Remember when you were trying to get your driver's license for the first time and you had to take a Driver's Ed course? In Massachusetts when I was growing up you could get your license at age 16 if you had completed a certified Driver's Education course and if you hadn't, you couldn't get your license until age 16 and-a-half.
So naturally, everyone took the course so they could start driving six months earlier. Maybe it's still like that in Massachusetts, I don't know. In any event, part of this Driver's Ed course, usually the very last part, included the infamous film they showed the class of all the horrible things that could happen to those drivers stupid enough to ignore all the wisdom that they learned while attending Driver's Ed.
The film, if I remember correctly, lasted at least ninety minutes and was filled with the sort of blood and gore you normally had to be at least eighteen to see at the movies. Nowadays, of course, you can see worse every day and twice on Sundays just by going to Youtube, but you get the point. Severed limbs, bodies lying in the road, pools of blood, you name it, all were shown in graphic living color with the intention of getting kids to drive carefully. Kind of a "Scared Straight" program for regular kids.
That's the sort of reaction it seems the Mitchell Report has prompted in the baseball community. A trickle of players have seen the light at the end of the tunnel and recognized it as the express train of public judgment speeding down the track at them. Those few individuals are jumping ahead of the curve and staking out either:
A) The best excuses for why they were caught red-handed juicing like Anita Bryant in the 1970's, or
B) The best and most emphatic denials of ever having ingested anything stronger than aspirin or perhaps the occasional Tylenol tablet into the temples that are their god-like bodies.
Just today we've seen one player take up residence in each camp. The Baltimore Orioles' Brian Roberts fessed up to one isolated instance of bad judgment in 2003, when he experimented with a single shot of steroids and for which he issued the obligatory mea culpa and assured us that "performance-enhancing drugs have never had any effect on what I have worked so hard to accomplish in the game of baseball."
On the other side of the fence stands Roger Clemens. After issuing a vigorous denial through his attorney three hours after the issuance of the Mitchell Report, the Rocket today said, "I did not take steroids, human growth hormone or any other banned substances at any time in my baseball career or, in fact, my entire life."
Pretty hard to misinterpret that strong statement, but on the other hand, it's pretty hard to misinterpret the statement of Clemens' former trainer Brian McNamee that he personally injected Clemens with steroids in 1998 and HGH in 2000 and 2001.
If Clemens is telling the truth, there are only two possibilities - either McNamee is mistaken or he is lying. It's hard to imagine that he could be mistaken about who's butt he was sticking a syringe into, especially since reports are that he and Clemens at one time were close. Likewise, if he had any motivation for lying to the Mitchell investigators, no one has come up with any credible explanation of what that motivation may have been.
The only other explanation would be that the Rocket is lying; desperately trying to salvage his reputation in what is truly the twilight of his career. Players like Brian Roberts have time to at least partially erase the sting of being outed in the Mitchell Report as they continue their careers, but for someone like Roger Clemens, whose best days as a player, probably even all his days as a player, are now behind him, the final image people will have of him is that of a cheater.
In any event, players had better hurry up and get their statements prepared before all the good excuses are gone. Roberts now has ownership of the "terrible mistake" excuse, while Andy Pettite staked his claim on the ever-popular "injury rehab."
Guys who want to get in on the public breast-beating had better hurry up before it all gets old and tiresome and the American peoples' amazing capacity for forgiveness and understanding has evaporated. There is an old saying, "He who laughs last didn't get the joke." In this case, he who apologizes last might be left holding a big, steaming bag of recrimination.
Hey everyone, I know it must seem like I've dropped off the face of the earth, but it's nothing like that.
I've been busy writing - two full-length novels so far, plus over a dozen short stories - and working hard to try to get an agent. If you are curious and have a few minutes, check out my website, www.allanleve rone.com.
If you're a literary agent or if you know one, by all means contact me! In the meantime, I'll be here when I can - love this forum - and as always, thank you for checking out my blog, especially considering how many great ones you could be reading instead....
