Clemens, McNamee Spar Before Congress February 14, 2008
Posted by Pablo Zevallos in Andy Pettitte, Brian McNamee, Roger Clemens, Steroids.add a comment
Yesterday, Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee gave their sworn testimonies to Congress, and the egocentric Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Cal.) et al. Andy Pettitte’s testimony proved to be very damaging for Clemens, as Pettitte claims that he and Clemens spoke in 1999 or 2000 about Clemens’s use of HGH. Clemens snidely replied to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), “Mr. Congressman, Andy Pettitte is my friend…I think Andy misheard” and later “I think he misremembers our conversation”. Brian McNamee, on the other hand, was grilled as a “drug dealer” and some of his statements were found to be lies. As Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) found lie after lie of McNamee’s he said, “We don’t know what to believe,. I know one thing I don’t believe, and that’s you.” Particularly damaging to McNamee is his dishonesty, police offer/drug dealer past, and his involvement in a 2001 sexual assault case in Florida.
Someone is lying–there is no doubt about that. Clemens’s credibility is damaged with his accusing everyone else, and his wife’s own admitted HGH use, and his instinct to over-prove himself. McNamee’s credibility is damaged with the phone call, as well as the reasons stated above. My instinct tells me that, despite his murkiness, McNamee tells the truth, and Clemens is lying. More than that, my crystal ball tells me the syringes and needles say all. Why McNamee would wait so long–besides the fact that he even kept it–is besides me, but Clemens was still using McNamee’s services until December, some time after the report came out. The Yankee fan (yet underdog fan) in me wants Clemens to win, but it’s just too much of a burden of proof.
In side news, Andy Pettitte also admitted to using HGH in 2004, supplied by his father, Tom Pettitte. The younger Pettitte was recovering from elbow surgery and wanted to protect his father (recovering from multiple cardiac conditions) from the media frenzy, explaining his omission of this fact. Tom Pettitte obtained the HGH from a gym where Koby Clemens also trains, according to the NY Daily News. That year proved how much of a competitor Andy was–he was throwing 85 or 86 MPH, and, even with a damaged elbow, through his curveball and cutter through the pain (that is, if he even had one that day). This just further damages the “family and religious man and competitor” image–sad.
Now, all of this gossip aside, I’d like to know why this matters. Why does America’s tax money go for an egomaniac congressman looking to make headlines and investigating things that happened 5-10 years ago? This isn’t even a business/fraud issue–baseball is exempt from many of the antitrust/business laws of which other industries are subjected. Fair, America wants to know–but let them do it at their own peril. The thought behind this is that someone will come clean with the threat of perjury, and some one is still committing the crime. No one will ever know for sure what happened, unless someone admits their lies. This is about as fruitless as trying to figure out who killed John F. Kennedy, which I curiously and amateurishly attempted to do (to no avail).
