Who Framed Roger Clemens?

Well Roger Clemens had his day in front of Congress today and boy oh boy is everything clear now. Clemens speaking from the same table as Brian McNamee was finally able to speak and was backed up 100% by McNamee...or not. As it turns out a professional athlete testifying before Congress is a bit of a joke. Here is a complete list of everything that we learned from the testimony today: 1) Mrs. Clemens was on the juice; 2) Not everyone on the Oversight Committee thought this was a good use of time; 3) Rep. Waxman is a very short and very odd looking dude. That is it. Clemens denied every doing steroids and McNamee said that he gave Clemens injections of steroids, HGH, heroin, crack, and horse tranquilizes but denied ever injecting him with B-12, lidocaine, or anything other legal drug, he just stuck with the illegal ones. He swears. Clemens, on the other hand, said the McNamee is a totally lying man. Like totally.

I watched the second half of this four and a half hour waste of tax payer money and found Clemens to be much more believable that McNamee who was caught in a number of lies and called out for it by more than a few members of the committee including Rep. Christopher Shays who flat out called him a drug dealer. Having said this, there are a number of holes in Clemen's testimony. The biggest elephant in the room (who actually wasn't in the room at all) was Andy Pettitte. Pettitte signed an affidavit saying that sometime around 2000 he and Clemens talked about HGH and Clemens indicated that he had tried it before. Later in 2005, Clemens said that Pettitte had misunderstood the earlier conversation because he meant his wife had tried it, not him. This is all well and good but in the testimony today Clemens said that his wife first tried it later than 2000. This may have been a slip of the tongue because the testimony had been going on for a while by then but if it wasn't then he's got some 'splaining to do. It just makes his statements contradict each other. What makes things even harder for Clemens is that McNamee fingered Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch and they both confirmed the accusations. If McNamee was telling the truth about those two then why would he lie about Clemens? He could be for any number of reasons but it just doesn't add up to outsiders.

Putting the truthfulness aspect aside, I can tell you that Clemens handled himself very well during the testimony. He never backed away from an answer and spoke sternly but respectfully. He said that he does not support using performance enhancing drugs and seemed very sincere when he said student athletes and children should be aware of their dangers and they should never use them. This performance was so much better than Mark McGwire in 2005 who vowed to do everything he could to help keep children away from steroids but at the same time kept repeating he would not answer any questions regarding drugs in his own life. Clemens answered every question thrown his way and while he didn't hit every answer out of the park, he did much better than most pitchers would fair at the plate. (Look a baseball metaphor--a bit forced but who cares, this is my blog.)