Roger Clemens has sat down with good friend Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes and gave his first interview since his outing in the Mitchell Report. The entire interview will air Sunday on CBS (check your local listings) and my guess is that it is a softball interview. Clemens is a pretty smart guy; he knows that one bad interview can kill his already battered reputation. So what does he do, he calls a friend from 60 Minutes to interview him.
So far all that is reported about this interview is that Roger did in fact have his trainer inject him with something. The trainer says it was some HGH…Roger claims it was Vitamin B-12. I am not sure what exactly B-12 does for someone’s body, but I do know that a lot of baseball players have mentioned being injected with it. Why is it that baseball players feel a need to inject “vitamins” into their body when eating them could do away with the whole mystery of injections? I am pretty sure meat, eggs and dairy have B-12 and there is no need for needles to get in into your body. Just teeth and a mouth.
My favorite part of this hard hitting interview however is when Mike Wallace follows up with this:
--Clemens calls the accusation "ridiculous" and says he "never" used any banned substances.
--"Swear?" asks Wallace.
--"[I] swear," says Clemens.
You can’t learn that type of questioning in any school…except for maybe the Mike Wallace Kick Ass School of Journalism (MWKASofJ). Hopefully he got the pinky swear in there too…because that is unbreakable. My guess is that this slumber party interview is not going to do anything for Roger. He will still be perceived as taking steroids and will probably have a difficult time getting into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.
Peter Gammons (who I am pretty sure never took steroids) wrote a pretty good blog entry about Clemens, Maddux and Glavine. (B1 sent the link in) It shows that Glavine and Maddux are two old guys that reinvented their pitches and not their bodies and how they have had better careers since Clemens allegedly started rubbing on “the clear.”
I will watch the interview…hopefully Roger and Mike will have more than a love fest, but I am not holding my breath. I think it is time that we hold people accountable for their actions and if Roger did use steroids, then he deserves as much shame and scorn that Barry Bonds has received.
