I suppose there’s not much left to do with the Barry Bonds business than to await his sentencing and/or the decision to retry him on the perjury counts. I don’t claim to have any inside knowledge on this fiasco, but if the feds decide to continue with this preposterous kabuki theatre for another round, I will be stunned.
I’ll be just as startled should they actually decide to send the poor bastard to jail. I suppose I would grouse less if they fined him something, but he’s already paid many millions to his lawyers, and that ought to count as some kind of punishment.
Now that the greatest batter of his generation has been thoroughly trashed, it’s time to turn our attention to his counterpart from the hill: Roger Clemens. This was always the more interesting of the two cases, if for no other reason than there seemed to be some genuine wiggle room for the seven-time Cy Young Award winner that wasn’t available to the seven-time Most Valuable Player.
While you could debate the slippery question about if Bonds knew what he was taking was flaxseed oil or whatever, I don’t know how many people actually doubted that he had taken something. The evidence – from his gargantuan statistics to his hat size, etc. – was just too overwhelming. For Clemens, not so much.
For one thing, we tended to think of players using steroids and HGH as more typically batters, though in hindsight there’s no reason not to think the benefits from such illicit use would be just as significant for pitchers. It was the home run statistics that went nutty from the mid- to late-1990s, and the anomalies that seemed so prevalent were of guys hitting 50 home runs who had never hit 30, not 30-game winners or eye—popping strikeout totals.
Fifty juries could have found Bonds not guilty and I’d have never bought the idea that he hadn’t taken steroids or HGH. With Roger – even though I never liked him as a player (I was and am a Dwight Gooden guy) – I’m not so sure. And I think that’s what he’s counting on.
His volunteering to testify in front of that self-aggrandizing Congressional panel was either the justifiable outrage of an innocent man in the throes of having his reputation trashed or the almost cosmically clever calculation of a guilty one. I’d never really thought of Clemens as being all that clever.
Still, the moment it all started to come crashing down on Roger I was struck by a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for life to truly imitate art. I envisioned Clemens as angrily assuming the role of Col. Nathan R. Jessup in “A Few Good Men,” and the resulting testimony that I conjured up on Roger’s behalf was dutifully plunked in a blog I did a little more than three years ago when I was the editor of Sports Collectors Digest.
http://infielddirt.sportscollectorsdigest.com/default,month,2008-02.aspx
I think I may have been a bit too premature on this one; it might have worked better had I come up with it a couple of weeks before the trial opens this summer. I can’t shake the notion that Roger would love to deliver just such a soliloquy, but I think he’s way too invested in the Big Denial for it ever to happen.
- T.S. O’Connell
