Motivation Quote by Roger Clemens

It is a wonderfully unglamorous glimpse into how elite performance actually sounds up close: fragmented, conditional, almost bureaucratic. Clemens is talking about a moment baseball fans romanticize as instinct and swagger - the two-strike count - and reducing it to process. "Maybe" does a lot of work here. Even a pitcher with a Hall-of-Fame-caliber aura (and all the mythology that clings to Clemens in particular) is admitting uncertainty, not about his talent but about the micro-choices that decide an at-bat: pitch selection, location, how to "induce" the hitter into a mistake.

The phrasing also exposes the sport's chess-within-a-second rhythm. Two strikes is leverage, but it's also danger: the urge to get cute can backfire. Clemens isn't promising a strikeout; he's describing an adjustment designed to change behavior. "Induce" is the key verb - pitching isn't just throwing hard, it's engineering outcomes: a chase, weak contact, a timing disruption. The batter becomes less an opponent than a system you try to hack.

Context matters because Clemens' era obsessed over dominance - radar-gun readings, intimidation, the ace as alpha. This quote cuts against that branding. It sounds like a guy thinking aloud in the dugout tunnel, not a legend delivering a slogan. The subtext is that greatness is not constant certainty; it's a willingness to recalibrate under pressure, to treat even the most "decisive" count as a probabilistic bet.