There Will Be No Andy Pettitte at Congressional Hearings on Steroids

It is an absolute tragedy that Congress has allowed Andy Pettitte to remove himself from the Congressional hearing over steroids.

At the hearings, scheduled for Wednesday, February 13^th, at 9:30a.m., Congress is expected to grill (and by grill I mean throw softballs at) Roger Clemens and his former trainer Brian McNamee, the two most discussed names to come out of the George Mitchell Report, which was released in December of last year.

But according to all reports, there will be no surprises coming from either one of those two. Sure, since the Mitchell Report was released, these two have come out with lewd detail after lewd detail in an attempt to present incriminating evidenced and keep themselves away from jail and/or public scrutiny. Besides a few juicy details recounting events that suggest either that Clemens used steroids or he didn't, neither Clemens' nor McNamee's stories have changed. McNamee claims he personally injected Clemens with performance enhancing drugs, and Clemens claims that he has never even been associated with the stuff.

That's the story they are both sticking to, and no one expects either one of them to pull a Mitt Romney and change their platforms. They will both go to Capitol Hill, and when one of the Congresspersons as ask them whether or not Clemens used HGH, they will tell Congress and the world that they stand behind their original stories, under oath.

And that is where Andy Pettitte comes in. After the Mitchell Report came out last December, Pettitte admitted that he indeed did use performance enhancing drugs that were provided to him via McNamee; thereby, validating McNamee and giving credence to what he told the Mitchell Report investigators.

So if Pettitte were available on Capitol Hill to give testimony in front of Congress and the national viewing audience, it could quite possibly give personal insight into a matter that will otherwise end up being a he-said-she-said fiasco. And when Clemens says that he never used HGH/steroids and McNamee says he did, Pettitte, a close friend of Clemens and former trainee of McNamee, could be right there to say who he believed, if he ever talked about performance enhancing drugs with Clemens, and whether or not he has any evidence to support whichever claim he aligns himself with.

However, Pettitte won't be there to give such testimony. One can only hope that Congress's decision to give Pettitte clearance from public testimony means that they already have enough information from his deposition and that they won't need Pettitte at the hearings. But my question is, how do they know what will unfold at the hearings? Maybe there is a question that will arise, that Pettitte could give insight, credence, or validation to, if he were present. Instead, the entire sports world be confined to a taped testimony that doesn't have to undergo the questioning at hand, thus eliminating the possibility of new questions being visited by all three parties.

I really hope Congress has thought this one through, because if they botch this hearing like they botched the last one held back in January, then one seriously has to question why on Earth they continually get involved in matters of sports when there are more important things they could be messing up.