Bud Selig demonstrates to Congress that he even looked for steroids up his nose. (Photo — a a few more like it — from The Big Lead via Big Head DC.

Let’s be honest: Despite most people’s vehement denials, at some time or another, we all pick our noses. Sometimes, it’s hard to breath; sometimes, you just have to get something out. But the vast majority of us do this unappealing act far from others. We do it in the confines of our own homes or maybe in the bathroom or maybe when we think no one else is watching us.

But not Bud Selig. No, no, not Bud. Baseball’s Commissioner will defiantly pick his nose while the cameras are rolling. He will defiantly pick his nose in front of a Congressional Committee during one of the few times ever that normal people will stop and watch a Congressional Committee hearing. And he will do it while a row of photographers sit a mere five foot away from him and while cameras are broadcasting the event to the world.

Have you no shame, Mr. Commissioner? You are, after all, supposed to the face of baseball.

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Steroids. Santana. The Bullpen. Melky. Pick one, and you’re bound to hit a topic that we — and countless other Yankee blogs — have hit upon with more regularity than any of us would like to admit. But we’re almost done with that. As the handy-dandy countdown on the right tells us, Spring Training starts in about four weeks, and it couldn’t come soon enough.

For now, as we slog through the last few weeks without baseball, we’ll spin that Wheel of Topics and land on steroids. As we all know, Congress got to be on TV today. Lucky them. Appearing in front of a few members of Congress were Senator George Mitchell, Commissioner Bud Selig and Executive Director of the MLBPA Donald Fehr. If you want to read the news coverage, The Times has article on the way Congress latched onto the stimulants issue, another article on the day’s events with a focus on the Congressional inquiry into Miguel Tejada and a George Vecsey Sports of the Times piece on the hearings.

For the purposes of this post, I don’t care about what happened at the hearings as much as what didn’t happen at the hearings. Missing from the hearings were much mention of the NFL, the NHL or the NBA. Missing from the hearings were talks of Michael Vick’s questionable moral decisions representing a league filled with many players who have faced legal troubles. Missing from the hearings were talks of steroid use in football, referee scandals in the NBA and general PED use across sports that aren’t baseball.

This double standard — baseball must hold itself to some unattainable, drug- and cheating-free standard that has never existed in the history of the game — just has to stop. As witnesses to Congress, Selig and Fehr were deferential toward Henry Waxman’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which somehow holds sway over baseball. But as the figureheads of baseball, it’s time for them to go something of an offensive. How can they sit there mostly passive while the NFL elects steroid users to the Pro Bowl and EA Sports awards them with video game covers?

Personally, I have stopped caring about steroids in baseball. Once upon a time, I cared about this scandal, but in the ensuing years since this scandal became more and more of a front-page issue, I grew less and less concerned. Does it matter what people did in the early 2000s? There is no Delorean. We can’t change the past.

Instead, Congress, baseball, whoever should focus on what the game can do to improve in the future. But beyond that, the powers that be, the grandstanding masses, should look beyond baseball. They should look at football and see what’s going on there. They should look at basketball and the Olympic athletes who will do just about anything to gain a competitive edge. It’s become an overplayed Internet meme, but leave baseball alone. Go fry some other fish for a change.

I can only laugh and wonder at the irony: Mark McGwire was right when he said he wasn’t there to talk about the past. Why talk about the past? It looks good for politicians and doesn’t solve the problem. Three years later, nothing accomplished.

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With Congressional grandstanding comes legal games.

Right now, Roger Clemens does not have to testify in front of Congress or agree to a deposition in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Henry Waxman and Co. have asked Clemens to cooperate, but Clemens would simply be granting Congress a favor in doing so. He has yet to be legally compelled to testify.

And guess what? It doesn’t sound like he’s too keen to come forward on his own. T.J. Quinn has the story:

After saying repeatedly that Roger Clemens will answer any questions Congress wants to ask him, a source familiar with the inquiry said Saturday night that attorney Rusty Hardin is hedging over the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s request to depose Clemens under oath next week because it might interfere with his defamation lawsuit against personal trainer Brian McNamee.

The source said Hardin is also making “noises” about not turning over a taped conversation between McNamee and two investigators for Hardin’s office recorded Dec. 12, the day before the Mitchell report was released.

Raise if your hand if you’re surprised. Exactly.

While tales of reported abscesses on Clemens’ buttocks may end up throwing McNamee’s credibility into doubt, I’m not at all surprised that Hardin would opt not to have Clemens testify in front of Congress. Our esteemed legislative body isn’t the tightest lipped organization, and Hardin wouldn’t want his legal strategy plastered all over the pages of the nation’s newspapers. On the surface, this does represent an about-face for Hardin who said that Clemens would definitely testify at a hearing, but a deposition may hold more legal weight.

Meanwhile, Quinn’s sources say that nothing has been decided yet. Clemens may yet agree to be deposed or Congress could resort to a subpoena. No one knows. For a change.

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Of all the names in the Mitchell Report, two of the bigger stars named have remained fairly silent. Until today, no one had heard neither hide nor hair from Paul LoDuca or Chuck Knoblauch. But that changed when Knoblauch spokes to a Times reporter at his home in Houston.

The interview and Knoblauch’s words are more interesting for what he has to say about baseball than the Mitchell Report. To get the steroids stuff out of the way, Knoblauch, as Thayer Evans relates, called the report “interesting” and “crazy.” That about sums up this whole farce. “I have nothing to defend,” Knoblauch said. “I have nothing to hide at the same time.”

So that’s that. Believe what you want about Knoblauch.

More compelling are the indications that baseball still haunts. Chuck Knoblauch’s story in baseball had a sad ending. An offensive lynch pin on the Yankees for two seasons, he was seemingly destined for 3000 hits when in 2000, his third year in the Bronx but his second with throwing problems, he simply lost it. Suffering a meltdown that Rick Ankiel would imitate in 2001, Knoblauch simply could not throw the ball from second base to first base.

The Yankees tried to keep him around. He tried left field for a bit in 2001 and still managed to rack up 600 plate appearances. But his offensive production that season was abysmal. A 1-for-18 showing in the 2001 World Series punched his ticket out of New York. He would try to latch on with the Royals in 2002 and was out of baseball the following year. A promising career had been derailed by mental demons.

“I’ve got nothing to do with any of that, I mean, any baseball. And I don’t want anything to do with baseball,” he said to Evans.

Knoblauch doesn’t want a job in baseball; he doesn’t want a spot in the Hall of Fame; and as he asked the reporter not to tell anyone where he lives, he doesn’t want to be bothered. It’s sad really to see someone who was among the tops at his position fall so hard and so far so quickly.

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Congress is delaying their unnecessary grandstanding hearing featuring the big names in the Mitchell Report.

The congressional hearing involving Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and former trainer Brian McNamee was postponed Wednesday until Feb. 13 so lawmakers can gather evidence and coordinate their investigation with the Justice Department.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was informing witnesses that the Jan. 16 session is being pushed back…

“The Justice Department told the committee it would be helpful if we waited until after Radomski is sentenced,” the committee’s minority staff director, David Marin, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “This also gives us more time to delve into more recent developments, gather more information, and depose all witnesses before they testify in public.”

Spring Training starts the next day. What a coincidence. I’m sure this has nothing to do with media attention focused on baseball right before pitchers and catchers report. The circus, indeed.

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There’s been plenty on the Brian McNamee/Roger Clemens front over the past few days. Although I’d love nothing more than to see this whole thing just disappear, it’s not going to, which means we’re stuck with it. First thing I caught on it this morning was a piece on ESPN, where McNamee’s lawyers are looking to expose a conversation between McNamee and Clemens which took place on the day before the Mitchell report was revealed.

“They should ask for the entire tape of the interview back in December. That’s the tape they should ask for,” Earl Ward, one of McNamee’s lawyers, said Tuesday. “According to Brian, they tried to get him to recant. Brian said, look, what I told the [Mitchell and federal] investigators was the truth.”

If that’s the extent of the conversation, I’m not sure how much it helps McNamee’s case. However, if his lawyers are pushing for its release, there’s bound to be a bit more revealing information contained therein.

But then I caught a piece in Slam! Sports which aims to trounce McNamee’s credibility. In fact, just three paragraphs in, we’re treated to this quote:

“I hope baseball is not putting all of its case on this one witness because in my 32 years as an investigator, I would not find him to be very credible,” Florida state attorney office investigator Don Crotty said yesterday.

Crotty’s distrust of McNamee stems from an incident back in 2001, where a number of Yankees were having a party in Florida — which incidentally started in Chuck Knoblauch’s room. Outside, investigators found a woman passed out in a swimming pool. She had been drugged with GHB. McNamee was implicated, but never charged, since prosecutors didn’t think the victim’s case would hold up — because he had slept with a married member of the team. Crotty believed that McNamee was dishonest with him when questioned pursuant to the case.

It also appears that Brian referred to himself sometimes as Dr. McNamee:

An investigation showed his doctorate earned at Columbus University in Louisiana is now Columbus out of Mississippi, since Louisiana closed its operation in 2001 for handing out degrees to many who did “little or no academic work.”

The article says that Clemens actually believed that McNamee had a medical degree.

Also discrediting McNamee is his tenure with the NYPD. Though he was involved in many high-profile cases, including the death of Eric Clapton’s son, he’ll never shed the 30-day suspension he received for his negligence in the escape of a prisoner.

And then we have the issue of physical proof of Roger’s use of steroids. The Blue Jays team chiropractor at the time Roger was with the team didn’t see the telltale signs of steroid use:

“I worked with him daily and didn’t see any signs of steroid use,” Dr. Patrick Graham told The Sun yesterday. “I didn’t notice any rashes, acne or increased muscle mass or structure.”
…
“I think I would have seen signs of it,” he said, adding he always thought the Rocket’s success in Toronto was because of his newly developed “split-fingered fastball.”

Even after Clemens left the Jays organization, he would come in for a back treatment whenever in Toronto and Graham said he observed no body changes. “I haven’t seen him for two years, but I just don’t think he was on steroids.”

Professional trainer Phil Zullo, of North York’s Pro-Fit, agrees — saying if Clemens took the amount of steroids and the type McNamee alleges in the report, he would have ended up looking like Hulk Hogan. “With the way Roger works out and trains, he would have been a giant,” said Zullo, who did not work with Clemens but has always been known to be against the use of any substances for the amateur and professional athletes he trains.

True, none of this proves that Clemens didn’t do steroids. But then again, is he ever going to be able to prove that?

My stance remains the same as it has since the beginning, in that I don’t think he has to prove that he didn’t. Clearly, my opinion differs with much of the public. But why should Roger have to go to these lengths to defend himself against one person, with a spotty history, who was facing jail time? If there was more than one source of this allegation, then yeah, maybe Roger has to up his defense. But I don’t see the reason to assume the worst when we’re talking about the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.

Once again, though, it’s my deepest desire to see this story go away.

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Sounding a lot like Joe Torre did last week, Hank Steinbrenner issued his own half-hearted views on Roger Clemens. “I thought the media commentary after the press conference was over was a little harsh,” Steinbrenner said on Monday night. “Too much rush to judgment in this country. As far as whether he’s telling the truth or not, I have no clue. But I’m not going to say, well, he’s lying, like everybody on TV did after he was done.” Steinbrenner also noted that PED use in baseball went far beyond the limited New York-centric scope of Mitchell Report. No big surprises here.

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This one’s for you, steve. As we all know, Roger Clemens held a press conference this afternoon to discuss the Mitchell Report and his response to it. To put it bluntly, the press conference was a circus through and through. For the most part, Clemens and his lawyer rightly lashed out at the media for the piss poor coverage of Clemens’ response and their unreasonable demands for an immediate response from the Rocket. The conference ended with Rocket basically storming away from the dais.

Meanwhile, the other part — a replaying of the recorded phone conversation from Friday between Clemens and Brian McNamee — was fairly anticlimactic. While Clemens’ lawyer claims the ambiguous phone call in which McNamee never says he or Clemens is lying about their stances on Clemens’ injections — steroids or B12, respectively — the phone call wasn’t exactly a smoking gun that alleviated all doubt of guilt from the shoulders of Clemens.

Tellingly enough, Clemens did not really answer the question when someone asked him why he let McNamee inject him, and he said that McNamee provided his injections. So basically, we can see the defense he’s carving out for himself: He thought B12 just meant B12 while McNamee, taking a cue from accepted baseball insider lingo, thought that B12 meant steroids. So there you go. We’re right back where we started, and this pissing contest is just getting started.

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Via friend of RAB Mischa and Sean McNally comes the news that the Yankees — or at least those named in the Mitchell Report — are heading down to Washington in a few weeks. Or as Sean put it, “The circus is coming to town!”

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), head of the House Oversight Committee, has asked some of the folks currently involved in the media pissing contest to come down and testify under oath in front of the Committee on January 16. According to the press release, the committee has invited — but not subpoenaed — Brian McNamee, Kirk Radomski, Andy Pettitte, Chuck Knoblauch and Roger Clemens to testify. Apparently, only Yankees used steroids and were named in the Mitchell Report. Fair and balanced indeed.

Meanwhile, The Times reports that Clemens and McNamee have both accepted the invitation. The others have not yet been reached for comment. With McNamee, Clemens and lawyers in tow, it might actually be worth it to turn on CSPAN the Wednesday after next.

This committee hearing is set for the day after leading baseball figures sit before Waxman and Co. to testify on the findings in the Mitchell Report. Part me wants something — Bud Selig’s resignation, perhaps — to come out of these sessions; the other part of me wants Congress to focus on the future and not something that no one can change.

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Okay, okay. One more (for now) Mitchell Report story.

This time, it’s a visit with our old friend Number Six. As you may recall, Joe Torre was the skipper of all of those Yankee teams in the late 1990s and early 2000s when many members of the teams were supposedly based on the testimony of one person using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.

Torre, with his Hall of Fame spot all but guaranteed, did all he could to defend his team. No, wait. No, he didn’t. Torre issued a rather equivocal statement coming out in support of his favorite players but not quite picking sides. ESPN had more:

Joe Torre won’t pick sides between Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee, the former New York Yankees strength coach who accused the Rocket of using performance-enhancing drugs.

“You’re not going to get me in that jackpot,” the former Yankees manager said Wednesday. “I’d rather just stay away from making any in-depth comment about the whole steroid-HGH thing…”

“I’m very close to Roger. When I say close to him, he was a great competitor for me. Andy the same way. And I certainly know they’re two proud individuals that only like to do the right thing,” Torre said. “I’d just like to leave it at that…”

“It made it look like a lopsided report,” Torre said. “Plus, don’t forget, the Yankees have so many people coming through there on a year-to-year basis. We changed over quite often, whether it would be a player for the month of May, a player for the month of September. But I think the big part of it was the access, where these two people were both based in New York…”

“When you’re talking about 80 players that supposedly were using one thing or another, to me it may be an incomplete report,” he said. “The only thing I do know is that the most important thing for us in baseball is to make sure that when we take the field, that the fans trust us. So whatever we have to do to make that happen, I think that’s important.”

So either Joe Torre literally had no idea what was happening in his clubhouse with the players under his control or he just flat-out doesn’t want to talk about it. As always, I have no idea what the truth is; I’m just telling you what someone else said, and this time, that someone else was the man in charge for 12 seasons. Take that for what you will.

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