Talking Fairness

Hall of Fame for Clemens? Try Hall of Shame
Clemens fails in attempt at damage control 
Clemens shelled by Congress

   Now, admittedly, this isn’t very important news, which means I really haven’t been giving much time to keeping up with the updates. I didn’t even know that Clemens testified today, until I saw the headline on yahoo, and as a very big baseball fan, I’m a little interested in it, so I read the yahoo story (the 3rd headline) and while reading the article and having no idea what actually was said other than the quotes in the article, it became painfully obvious that something was amiss. It was late and it took me a second or so to realize I was reading a yahoo news story, and yahoo isn’t a “news” company, so that certainly had something to do with it. So, I went to MSNBC.com, which is my usual source of news in print. And to my surprise, both stories I read there, as well, were full of very opinionated negatives about Clemens’ testimony, without actually reporting what was said specifically. So I watched a clip of the actual testimony and finally got to some actual facts, and certain things came to me immediately, that the journalist didn’t mention, out of three.

     There seems to be two major issues with Clemens’ being the one telling the truth. First, Mcnamee accused two other players, who comfirmed his accusations as true, so why would he tell the truth about two and lie about the other? And, second, Andy Pettite, a neutral party from all we know, has given testimony against Clemens. Now to the first issue: If anyone has ever studied the art of persuation, they know that this technique (if it were a technique used by Mcnamee) is one of the best. It’s such an important element of persuation, in fact, I bet it actually has a name, which unfortunately I’m unaware of. You want someone to believe a really big lie, so you tell the truth about smaller irrelevant things to build credibility. That’s why it’s completely irrelevant what Mcnamee said about anything else, except Clemens. If Mcnamee has a motive to lie about giving Clemens HGH, then he has a motive to lie. Telling the truth about something else doesn’t do away with that. And this is where I become irrate with the journalists.

   Roger Clemens is a dull, chubby, middle aged millionare whose never had to think to make his way in his life. His inability to come up with a reason why Mcnamee would lie in his case, just means Clemens is stupid, not guilty of HGH use. But the journalist are not supposed to be as stupid as a guy who can make a buck throwing a ball into a glove well. They’re supposed to clearly see that this Mcnamee guy supposedly saved the syringes from 6 or 7 years ago. If he knew what Clemens taking HGH in 2001 meant at the time enough to save syringes, he surely knew whenever he was interviewed for the Mitchell report. Now I’m not saying I don’t believe Mcnamee, I’m just saying that it painfully obviously possible that he knew he’d given Clemens’ wife HGH and knew he’d become very well known if he threw in a BIG name into the hat along with the miniscule Chuck Knoblauch and pretty good sized, albeit not ”arguably the best pitcher of our life time”, not even (in my book) a hall of famer… Andy Pettite. They’d just be more names in the 88 names named in the report. So, when asked the question why would Mcnamee tell the truth about Pettite and Kboblauch, but lie about Clemens, my answer is to become famous, and possibly to shift the “your a criminal” spotlight off of himself, which the smaller two names couldn’t do. This goes to a question asked by Congressmen Elijah Cummings about Mcnamee pridicting the future. Clemens said he didn’t know, but I say it all goes back to the saved syringes! Mcnamee knew what was going on, and he knew he was a big time drug mover, and obviously he’s smart enough to know those sorts of people get into trouble with the law. So, all in all, to me using the fact that Mcnamee named two people truthfully along with Clemens is a bugus way of measuring if he’s told the truth about Clemens.

So, to the second issue facing Clemens, Pettite’s testimony. Well, this will be short because it’s utterly straight foward. Andy Pettite, like Roger Clemens, is not an intellectual, he doesn’t necessarily have an above average memory, or even an average one at that. After all, he’s gone an entire baseball career taking all kinds of medications, pain killers, muscle relaxers, and even HGH (which admittedly i have noidea if it worsens the memory) but the point is twofold. If we assume that Clemens’ wife did get injected with HGH, which I haven’t heard anyone deny, so it’s completely fair to assume so, then a conversation that went something like:
Roger: Hey, Andy, can you believe my wife got HGH for a photo shoot from Micky?
Andy: HAHA. I used that for my leg, it really helped, I ain’t ever heard of something like that.
Roger: Did it really help that much without any side effects?
Andy: Yeah, it did. You thinking about?
Roger: Yeah I’m thinking about it, doing this shit at 40 is hard.    

Very possibly gets distorted after 5 years of thinking nothing about it. To an outsider it may seem like an event that Andy would remember forever because of what would be at stake, but these two guys are supposedly really close and both famous enough to feel invincible… not to mention that Andy took the same stuff, so he wouldn’t have reacted so strongly to it…

Again this isn’t to say that what happened was Pettite used HGH explicitly because Clemens told of his use, so a good memory of the conversation wouldn’t be out of the question at all. So, again my not being updated on this whole story is a hinderance to actually judging whether or not Clemens used HGH or not… which I’m actually kind of lean toward that he did use it.

Luckily, all that I meant to do with this is rant about how bias the coverage on the story really is, and that it’s pitiable that the media so badly wants Clemens to be lying that they see everything he does and says as evidence of his lies.