Steroid use has flourished in Baseball (and in other professional sports) pursuant to an open conspiracy between players and team owners to feed the gladiatorial lust of fans who want to see bigger, stronger and faster cyborgs perform for their atavistic enjoyment.
[Bonds should be cheered, not jeered, as new home-run king]
Plausible deniability is the Washington fiction that involves creating enough distance between the powerful who order nefarious deeds and the grunts who execute them to allow the powerful to deny any involvement if the shit hits the fan.
And as I watched highlights of Roger Clemens testifying before Congress yesterday, it occurred to me that this seven-time winner of the Cy Young Award as the best pitcher in baseball could have benefited from this fiction.
Because the more he said, the more he incriminated himself – not only on the settled charge of taking illegal performance enhancing drugs, but also on the looming charge of perjury and obstruction of justice.
Whereas, since he was not legally required to testify, he could have avoided this inevitable entrapment by issuing a well-crafted statement denying the charges and dismissing – as a pack of lies – everything his chief accuser and former personal trainer, Brian McNamee, said. And, given that it was already established in sworn depositions and, more importantly, in the media – that McNamee is a professional opportunist and pathological liar, Clemens’ plausible deniability was virtually guaranteed.
Instead of creating this distance (physically and in terms of personal character), however, Clemens put his reputation, Hall of Fame candidacy and personal freedom on the line by agreeing to sit at a defendants’ table with McNamee in this high-stakes, but ultimately futile, congressional hearing to clear his name.
They spent four hours testifying and fielding redundant and patently partisan questions from members of Congress. Yet I can sum up the entire hearing as follows:
McNamee claimed that he injected Clemens with steroids dozens of times. Clemens insisted that the only thing McNamee ever injected into his butt was vitamin B-12, which is almost as unbelievable as Barry Bonds insisting that the only thing his trainer ever injected into his was flaxseed oil. And when all was said and done, one congressman rendered the virtually unanimous verdict by exclaiming “I don’t know who to believe!”
Remarkably, Clemens seemed acutely aware that the whole exercise would be a waste of time. After all, here’s what he said in his opening statement:
I have never taken steroids or HGH. No matter what we discuss here today, I am never going to have my name restored.
In fact, no one will ever prove in a court of law that Clemens took steroids. However, there’s a school of lawyers now combing through his testimony for “inconsistent” statements to hold against him.
For the record, I believe McNamee. Primarily because Clemens’ best friend and former teammate Andy Pettitte, as well as another former teammate, corroborated McNamee’s testimony, which makes this far more than a case of he said, he said.
Nevertheless, the precedent Congress set last year by giving Rafael Palmeiro a walk after he lied under oath about taking steroids bodes well for Clemens.
Even more intriguing, however, is the prospect that, if Clemens is not charged, lawyers for the indicted Barry Bonds would have just cause to argue jury nullification; i.e., that even if the jury finds that Bonds lied about taking steroids (and I believe he did), it should acquit him anyway since none of the other (white) players who lied about taking them were even charged.
Related Articles:
Lies about steroids keeps Mark McGwire out of Hall of Fame
Mitchell Report implicates Clemens and many other players
Barry Bonds indicted
Roger Clemens Congressional Testimony
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Noel says
Back when the race to break Roger Maris’s single season home run record, when those two roid raging idiots, Sammy Sosa and Mark McQuire, were hitting them out of the park on a daily basis, when everyone from the kids in the playgrounds to the President of the United States were cheering these cheating bastards on to break Maris’s record. I sat and said “This can not be good for the game”.
It’s cheating! Especially when you consider that the strongest thing that Maris ever took was aspirin.
Now the word is that Clemens is such good friends with the Bushs that even if he’s convicted of perjury and obstruction he’ll get a pardon. Do you think Bonds will get a pardon when he’s convicted. This is all such horse shit. And what a waste of taxpayers money, don’t we have an economy to worry about?
ALH ipinions says
I hear you Noel.
Perhaps it’s a good thing federal prosecutors work at such a snail’s pace. Beause Bush will be long relegated to the dustbin of history by the time they indict and convict Clemens.
However, I assure you, the outing of Roger Clemens is the best thing that could have happened for Barry Bonds….