? Once, in 1986, the same season as his first Cy Young.

Is he in the Hall of Fame? No. He was on the BBWAA ballot from 2013 to 2022, peaked at 65.2 percent and was not elected.

Was he convicted of anything? No. He was acquitted of all charges at a 2012 federal trial.

Where to go next

For other pitchers of his generation, read Pedro Martinez: The Peak That Redefined Dominance and Randy Johnson: The Big Unit, and for the other great Hall of Fame argument of the era, Barry Bonds: 762 Home Runs and an Unfinished Argument. To follow a game like the ones in his career log, how to read a box score helps. The history and Hall of Fame topic page has current coverage, and the leaders page shows the career lists in this profile.