Pitching hero ‘Rocket’ Roger Clemens has come under fire after allegedly lying to U.S. congress about his use of performance-enhancing drugs.
Early next April, as Major League Baseball teams prepare for the 2011 playing season, one of the greatest pitchers ever to throw a ball will be finding out the date that he will be tried for lying to Congress about using performance-enhancing drugs.
It’s been a long, slow, public and painful fall from grace for ‘Rocket’ Roger Clemens, a seven-time winner of the Cy Young Award for his seemingly supernatural pitching skills.
The cat came bouncing out of the proverbial bag with a vengeance in December 2007 when former Senator George Mitchell published the Mitchell Report. The Mitchell Report was an exhaustive study was requested by embattled MLB Commissioner Bud Selig to provide a vestige of transparency into baseball’s steroid era.
Clemens was heavily implicated in the report. His former trainer Brian McNamee informed Mitchell that he had injected the ‘Rocket’ with illegal, performance-enhancing drugs on numerous occasions over several playing seasons.
Through his all-star legal team, Clemens slammed back against the accusations, called McNamee a liar, and argued that he made it all up to avoid prosecution for refusing to co-operate with Mitchell’s investigation.
Although fans looked back on Clemens’ career numbers and noticed abnormalities in performance that made no sense for a player of his age, Clemens was unrelenting. He demanded and got a day before Congress where he and McNamee exchanged testimony under oath. Many observers expected that someone would eventually be charged with perjury and most assumed it would be Clemens.
Sentencing guidelines suggest he could go to jail for as long as a year and a half if he is convicted.
It’s hard to fathom what could have made Clemens deny what, in the court of common sense, has to be considered slam-dunk evidence. Always a bit of a megalomaniac, Clemens could have felt insecure that his place as one of the best ever pitchers, and a sure-fire Hall of Famer, would disintegrate with his golden-boy image if he admitted to illegal drug use.
Others, like Alex Rodriguez, who will go to the Hall of Fame, have admitted to steroid use and come away unscathed for their honesty. It’s tough to imagine that the baseball writers who will vote on which players make the Hall of Fame will forgive Clemens for dragging out a profoundly traumatic period in baseball history.
The odds of the ‘Rocket’ making it into the Hall of Fame are not likely given the path he’s chosen to take, and it’s probably a safe bet to say that if he ever does, a detour through the American prison system will come first.
