I'm not a fan of Dan Duquette. However, contrary to popular belief, he never said that he didn't re-sign Clemens because Clemens was in the twilight of his career. This urban legend was a classic case of the media taking a quote out of context. It used to be explained in the SoSH wiki but it's still explained in this reference to a 12/14/96 Boston Herald article by Michael Silverman:
"The Red Sox and our fans were fortunate to see Roger Clemens play in his prime and we had hoped to keep him in Boston during the twilight of his career. We just want to let the fans know that we worked extremely hard to sign Roger Clemens. . . . We made him a substantial, competitive offer, by far the most money ever offered to a player in the history of the Red Sox franchise.
Unfortunately, we just couldn't get together. We were hoping he could finish his career as a Red Sox and we also wanted him to establish a relationship beyond his playing career. We wanted him to have the status of a Ted Williams, but at the end of the day we couldn't get it done."
You'll notice this quote doesn't say anything about when the twilight of Clemens' career will be. It could be starting in the upcoming year, but it could instead be a lot later, or it could be anytime in between.
Often when a premier player leaves a team, the team insinuates to the public (whether true or untrue, but usually untrue) that they wanted the player to stay on the team until whenever the end of the player's career would be, but that things just didn't work out that way. This quote was an example of that scenario.
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