After winning seven Cy Young Awards and 354 games in the Major Leagues, Roger Clemens climbed a Hill one more time on Wednesday for the most important matchup of his career.Strongly refuting former trainer Brian McNamee’s allegations that Clemens used performance-enhancing drugs as part of a training program in the latter stages of his celebrated career, Clemens appeared Wednesday on Capitol Hill, prepared to tell his side of the tale before Congress and a national audience.
Wearing a navy suit, red tie and blue shirt, Clemens entered Room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building at 10:04 a.m. ET amid a flurry of shutter clicks, flanked by his attorneys and his wife, Debbie. McNamee entered a minute later from a different entrance wearing a gray suit, white shirt and silver tie, and did not appear to acknowledge Clemens.
Clemens and McNamee took their respective seats one chair apart for a hearing titled “The Mitchell Report: The Illegal Use of Steroids in Major League Baseball, Day 2.” Once partners who shared a common interest — namely, escalating Clemens’ physical performance through grueling, military-style workouts — their stories now could not be any more different.
Separated only by a space assigned to Charlie Scheeler, a member of former Sen. George Mitchell’s law firm who helped investigate the Mitchell Report, Clemens and McNamee were prepared to tell their polar opposite stories. Ostensibly, only one can be telling the truth, and much was on the line.
As Rep. Tom Davis, the committee’s ranking Republican said, “Someone is lying in spectacular fashion about the ultimate question.”
“I appreciate the opportunity to tell this Committee and the public — under oath — what I have been saying all along,” Clemens said in a prepared statement. “I have never used steroids, human growth hormone or any other type of illegal performance-enhancing drugs. I think these types of drugs should play no role in athletics at any level, and I fully support Sen. Mitchell’s conclusions that steroids have no place in baseball. However, I take great issue with the report’s allegation that I used these substances. Let me be clear again — I did not.”
McNamee’s version, as expected, differed sharply.
“When I told Sen. Mitchell that I injected Roger Clemens with performance-enhancing drugs, I told the truth,” McNamee said in his prepared statement. “I told the truth about steroids and human growth hormone. I injected those drugs into the body of Roger Clemens at his direction. Unfortunately, Roger has denied this and has led a full-court attack on my credibility. And let me be clear, despite Roger Clemens’ statements to the contrary, I never injected Roger Clemens — or anyone else — with Lidocaine or [Vitamin] B-12.”
Amid the high ceilings and ornate dressings of the committee hearing room, the same room in which Mark McGwire famously and repeatedly insisted that he would not talk about the past, Clemens was all too eager to appear and tell his side of the story. In Clemens’ prepared remarks, he again insisted that he never used steroids or human growth hormone.
McNamee’s claim is that he injected Clemens with both steroids and human growth hormone on at least 20 occasions beginning in 1998. The story is partly corroborated by Clemens’ former teammate, Andy Pettitte, who stated in a sworn affidavit that Clemens spoke in 1999 or 2000 with Pettitte about using HGH, though in 2005 in Kissimmee, Fla., Clemens recanted that story and said Pettitte was mistaken — that Clemens had been speaking about his wife’s use of HGH in 2003.
“Andy Pettitte is my friend,” Clemens said during Wednesday’s testimony. “He was my friend before this, he’ll be my friend after this. … I think Andy has misheard.”
Pettitte also admitted to personally using HGH a second time in 2004, details that were previously unavailable. Pettitte said in a statement released by his attorney, Jay Reisinger, that he obtained the HGH from his father shortly before undergoing season-ending elbow surgery.
Clemens has insisted that McNamee only injected him with Lidocaine and vitamin B-12. Clemens testified that McNamee injected him with vitamin B-12 on three occasions with the Blue Jays and twice with the Yankees, saying that he has used it since 1998 and that, “I’ve always assumed it was a good thing to have.”
McNamee replied, “The first time I heard Roger was taking B-12 was on ‘60 Minutes.’”
McNamee also testified that former Yankees teammate Mike Stanton noticed Clemens bleeding through his dress pants in 2001, at which point Clemens started carrying Band-Aids.
While McNamee denied public comment before Wednesday, leaving silently last week after providing more than seven hours of sworn deposition under oath, Clemens has boisterously patrolled the Hill, meeting with as many representatives as possible.
In his final Capitol Hill visit before Wednesday’s proceedings, Clemens met with five more representatives, bringing his three-day lobbying total to 24.
The effort was just one of numerous tactics used by Clemens in refuting McNamee’s charges that he used performance-enhancing substances in the latter stages of his career, allegations that consumed nearly nine pages of the Mitchell Report.
After the Mitchell Report’s Dec. 13 release, Clemens also vehemently denied the charges in a televised interview with CBS’ ‘60 Minutes’ and held a sometimes-contentious press conference in Houston, Tex., before releasing an 18,000-word statistical analysis in an attempt to disprove that Clemens’ late-career surge was prompted by PED use.
Yet Clemens admitted the damage is already done.
“No matter what we discuss here today, I am never going to have my name restored,” Clemens said. “I know a lot of people want me to say I took steroids and be done with it. But I cannot in good conscience admit to doing something I did not do, even if it would be easier to do so.”
The hurler submitted a letter to the United States House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday that, signed by a medical specialist, said Clemens showed no signs of steroid use from May 1995 through August 2007. The letter, signed by Bert O’Malley, the chairman of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at Baylor University, said Clemens was “devoid of suspicious indications” of steroid use during that time.
Yet that evidence may pale in comparison to the physical items surrendered by McNamee — which included bloody gauze pads, used syringes and drug-laced vials purported to contain Clemens’ DNA. McNamee withheld those items from federal investigators before finally acknowledging their existence in January.
“I was trying not to hurt the guy,” McNamee said in his deposition. “There was a feeling of betrayal. I shouldn’t have done it, but I didn’t want to hurt him as bad as I could.”
The revelations figure to have significant impact on a friendship between Clemens and Pettitte that was cultivated after the seven-time Cy Young Award winner was traded to the Yankees for the 1999 season. Both residents of the Houston area, Clemens and Pettitte trained together often during the offseason and Pettitte credited Clemens with helping him become more of a power pitcher.
When Clemens planned to retire after the 2003 World Series, he instead followed Pettitte to Houston as a free agent, saying at the time that he would not have signed with the Astros if Pettitte had not.
Clemens may have received some assistance from another former teammate on Tuesday. Jose Canseco said in a sworn affidavit that he has never seen Clemens “use, possess or ask for steroids or human growth hormone.”
The affidavit, dated Jan. 22, is part of the evidence gathered by the committee holding Wednesday’s hearing, and appears to disprove the Mitchell Report’s contention that Clemens attended a party in Miami at Canseco’s house on June 9, 1998, in which McNamee testified that Clemens asked Canseco about steroids.
McNamee disputes that claim, saying that he expressly recollects speaking with both Clemens and his wife at the party before leaving for a Blue Jays-Marlins game in Miami.
But Waxman chastised Clemens and his attorneys for not immediately complying with a request issued Friday to provide the name of a nanny — who was not named — who later offered a statement in which she recalled Clemens’ attendance at Canseco’s house. The committee was unable to speak with the nanny until she had already met with Clemens at his Houston home last weekend and also spoke to a member of Clemens’ investigative staff.
Waxman said the conduct “raises an appearance of impropriety” and said, “There’s always going to be a question of if you were attempting to influence her testimony.”
Clemens’ attorneys, Rusty Hardin and Lanny Breuer, attempted to address chairman Waxman, but House rules do not permit them to be officially recognized.
“It was my idea to investigate what the witness knows, like any lawyer in the free world,” Hardin said.
Rep. Davis, continuing a line of questioning, attempted to punch holes in McNamee’s contention that Clemens developed an abscess on his buttocks in 1998 after a hurried injection at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla. McNamee said the injection took place in late July or early August, but the Blue Jays were not in Florida at that time. Each member of the Blue Jays’ training staff testified that they recalled no abscess, though Clemens was sent for an MRI to check on a bruise or possible muscle tear.
McNamee contends that after the alleged abscess, Clemens threw the remaining supply of Winstrol into McNamee’s locker and said, “Get rid of this stuff.”
“It was something I shouldn’t have done,” McNamee said of injecting pro ballplayers with illegal drugs. “I’m ashamed of it. That’s why I’m here today.”
Launching a full-out assault on McNamee’s character, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) asked McNamee to admit he had repeatedly lied to reporters in numerous media stories published relating to himself. Burton called the proceedings “a circus” and referred to the hearing as a “trial by media” on Clemens.
“I don’t know what to believe,” Burton told McNamee, “but I know what I don’t believe and that’s you.”
Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said that he expects Wednesday’s events to be the final time
Tags: andy, baseball, Clemens, cy young, mcnamee, McNamee face off in D.C., mlb, roger, steriods
