How did Roger Clemens do in his '60 Minutes' interview aired last Sunday night? Dead on arrival.

I was worried about Mike Wallace tossing softballs at Roger Clemens. This seemed to happen.

Some people would say that Clemens looked uncomfortable. I don't think that's accurate. He looked like a guy who was trying to prevent himself from spitting out the answer before the question was asked. He looked like a hitter who somehow knew exactly where and what the next pitch was going to be.

This is the reason that a guy like Steve Kroft would have been a far better choice. Clemens controlled the entire interview and Wallace let him get away with it. Judging from the interview, it seemed that Clemens was provided with the questions ahead of time. That's why Clemens had supposed copies of emails to him by Brian McNamee four days before the Mitchell Report was made public. Those emails supposedly asked Clemens to borrow some fishing gear. And for many people, they had exactly the effect that Clemens and his attorney wanted: to portray McNamee as a sleazebag.

At times Clemens seemed very credible. Part of the problem is that he has a classic problem of age: ptosis (drooping eyelids). Ptosis has a way of making a lot of people look less than truthful. But interspersed between his moments of credibility were a lot of moments that just didn't ring true.

Here are some of them:

1) Wallace asked Clemens about not appearing before the Mitchell Committee when invited. Clemens said that he was advised by his lawyers not to do it, and then he said, "If I had known what was in the report, I would have been down there in a heartbeat."

Sorry, but that explanation seems flimsy. Why would he be told not to go there? Sen. Mitchell was clear that he contacted Clemens and others named in the report to give them a chance to respond to allegations against them. For Clemens to say that he didn't know the purpose of the meeting is a lie.

Also, maybe I'm idealistic, but if Clemens had nothing to hide, then why decline the opportunity to meet with the Mitchell Committee? One possible explanation is that Clemens was advised by his lawyer that if he met the Mitchell Committee, it would have been leaked to the media, but if he didn't go then maybe Mitchell would not include the allegations in his final report. If that's the case, it was a gamble, and Clemens lost big-time.

"If I had known what was in the report, I would have been down there in a heartbeat." How does this explain the fact that Clemens waited a full five days after the Mitchell Report appeared to defend himself? Here's the problem: if that happened to any of us, we would be screaming as loudly as possible about 2 minutes afterwards. It just rings hollow.

 

2)  McNamee injected him with lidocaine and Vitamin B12 for joint pain.

On a previous post a few days ago, I said that this should be a central part of the interview by Wallace. It wasn't. Maybe it's because Wallace doesn't know enough about lidocaine and Vitamin B12 to ask the right questions. I guess that also means that he didn't read my blog here. Heavy sigh...

What really should have happened is that Mike Wallace should have had a knowledgeable doctor at the interview to ask Clemens a few pointed medical questions. That most likely didn't happen because '60 Minutes' does not have its reporters conducting interviews with a third-party specialist present.

But if the goal was credibility, Wallace should have told Clemens that the interview would be taped in 2 days. The first day would be devoted to hearing Clemens describe/justify things, and the second day would occur after a doctor had gone over Clemens's responses to Wallace's questions.

The problem is this: lidocaine and Vitamin B12 may not have been illegal according to MLB's rules, but lidocaine and injected Vitamin B12 require a valid prescription from a doctor. Who gave Clemens those prescriptions?  Clemens opened the door for this line of questioning.

Also, his reasons for using them are questionable. Injecting lidocaine into your butt to help you with joint pain? Which joint? His hip joint? Using lidocaine for systemic (whole-body) joint relief is not common medical practice. And even in cases where it has been used, the deltoid muscle of the shoulder (he could have used his non-pitching one) is a far safer place to inject it. If he had joint pain in his knees or shoulders, then the use of lidocaine seems like a very odd choice.

As for Vitamin B12, yes, there are people who think that it helps them, and there are also a lot of medical professionals who feel that Vitamin B12 deficiency might be more common than is reported. But they suspect it to be more widespread in the elderly population who might not be ingesting a lot of food (mostly meat and dairy) containing Vitamin B12. But Vitamin B12 deficiency in a younger guy like Clemens who has been known to eat a hearty steak every now and then would not even be on a doctor's radar screen unless Clemens was a raging alcoholic or he heavily used acid-blocking medication such as histamine H2-receptor blokers or proton pump inhibitors.

If Clemens was really in one of these categories, then he should just say that he has a medical condition and provide the evidence to Major League Baseball. Otherwise, he's just substituted one possible federal crime with another.

 

3) Toradol (ketorolac)

Clemens brought up his use of Toradol in the interview. Toradol is a non-steroidal antiinflammatory, antipyretic and a pain medicine. It's very effective. But according to his interview, he was using both lidocaine and Toradol?

I'm sure that no team doctor or other licensed doctor would have written Clemens a prescription for lidocaine because of its risk of central nervous system effects even at low doses (tremors, dizziness, blurred vision, seizures, etc.) and negative effects on a person's heart and blood vessels at higher doses (sedation, decreasing your drive to breath, stopping your heart, etc.). It's just not the kind of symptoms you'd want any guy - especially a pitcher - to have.

 

4) "I was eating Vioxx like Skittles"

When I hear an argument like this and Clemens then blaming people who gave him Vioxx and talking about how he might have heart damage from it, I think of one word: smokescreen.

Clemens decided to play, even when his body was screaming at him to stop. If you want to talk about steroids giving people an edge, then you have to also include things like Vioxx and Toradol. At least with steroids the user has to put in some effort to get results from the drug, but Vioxx and Toradol don't even require that kind of effort. They just have to be placed in a person's body.

Introducing Vioxx was a major indication that Clemens was trying to drum up sympathy and possibly to deflect Mike Wallace from focusing on the lidocaine and Vitamin B12, because I'd bet a lot of money that if Wallace had asked Clemens for the names of the doctors who prescribed and injected the lidocaine and Vitamin B12, Clemens would have been tongue-tied.

 

5) "I didn't play to get fame or go to the Hall of Fame."

Roger, do you really expect us to believe that? It's a good thing you weren't hooked up to the polygraph (lie detector machine), because you may have caused the stylus to fly right off the paper.

 

6) "If I was using steroids, then why didn't I break down earlier? Steroids turn your tendons to dust."

This is deception and an attempt to prove his innocence by appealing to the general public's ignorance about anabolic steroids. Brian McNamee specifically told Sen. Mitchell's group that he had injected Clemens with Winstrol (Stanozolol). This is an important detail.

The use of an anabolic steroid like natural testosterone has been reported in animal studies to result in stiffer tendons and a higher failure rate compared to control animals who were not injected with testosterone. Other anabolic steroids are associated not with weakening tendons, but rather with increasing strength of the muscles attached to them to the point of mechanical overload which leads to failure/destruction of the tendon. However Winstrol, a synthetic anabolic steroid, actually has been shown to induce changes that strengthen (not weaken) tendons and ligaments. That is why it is one of the anabolic steroids of choice for athletes.

 

7)  "If I was injecting with steroids and HGH, then how would I get the needles?"

Answer: you'd get them the same way that you got the syringes and needles for your seemingly illegal lidocaine and Vitamin B12 shots.

 

8) "Why would I want to do things (steroids) that would limit my flexibility?"

This is again an attempt to try and play on the stereotypes of anabolic steroids. Anabolic steroids taken regularly for long periods of time have the possibility of making someone "muscle-bound". But using lower doses of steroids could reduce muscle breakdown without necessarily causing incredible increases in muscle mass.

This brings me to another criticism. Why did '60 Minutes' not dig up photos of Clemens during different stages of his career? Regardless of whether or not they show a difference, I think that for any other athlete in this situation in this situation, showing a progression of pictures would have been the norm.

 

9) "You'd think that after 24 years, people would give me the benefit of the doubt."

Roger, your record over that 24 years and the interesting surges of excellence as you got older is exactly the reason that people suspect you in the first place. You should know that.

 

After watching the Clemens interview, I realized why lawyers always tell their clients to shut their mouths: because people who lie tend to tell more lies to cover the previous lies, and eventually people realize that it just doesn't sound right.

There are a couple of things that Clemens said which were credible:

1) Clemens said, "The higher you get up on the flagpole, the more your butt shows."

I'm sure that even Clemens head lawyer Rusty Hardin had to wince at that comment. For a guy who's been accused of dropping his pants and getting injected with steroids and HGH in the butt, it was an incredibly poor choice of words.

But there is a lot of truth to it. People are jealous. That's why it's lonely at the top. That's also why people in high places have to make sure that they rigorously screen those around them.

 

2) His comments about taking a polygraph test.

A lot of people would say that Clemens did not clearly answer the question about whether or not he would take a polygraph test.

If he has misgivings about doing it, he's well within his rights. The test is not perfect, and he really has nothing to gain by taking it. If he takes it and passes it, then his critics will say, "That's just part of Clemens's pathologic lying personality. He'd probably be able to say that his name is not Roger Clemens and still pass it."

I think that for a guy with a strong resolve, tons of incentives to pass the test, lots of money to hire "coaches", and the proven ability to be cool under pressure makes Clemens fits the ideal profile of someone who could beat the test.