Clemens Is Screwed

If you've been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, it'll come as a surprise to you that Roger Clemens may have irreparably fucked up his legacy as one of baseball's greatest pitchers. Not that you couldn't have seen it coming from miles away...

It all started, well, when Clemens, at age 36, became the best pitcher in baseball. Everyone wondered how a guy, who was on his way downhill in Boston, goes to Toronto and is better than he was 10 years before.

And then, the most hated man in the history of baseball, Jose Canseco, put out that book that named Clemens as an avid steroid user. Suddenly, baseball became very concerned about steroids. This, and Game of Shadows, the book about Barry Bonds' alleged steroid usage, led Commissioner Bud Selig to authorize an investigation by George Mitchell into steroids.

The Mitchell Report came out, and the biggest surprise in there? Roger Clemens. Clemens, of course, was quickly on the defensive, claiming that he was innocent and that any incriminating evidence listed in the Mitchell Report was all lies.

Which leads us today's debacle, of Clemens going in front of a Congressional hearing and acting like a complete moron, much like Palmeiro, McGwire, and Sosa before him. Even after his former teammates and friends throw him directly under the bus while admitting to their own steroid usage, Clemens still claims he's completely innocent. Seriously, when Chuck Knoblauch's rambling stories about his own inability to throw to first make people believe Clemens is guilty, he's probably guilty.

Which brings me to the bigger question: What exactly did Bud Selig hope to accomplish with this? When the whole Bonds thing came out and then Canseco's book, I could see him wanting to keep this thing from snowballing. So he instituted the drug policy and the drug testing, which led to him actually finding steroid users. And then he commissions the Mitchell Report to see what else he can ferret out.

But I don't think he expected that this is what they would find. (Or maybe he did, if you believe what John Rocker says.) I don't think he knew that Mitchell would find guys like Brian McNamee and Kirk Radomski, who could corroboratively link known steroid users (like Jason Grimsley) to unknown steroid users (like Clemens and Pettite, a claim which was later proven to be false, but actually appears to be true). That McNamee would take sports memorabilia collecting to a new level, and keep steroid-laced DNA samples of the players he'd injected. And I don't think he suspected these players, once they're called on it, would actually come out and admit to using steroids. I think what Selig saw as a measure to assuage public outcry on the whole steroid thing showed him that, like it or not, a lot of great players in the past 10 years might have gotten that way from using steroids.

Everyone, that is, except for The Rocket, who's as clean as new snow on this one.

Sure.