Roger Clemens: His Own Worst Enemy

Roger Clemens’ worst enemy isn't Brian McNamee. It’s not former Senator George Mitchell either.

Roger Clemens’ worst enemy is Roger Clemens.

Clemens might be the least intelligent sports figure of our generation. At least Barry Bonds had the smarts to pay off his former trainer and claim he had, in fact, used steroids...but didn’t know what they were.

Hardly believable, but at least almost plausible.

It took Roger Clemens DAYS to come up with the following excuse:

“It wasn’t steroids, it wasn’t HGH, it was B12!”

That’s almost as good as his “I thought it was the baseball” excuse after he famously flew into a 'roid-rage and fired the sawed-off end of a baseball bat at Mike Piazza.

Roger’s memory is apparently on par with his intelligence. Check out the following excerpt from Jose Canseco’s book:

It was so open, the trainers would jokingly call the steroid injections “B12 shots,” and soon the players had picked up on that little code name, too. You’d hear them saying it out loud in front of each other: “I need to go in and get a B12 shot,” a player would say, and everyone would laugh. (Of course, that was the kind of joke you really only made around other steroid users, because obviously they were in the same boat as you. What were they going to do, tell on you? Not hardly.)

It was the pitchers that kept the “B12” joke going. For example, I’ve never seen Roger Clemens do steroids, and he never told me that he did. But we’ve talked about what steroids could do for you, in which combinations, and I’ve heard him use the phrase “B12 shot” with respect to others.

A lot of pitchers did steroids to keep up with hitters. If everyone else was getting stronger and faster, then you wanted to get stronger and faster, too. If you were a pitcher, and the hitters were all getting stronger, that made your job that much more difficult. Roger used to talk about that a lot.

“You hitters are so darn strong from steroids,” he’d say.

“Yeah, but you pitchers are taking it, too. You’re just taking different types,” I’d respond.

And sometimes Roger would vent his frustration over the hits even the lesser players were starting to get off good pitchers. “Damn, that little guy hit it off the end of the bat and almost drove it to the wall,” he would say. He would complain about guys who were hitting fifty homers when they had no business hitting thirty. It was becoming more difficult for pitchers all the time, he would complain.



Even though Jose Canseco vehemently defends Roger Clemens today (as he did on a recent interview with WEEI’s Big Show), he continues with the following:



I can’t give chapter and verse on Roger’s training regimen. But I’ll tell you what I was thinking at the time:

One of the classic signs of steroid use is when a player’s basic performance actually improves later in his career. One of the benefits of steroids is that they’re especially helpful in countering the effects of aging. So in Roger’s case, around the time that he was leaving Boston—and Dan Duquette, the general manager there, was saying he was “past his prime”—Roger decided to make some changes. He started working out harder.

And whatever else he may have been doing to get stronger, he saw results. His fastball improved by a few miles per hour. He was a great pitcher long before then; it wasn’t his late-career surge that made him great. But he certainly stayed great far longer than most athletes could expect. There’s no question about that.



Roger apparently thinks we don’t know anything about steroids. Barry Bonds must not be on steroids, because according to Clemens it doesn’t help you...it hurts you.

According to the Rocket, his career would have ended long ago if he were on steroids, because steroids make you break down and grow a third ear out of your forehead. Or something like that.

This was my favorite excerpt from Clemens' “hard-hitting” 60 Minutes interview:

 

Mike Wallace: George Mitchell says he believes McNamee and this is why. McNamee got caught up in a federal steroids investigation, and the federal prosecutors agreed not to charge him if he told the truth about his involvement with steroids. But they would charge him if he gave any false information. So Mitchell says McNamee had strong incentives to tell the truth. What, hold, what did McNamee gain by lying?

Clemens: Evidently not going to jail.



Here’s the logic Clemens expects us to all buy into: McNamee was told to tell the truth or he goes to jail. So McNamee lied in order to keep himself out of jail.

Either McNamee is as dumb as Clemens, or something appears flawed in that logic...don’t you think?

Clemens could have gotten himself out of this. He’s not Barry Bonds. He was actually rather well-liked by most fans (outside Boston, anyway).

He could have saved himself, if only he weren't so stupid.

It was his word against a guy nobody knows, nobody ever heard of, and nobody had any reason to believe. Had he immediately gone in front of the cameras, denied everything, told the world McNamee had a grudge against him, and maybe even filed a lawsuit (as Curt Schilling suggested), he might have skated through.

But he thought we were dumb enough to buy the B12 excuse. Are you kidding me?

So, Roger, stop blaming the “guilty before innocent” American public. Stop blaming the Mitchell Report. Stop blaming your former trainer and friend Brian McNamee.

You're the one to blame, Rocket.

You are your own worst enemy.



I'm SeanMC.

http://bostonsportsrants.blogspot.com