Roger Clemens Trial

Did Roger Clemens use steroids? If the answer to this is yes and Clemens under oath said no then he committed perjury. Committing perjury is a big deal. Committing perjury under oath is a pretty big deal.

Barry Bonds is now a convicted felon over similar charges. I beleive his ws obstruction of justice but I am not sure.

There really is no doubt that starting in the late eighties up through the mid nineties most, in not all, of the successful home-run hitters of those times were taking steroids or otherwise bulking up. You can go back to Brady Anderson and his fifty home run season, many others that came out of nowhere for a short time. Does anyone really think Luis Gonzales became a star with that much power all of natural causes. Jeff Bagwell insists he was clean but he is painted with the same brush because of when he played.

It does not even take a sniff test. You just have to look at the numbers in that time frame and compare them with the numbers in this time frame. In any other time have offensive numbers regressed this dramatically? Are we supposed to believe that pitchers have just become that much better. Certainly not.

So back to Clemens. Did he take steroids. It really does not matter. The question is can you prove beyond a doubt that he did and thus that he committed perjury. There was very little doubt in my mind in what the outcome of the case would be just as there was very little doubt in my mind of his guilt.

I will not complain about the verdict however. Rich and famous people should be convicted the same as anyone else for a crime. The question remains however of who really was to blame for the steroid era. Players, certainly but blaming the players is only half, or less, of the story. The owners knew, most fans knew, certainly journalists knew. Maybe we wanted to pretend we did not. The evidence however was there, if we did not see it, we just did not want to.

The bottom line is that as hard as it is to accept people really don't care. We all know a great majority cheated. Roger, Barry, maybe they are guilty of not being smart about answering the questions. Rafael Palmiero is not on trial. Sammy Sosa is not on trial. Heck David Ortiz, Boston's favorite is not on trial. The fact that who is charged and who is not is so arbitrary and so dependent on the accused players personality and ability to portray himself as a nice guy makes these trials a sham.

It seems baseball now has standards in place that at least prevent some drug use. Ryan Braun and his incident last winter with a failed test that was subsequently thrown out shows the process still needs refinement but the process does appear to work. What may be hard to understand is that even the Ryan Braun thing did not create much heat with the fans.

Why? I do not know. Honestly I think it is because we have lost our innocence. These players are good at a sport but I do not think that as a rule any parent would encourage their children to make these players heroes and role models. I think that we have done a much better job as parents in explaining to our children who the real heroes are in life.

They admire players and their moves, for the most part however I do not think they admire them as people. Now perhaps other kids other places, perhaps those without full family units and positive role models feel and act differently. I cannot get worked up about Clemens or Bonds. I do not like what they did, but I think making them scapegoats for a system where everybody including owners got filthy rich is foolish.

I also think that harsh as it is that athletes in most cases are as much cautionary tales for our young people as they are role models.

It certainly is a different world. It is a world where expecting anyone to care about the semantics of what an assumed steroid user said about his alleged steroid use is hopeless. We have learned a hard and painful lesson, adults and children alike, it however might be a good lesson, one we should have learned long ago. Choose your heroes wisely and perhaps, just maybe treat your fallen heroes with just a little of the empathy you wish they would have had when they were on top. It will not hurt you to do so, the days of most of us being hurt by an athletes failings are long gone, perhaps the best we can do for them is to feel sorry for them. That in itself might be the greatest punishment of all.