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Roger Clemens Hearings Go Sideways: Is This Just Pure Selfishness?

by Christopher McIntosh
02/14/2008

Book 'em, Dan-o.

Roger Clemens should be heading to the same federal [redacted: see Office Space] prison that will house Michael Vick and (hopefully) Barry Bonds.

I watched the hearings yesterday. And by hearings I mean circus. And by circus I mean something much larger, but smaller, and yet, more out of control. The implications were huge, the focus was tiny (one, admittedly large and legendarily important player), and it got absolutely outrageous.

There are literally tens of thousands of articles on the Clemen's hearing. Who was right? Who was wrong? Who was more believable?

I am shocked. I never in a million years thought that a hearing like this, with stakes this high, could go so sideways.

This was like winding up your drunk Uncle, handing him his life savings, and putting him on a plane to Vegas without a confirmed hotel room.

Now that the writers are back, I imagine many of them are peeved beyond comprehension - the hearings already had such potential for satire and absurdity. There were countless easy targets (congresspersons, baseball players, lawyers, drug dealers), massive media attention, and an army of sportswriters just ready to play "who can top this" in terms of just... how... important... this... is... for baseball... and the country (a country at war I'd like to remind some of them, but that's another column).

I never imagined it could exceed those already loose "boundaries."

Truth be told, I'm having a hard time coming up with a way of writing about this. The old cliche about "truth is stranger than fiction" has apparently lost cliche status for the next couple of days.

As of today, here's what I know.

Andy Pettite, a guy whose character no one has impugned, provided a deposition over 100 pages long, as did his wife, attesting to conversations he had with one Roger Clemens where they discussed Clemens' use of HGH and other performance enhancing drugs (PEDs).

Pettite also corroborated McNamee's story that he provided the two of them (Pettite and Clemens) with said PEDs and injected them into his buttocks. (I would have killed for someone to break out a Forrest Gump impersonation just once and said "butt-tocks" but that wasn't going to happen given the "stakes" involved).

Roger Clemens called McNamee a liar. Taking a page out of the Obama playbook, he said that he and Andy were friends before this incident and will be friends after this incident. And went to great pains to say Andy was an honest, stand-up, truth telling guy.

When asked how he squares this contradiction - and, not incidentally, why he didn't perjure himself when he said multiple times that he has never even spoken about PEDs - he claimed that Andy didn't get it. He was talking about his wife. His wife was going to be in the SI swimsuit issue and he... oops, I mean she, wanted to look good for it.

Incredibly, that wasn't the worst thing he said on this particular issue. When Rep. Elijah Cummings pointed out that Pettite (and his wife) claim Clemens talked to him about the steroid use in 1999 a full 4 years before the shoot, Clemens folded up like a lawn chair. He might as well have pretended to not speak English but because of time limits Cummings had to move on.

The Representative from Massachusetts (who might as well have been wearing a Red Sox jersey) produced medical records, as well as evidence from two different doctors, one from a doctor for the military and one of the recognized experts in this field that showed Clemens had uffered an abscess that was most likely caused by a poorly handled shot of steroids. A pro-Clemens representative retorted with a different report where he says that that's not true.

From a (one) doctor at Baylor.

There was also a lot of nonsense. Both sides (McNamee/Clemens) pulled out some bush league stuff - McNamee claimed to be a "doctor" because of a PhD from a now defunct fly-by-night organization, unfathomably tried to claim he wasn't a drug dealer, admitted time after time that he lied, and had no justification for the macabre refusal to throw away Clemen's medical waste on the poorly informed basis that he thought there would be DNA to analyze on it, despite having never handled evidence when he was a cop.

I guess he's just a huge CSI fan.

But far and away, the biggest bush league stunt pulled by Clemens et al (and that's saying something considering this guy once shattered a guy's bat, then picked up the heavy end and chucked it at him as he ran to first) was simultaneously refusing to produce a witness (his former nanny who could testify regarding the question of when he and McNamee first met, a pool party at the Canseco residence - stop shivering, I'm creeped out, too) and inviting her to his house where he, in effect, asks her to lie for him.

Okay, I know the word is coaching, but when he says things like "I wasn't there, right?" regarding a party many years ago, he may not even be coaching, but I have to disagree with Chair Waxman when he says "it at least has the appearance of impropriety."

It doesn't have the "appearance." It smells. Badly. Anybody who's watched even one courtroom drama knows this.

So how does the Rocket choose to adroitly handle this?

"We were doing you a favor."

The committee wants to contact a witness. Demands it twice and before you hand over the pertinent information after your unwarranted delay, you invite her to your house despite having not spoken in years? And that's doing them a favor?

Was he kidding? I think this is the real question of the hearing.

And I'm not kidding.

If Clemens thinks, after all that, that his best strategy is to claim that their delay tactics coupled with whatever transpired on that Sunday at the Clemens house before they gave the nanny to the committee staff was a "favor" then that's game, set, and match for me.

He's either the dumbest human alive or one of the most selfish.

I'm going with selfish (only because I've met some really dumb people in my life) and if that's the case, he's a doozie. He threw his wife, his best friend, and the man potentially responsible for more than half of his Cy Young awards under the bus, then backed it up, and ran over them again.

Think about it. As early as 1996 people were saying he was in the "twilight of his career." If he did it - and that is the most generous thing I've done since tip the bartender who gave me Dewar's (scotch) instead of Jameson's (irish whiskey) - there's only one reason he took PEDs. Pure unadulterated me-first selfishness. Hell, even Barry Bonds is more understandable. He watched Sosa, McGwire, et al "save the game" and turn into the best players in baseball when he knew that on a level playing field he would make every last one of them look like single A September call-ups. Clemens wanted to keep going. And going. And going. Like the Energizer Bunny. He wanted to get the ball, to stand on the mound, to intimidate, to singlehandedly win games and to turn around franchises.

It was about what he wanted, not anyone else. If nothing else I think this hearing proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

There's just one question left. And no, it's not whether steroids had an effect, because if he took them when they say he did the statistical evidence is astonishing. There are even Wharton School of Business studies coming out that prove this statistically. He's an anomaly. His results are extraordinary in the literal sense of the term. Extra-ordinary. Beyond the norm.

That's what legends are, beyond the norm. At least, that's what Roger Clemens thought.

And we're about to find out just how far beyond the norm he went.

Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton was often quoted out of these hearings. She obviously didn't want to be there, felt there were better things to do, and kind of mailed it in. One thing I didn't find odd - that apparently every other media outlet did - was her famous comment to Clemens:

"Sir, I know you're going to heaven".

Anyone who's seen the inside of the church or was raised in South knows exactly what she meant. And I can't think of a better way to encapsulate the events of February 13th.

She thought he was a cheater, a liar, a perjurer, and by extension, a criminal. If she was in polite company, however, I doubt she would say all that even if she felt all those things.

So rather than get into all that unpleasantness, I'll just affirm the one thing we can all agree on - I don't know nothing about nothing, but you sir, are going to heaven.

Because God forgives all sins.

For Clemens' sake he better hope the US Congress and the federal judiciary are equally forgiving.

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