Mike Celizic

I don’t know if it’s kindness that kept Joe Torre from inserting Roger Clemens into the Yankee rotation for the weekend’s series against the Red Sox or just bullheadedness.

The kindness would be to save Clemens from the embarrassment of watching the bullpen blow another game to the Rocket’s former team. The bullheadedness would be Torre foolishly sticking with his rotation because Chien-Ming Wang, Mike Mussina and Andy Pettitte – Torre says - are all terrific pitchers who don’t deserve to be skipped to make room for Roger.

Of course, there’s a third option – that Torre knows that it doesn’t matter who he pitches. If they continue their awful hitting, he could roll Whitey Ford, Ron Guidry and Lefty Gomez out there in their primes and the team would still lose. And if the hitters rouse themselves from their torpor, he could pitch Jeff Weaver, Kevin Brown and Ed Whitson and they’d win.

Whatever the reason, the Yankees can certainly wait until next Monday to welcome Clemens back to the rotation, because he’s not the answer to what ails this team. Torre said Clemens will give the team a “big lift,” but that’s also what pallbearers do for a casket. They can lift it over their heads, but the occupant is still dead.

It all looked so clever just a few weeks ago when Clemens magnanimously decided to pitch one more partial season for New York in return for a mere pittance of $18 million. He was going to turn a decent rotation into a great rotation, win a bunch of games, and lead the team back into the playoffs.

Instead, he’s likely to discover that he may as well be back in Houston, pitching great for six innings a game only to see the bullpen fail to hold leads or the offense not score enough runs to give him a lead. In the past two years with the Astros, he pitched to ERAs of 1.87 and 2.30 and still won just 20 of 51 starts.

He could end up with similar results this year. The Yankees are that bad, and no matter what kind of push they put on, unless the Red Sox suffer a complete meltdown – as in Jonathan Papelbon and a starting pitcher or two going down for a significant stretch – it’s not going to be enough.

All Clemens has to do is look at his good buddy Andy Pettitte, who followed him to Houston and led the parade back to the Bronx. Pettitte has the fifth-best ERA in the American League and still has only a 3-3 record to show for it. Monday, he pitched terrifically, only to watch the bullpen blow it for him. And with Clemens coming on board and pitching six innings a start, the bullpen isn’t going to get more rest.

As of Tuesday morning, New York had 111 games yet to play, which is a lot.

But they’ll probably need 95 wins to get a wild card, and to do that, they’d have to go 74-34 the rest of the way. That’s .670 ball, which is asking an awful lot.