Raise Your Hand If You Don't Think Roger Clemens is Lying ...

I mean, it's really hard to believe otherwise. And I understand that this is a country where people are innocent until proven guilty and that's why I'm not saying that Clemens is lying. I'm saying that I think he is lying.

If you watched the Congressional Hearings on steroids on February 13, 2008, where Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee squared in a battle to prove whether or not Clemens used performance enhancing drugs, there is no way you can come out thinking otherwise. Yes, there were holes in McNamee's story, but there were also holes in Clemens' story, and in order to be fair and impartial, I think you really have to take all of their conflicting accounts and throw them out the window.

Because the really damning stuff to Clemens' case didn't come from McNamee, it came from third parties. One of those third parties was Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens long-time friend and training partner.

Pettitte was excused from the hearings, but he left loads of testimony in the form of depositions and affidavits. In those pieces of testimony, Pettitte recalled a conversation he had in either 1999 or 2000 with Clemens where Clemens told Pettitte that he had used performance-enhancing drugs. That was the most damning statement from Pettitte, who was asked about that statement during his deposition over and over again and consistently came up with the same conclusion that Clemens had told him he had used Human Growth Hormone.

Pettitte even recalled telling his wife that Clemens had told him he used HGH. Thus, Mrs. Pettitte also submitted a sworn affidavit testifying that Pettitte told her of Clemens' statements in 1999 or 2000.

Clemens continued to categorically deny having used HGH, despite the Congress members throwing this in his face again and again. On several accounts, Clemens claims that Pettitte "misremembered" or "misheard" him during this supposed time in 1999 or 2000 and he said he only talked to Pettitte about some commercial that was about HGH, but never his own personal use.

Clemens had also claimed that he had told Pettitte that his wife had used HGH and that perhaps that was what Pettitte was getting confused. He said that despite the fact that Andy Pettitte alleges that their conversation about HGH happened prior to the time in which Clemens' wife testified to having used HGH.

There were also several other inconsistencies in Clemens story, from his time with his nanny in Florida during a Jose Conseco party, to his claims that McNamee shot him with B-12.

And while I'm no body language reader or psychologist, as a human being, Clemens just didn't come across as a man who was telling the truth. While McNamee seemed cool, calm, and collected and rarely, if ever, turned to speak to his counsel, Clemens was struggling with his thoughts, searching for words, mispronouncing McNamee's name, and reiterating utterances of "misremembers" and "misheard" throughout the afternoon.

It's hard to believe that the "hardest working man in baseball" seemed less credible than mail order PhD. who ratted on people in which he was complicit with, that was the case.

I do feel sorry for Clemens though, because he has been forced to prove a negative and has been deemed guilty in the court of public opinion without the presumption of innocence. However, I have no problem in saying that I too think he is guilty and that he deserves all of this, because if not for anything else, on February 13^th, he told inconsistencies, ran around the truth and didn't answer particular questions, and those are not the actions of a man who deserves the benefit of the doubt.