Some of you have already gone to YouTube and seen Roger Clemens posted video. You may also have seen the clips of his upcoming '60 Minutes' interview. If I thought Clemens looked guilty before, he really looks guilty in the brief snippets from the '60 Minutes' interview. Roger, didn't your attorney Dusty Hardin tell you not to blink at the very moment you are trying to "tell the truth"? Didn't he tell you not to take your eyes off the interviewer at that same moment?
Certain things have already been leaked, such as Clemens saying that the injections were lidocaine (an anesthetic) and Vitamin B12. So, for those of you who will watch the interview, here are a few questions that you should see if Clemens answers clearly, because these are questions which licensed doctors advising MLB about Clemens veracity (or lack thereof) will be looking for:
1) Did Brian McNamee ever inject Clemens with steroids or anything else? Clemens denies this on his YouTube bit, but he seems to be saying something different on the clip I saw of his '60 Minutes' interview. Such a contradiction of this kind of major item could completely destroy his credibility. Also, he needs to be careful because McNamee may be holding a trump card: Roger may have some sort of very small identifying mark on his buttocks which only someone looking very closely could see. If Clemens has such a mark, denies that McNamee ever gave him gluteal injections for anything, and McNamee correctly describes the mark, then its game over for Clemens.
2) Did Clemens ever have dermabrasion of his butt or any other plastic surgery in recent years (i.e. within the past month) to erase identifying marks.
3) For what condition has Clemens been using lidocaine injections into his butt? This is not a common practice these days due to the side effects of lidocaine injected this way. Maybe he needed it because he strained his gluteus maximus or minimus while squatting?
4) Lidocaine is a Class VI drug. This means that he needed a prescription to use it. Does he have proof that he had legal prescriptions for this? And if so, who prescribed it and who was injecting him with it? Only a trained medical professional should be doing that because of the risk of damaging the sciatic nerve. For more systemic anesthesia, a far safer and more efficacious place to inject it would have been into the deltoid muscle of his non-pitching arm.
5) Vitamin B12 injections are also only legally available with a prescription (the oral form at lower doses does not require a prescription). Does he have legal prescriptions for this? And again who was injecting him? Where was he getting injected? Unless he had clearly diagnosed Vitamin B12 deficiency as revealed through a blood test, there is not a single responsible medical doctor who would inject him with it. Maybe he has pernicious anemia, maybe he has a gut malabsorption problem. If he wants to save himself, he has to reveal this, because otherwise his use of injected Vitamin B12 looks illegal according to federal law.
6) Has he ever been prescribed any of these things by an online dentist?
The last thing which is extremely ominous in Clemens situation is that Joe Torre, as loyal a guy as there is to his players, refuses to stand up for Clemens. If Torre really felt in his heart that Clemens was innocent, don't you think that he'd be the first baseball person to stand by Clemens's side? There's only one logical reason why Torre would not support Clemens: he knows or strongly suspects that Clemens is not telling the truth and he doesn't want to be part of the lie.
There is a large part of me that wants Roger Clemens to be innocent, but so far his explanation is only marginally more believable than the story that Indians pitcher Paul Byrd told the public about his "legal" HGH use. And trust me, that story made absolutely no sense to anyone in medicine.
In the end, no one may ever be able to prove that Roger actually did steroids or other PEDs, but unless he can come up with some really good and documented medical problems on the '60 Minutes' interview, his reputation will most likely be damaged forever.