The question, asked several times since 2005, almost always was the same.
“How’s Clement doing?”
And Roger Hansen’s answer almost always was different.
“He’s raw but he’s improving,” Hansen, the Seattle Mariners’ catching coordinator, said not long after he got his hands on the Mariners’ first-round draft pick in 2005. “Right now he needs work in everything — receiving, blocking, throwing, footwork. But he’s going to be a good one.”
A year later, “How’s Clement doing?”
“A lot better,” Hansen said. “He needs to be more consistent, but he knows what he needs to do and he’s a hard worker.”
Two winters ago, the consistency had arrived.
“We don’t have a crystal ball, but he’s getting close,” Hansen said before spring training in 2007. “He’s improved in every aspect.”
And now?
“He gets it,” Hansen said earlier this month after Clement was called up to the Mariners for the second time.
He gets it.
Sometimes it takes the pain of failure to make a player realize what it takes to become a success. To Clement, who batted .167 with no home runs between April 30 and May 16, it meant going back to Class AAA Tacoma and realizing why he was so good down there.
Clement goes through a daily regimen of drills but, for a reason he can’t explain, he got away from it during the 2 1/2 weeks he was with the Mariners early this season.
He won’t say the pressure to perform, especially offensively on a team that badly needed his left-handed bat, got the best of him. But there certainly were expectations.
“I’m not arrogant enough to think I was going to come here and change the world,” Clement said. “But I did probably put a little too much pressure on myself to do too much. It’s nobody’s fault but my own.”
He went back to Tacoma and quickly figured out what went wrong.
“It was frustrating to allow other things to get to me that weren’t in my control,” he said. “It was a good opportunity to go back down and get some confidence and hit the ball better again.”
Hansen worked with him in Tacoma and, more than a week before the Mariners called Clement back up, he predicted that his young student wouldn’t fall into the same trap again.
Oh, he might struggle for a while, but Clement realizes what makes him successful — as both a hitter and as a catcher — and falls back on the same workout regimen to prepare himself.
“Sometimes young kids come to the big leagues and think, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t be doing that,’” Hansen said. “No, you need to get out there and do what you normally do to prepare yourself. He went back and really started to get into his routine.”
In other words, Clement gets it.
It reminds Hansen of another young Mariners catcher he helped groom in the mid-1990s — Jason Varitek, who went on to star with the Boston Red Sox after the Mariners traded him.
When the Sox played in Seattle last month, Varitek reminded Hansen of the moment he experienced his catching revelation.
“Remember when I ‘got it?’” Varitek asked.
Hansen, renowned for his tough love, acted like he didn’t know.
“I don’t remember,” Hansen said. “Have you really ‘got it?’”
Varitek reminded Hansen of the moment he realized the importance of maintaining a daily routine regardless of the outside conditions/distractions/influences.
“We were in Tacoma and we’d gotten rained out,” Varitek told Hansen. “But you and I were on the warning track in the pouring rain and we were throwing and blocking, and that’s when it started to click.”
Hansen will never forget that rainy day in Tacoma, even though he swore to Varitek that he didn’t remember it.
“When did you ever get it?” he said. “I mean, you missed a ball tonight against the Mariners.”
Varitek knew Hansen was tormenting him just for fun, and he loved it. That’s the relationship catchers have with their teacher.
“They all get excited about it,” Hansen said. “Jeff will get better and better in a year or two because he will get used to everything and get more of a routine. When he starts catching more, all of a sudden he’ll know what he has to do every time, on the road or at home.”
Now’s the time to sit back and let Clement develop through hot streaks and struggles in the major leagues.
“To build a superstar major league catcher, you’ve got to give them time,” Hansen said. “They’re going to have adjustments to make and they’re going to have failure. This is a perfect time for him to do what he has to do, learn the hitters and end up winning a World Series.
“It’s the same thing Boston did with Jason.”
Herald writer Kirby Arnold covers the Mariners
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