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Roger Clemens Continues To Defend Piazza Bat Toss Incident

Originally posted on Athlon Sports | By Matthew Blittner | Last updated Aug 11, 2025 6:58 PM ET

“The Rocket,” Roger Clemens, has never been shy about throwing inside or about speaking his mind. 18 years after retiring, he is still throwing heat, but now it's with his mouth and not his arm.

On Saturday afternoon, at Yankees Old-Timers’ Day, Clemens and the world were reminded of one of his most infamous incidents, that being his broken bat toss at Mets’ catcher Mike Piazza during Game Two of the 2000 World Series. Of course, Clemens also spoke at length about that incident earlier in the week at David Cone’s charity golf outing.

“He would have known if I’d thrown it at him,” Clemens told the assembled media, including MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch. According to Hoch, Clemens then said the bat “landed in [his] lap,” so he threw the broken shard, “whistling it to the on-deck circle.”

For fans out there who are too young to remember this incident, here’s the play in question.

As you can see, the broken bat shard bounces in front of Piazza, who had started to jog to first base, before realizing he’d hit a foul ball. However, even though the bat landed in front of Piazza, it was close enough that it seemed like it may have been intentional, especially in the heat of the moment.

For 25 years, Clemens and Piazza have both insisted that the other is wrong about what happened on that cool October night. Piazza continues to believe that Clemens intentionally threw the bat at him because of how well he had always hit the ace pitcher.

Meanwhile, Clemens remains steadfast in saying he never intended to hit Piazza with the bat. Although that is a change in his story, as he originally claimed he mistook the bat for the ball and then, only after realizing he was holding the bat, did he attempt to discard it by flinging it into foul territory.

Given that it’s now a quarter-of-a-century later and this play still invites plenty of debate, that just means it is destined to go down in baseball history as one of the “forever incidents” of the game.

This article first appeared on Athlon Sports and was syndicated with permission.

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