Congressman and Chair of the House Oversight Committee Henry Waxman regrets holding Wednesday’s hearing. “I think Clemens and McNamee both came out quite sullied, and I didn’t think it was a hearing that needed to be held in order to get the facts out about the Mitchell report,” Waxman said.

Had Waxman been serious about holding a hearing on the real issue — the prevalence of performance enhancing drugs in baseball — he would have. But Clemens and McNamee made for better headlines and more attention. This is fake regret from another phony politician. And the specter of an incomplete Mitchell Report looms large as well.

Remember when Roger Clemens came back in 2007 and Suzyn Waldman flipped her lid? It was “of all the dramatic things she has ever said,” the Roger Clemens return seemed to take the cake. Well, she sure does look foolish now, huh? In fact, I was at that game and the 50,000 of us that stood and gave Clemens a standing ovation probably look equally foolish. Our reaction wasn’t immortalized in audio. Meanwhile, Bob Raissman of the Daily News caught up with Waldman in the aftermath of this week’s hearings. Waldman gives the typical canned answers, but lest we forget, it was indeed dramatic.

We all want this to be over after today. We all know that Bud Selig screwed this one up. We all know that this sideshow circus down in DC is no longer about rooting out performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.

But for the next day, we’re stuck with it. We’re stuck with two grown men engaged in a public shouting match with legal ramifications and the reputations of distinguished baseball players and former Senators on the line. We’re stuck with grandstanding politicians and clueless baseball officials. And as the day gets started, we’re stuck with conflicting reports about Andy Pettitte’s testimony.

What we do know is that Andy Pettitte — along with Chuck Knoblauch and Kurt Radomski — will not be at today’s hearing. What the media hasn’t yet pegged down is why and what Pettitte said in his deposition sessions. An ESPN report from late Tuesday noted that members of Congress excused the Yanks’ lefty because he may not be a good witness:

Sources told [ESPN.com's TJ] Quinn that Pettitte was not a good witness when he appeared before congressional lawyers during a sworn deposition on Monday. Pettitte often contradicted himself, the sources said, so the committee agreed to his request not to appear Wednesday.

But as the rest of that article relates and as pieces on CBS Sportsline and The New York Times detail, Pettitte’s testimony may be the nail in Roger Clemens’ coffin. While The Times report notes the existence of a signed affidavit given by Pettitte to the House Oversight Committee in lieu of testifying, CBS’ story has the details from the affidavit:

Roger Clemens told Yankees teammate Andy Pettitte nearly 10 years ago that he used human growth hormone, Pettitte said in a sworn affidavit to Congress, the Associated Press learned Tuesday.

Pettitte disclosed the conversation to the congressional committee holding Wednesday’s hearings on drug use in baseball, a person familiar with the affidavit said. The person spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because the document had not been made public.

According to the person familiar with the affidavit, who said it was signed Friday night, Pettitte also said Clemens backtracked when the subject of HGH came up again in conversation in 2005, before the same House committee held the first hearing on steroids in baseball.

Pettitte said in the affidavit that he asked Clemens in 2005 what he would do if asked by the media about HGH, given his admission years earlier. According to the account told to the AP, the affidavit said Clemens responded by saying Pettitte misunderstood the previous exchange in 1999 or 2000 and that, in fact, Clemens had been talking about HGH use by his wife in the original conversation.

Furthermore, as ESPN reports, McNamee once told Pettitte that the “stuff [McNamee] gave Roger” was illegal.

Now, right now, all the information we know for sure is that this affidavit exists. The AP story on Sportsline relies on anonymous sources who could be wrong. In less than 12 hours, we’ll know sure, but things do not look good for Roger Clemens.

Someone tell me again though what this has to do about changing the culture of PED use in Major League Baseball? I’m dying to hear the answer to that question.

I bet this isn’t what Bud Selig and George Mitchell had in mind when the Mitchell Report hit the streets in December.

After nearly two months of back-and-forth posturing in the press and the halls of Congress, it’s come down to two men. Only Brian McNamee and his one-time client and current arch-rival Roger Clemens will testify in front of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. According to numerous reports, Andy Pettitte did not want to testify in public against Roger Clemens, and the committee was satisfied with the deposition testimony it received from Chuck Knoblach and Kurt Radomski, the other New York-based trainer named in the Report. Somewhere, Paul Lo Duca just breathed a giant sigh of relief.

In related news, Jim Baumbach and Robert E. Kessler of Newsday reported that Pettitte’s testimony confirms McNamee’s story and contradicts Clemens’ vehement denials. For Clemens, this will be utterly devastating, and Andy Pettitte, who has long idolized and respected Roger, must not feel too great about the current situation.

From a Yankee perspective, this circus is either ending or just starting. For better or worse, Roger Clemens is now forever linked to the Yankees because of the Mitchell Report fallout and the time of his supposed drug use, the bulk of which is reported to have occurred during his time in the Bronx. If Pettitte’s testimony, part of the public record, shows Clemens’ recent denials to be a façade, the media circus will swarm around Tampa next week like no other. If not, this strange tale of drugs, syringes and gauze will play out in Congress.

For Clemens, this news on the eve of the hearing cannot be good. On Wednesday, two men — one player out of the 89 named in the report — and one trainer will face down a Congressional committee annoyed by the way this drama has played out. One of them will emerge from the committee room most likely the subject of a perjury inquiry and a disgraced man. I wonder what odds Protrade would give on that one.

Finally, there’s always Bud Selig standing in the corner. With this latest development, the Mitchell Report and its original intentions have been launched out the window. No longer is this about stopping steroids in baseball. No longer is that incomplete document that randomly named 89 out of what has to be hundreds of drug users the focus of attention. Rather, it is about only the biggest name in the document and the saga that has played itself out on TV stations and newspapers across the country. It’s about a recorded phone call, eight-year-old syringes and gauze, spousal accusations and firm denials.

Somehow, I bet this isn’t what Bud Selig envisioned three years ago when he commissioned the report, and I bet it’s not what he envisioned when he released this document to the wolves two months ago. A Mitchell Report without names would have served its purpose better than this document, and as the charade continues tomorrow, I have to wonder whether or not this whole thing — this report, this committee hearing, this attention to something that no one can change — is really in the best interest of baseball.

Brian McNamee claims that Roger Clemens’ wife Debbie used HGH before her 2003 Sports Illustrated with her husband. With this strange turn comes more headlines, and I wonder if Congress and Commissioner Selig regret ever opening this can of worms. Maybe Mark McGwire was right when he didn’t want to talk about the past.

Let me start this one off with my typical Roger Clemens-Steroids disclaimer. I don’t know what Roger Clemens did or when. I don’t know if he’s telling the truth; I don’t know if Brian McNamee is telling the truth. But I do believe in the legal right that places the burden of proof on the prosecution. In other words, Clemens is innocent until proven guilty.

And this latest round of news — seven- or eight-year-old gauze or used syringes — hardly strikes me as a smoking gun.

The story according to Duff Wilson and Michael S. Schmidt of The Times:

Brian McNamee has given federal investigators bloody gauze pads, vials and syringes he said he used to inject Roger Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone in 2000 and 2001, a lawyer with knowledge of the case said Wednesday.

McNamee, Clemens’s former personal trainer, hopes that DNA and chemical tests on the materials will support his contention that he injected Clemens with those drugs, the lawyer said. The disclosure came a day after Clemens gave a sworn deposition to Congressional investigators Tuesday.

Clemens’s lawyer, Lanny A. Breuer, responded that McNamee “apparently has manufactured evidence” and was “a troubled man who is obsessed with doing everything possible to destroy Roger Clemens.”

It’s pretty hard to take this one too seriously, and I’ll turn to Breuer for a concise summary. Breuer said this “defies all credibility. It is just not credible — who in their right mind does such a thing?”

Supposedly, the story goes, McNamee had these syringes at home but had not yet opted to share them with federal investigators out of what one source termed “lingering loyalty” toward Clemens. When Clemens basically threw him under the bus at that bizarre press conference a few weeks ago, McNamee decided to wage his own war against the Rocket.

It doesn’t take a legal expert to know that this evidence would hardly be too convincing. As Schmidt details in a sidebar piece, this revelation brings up more questions than it answers. Why did McNamee withhold evidence for so long? Why and how was he storing the syringes?

Meanwhile, it’s nearly impossible to date leftover injections in syringes or crusted blood. As one law professor said to Schmidt, Clemens’ defense team will have a field day with this. “Clemens’s defense lawyers will attack McNamee on cross-examination, claiming that the evidence was manufactured by McNamee in response to the revelation that Clemens had taped him,” Mathew Rosengart said.

This story — already bizarre — just gets stranger by the day. I wonder if Bud Selig is still pleased that his half-hearted efforts at rooting out steroids in baseball has led to this debacle.

“It was great to be able to tell them what I’ve been saying all along, that I’ve never used steroids or growth hormone. And I look forward to being here I guess in this room next week. So, thank you very much. Y’all have a good day,” Roger Clemens said after five hours of questions (and probably as many autograph requests). I’m sure Brian McNamee will say the opposite, and Congress will be none the wiser. Taxpayer time and money well spent.

So here’s a “shocker” from Ken Davidoff: Andy Pettitte is mad at Roger Clemens, and — brace yourselvse — the two of them weren’t as close as everyone made them out to be.

My world has just been torn apart. No, wait. It hasn’t. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

First, the goods:

“They were never as close as they were made out to be,” a friend of both said on the condition of anonymity. “They just sort of went along with it in the media, because it was a good story.”

Indeed, we had one of the game’s all-time best pitchers taking a fellow Texan under his wing, a guy whose childhood bedroom featured a Clemens poster. We had the pair bolting together to the Astros and returning together (a few months apart, granted) to New York.

Though Clemens and Pettitte enjoyed working out together, their relationship didn’t extend much beyond that. Clemens is an extrovert, Pettitte an introvert. Clemens enjoyed going out after games on road trips; Pettitte almost always stayed in. Their families aren’t particularly close, although both make the Houston area their full-time residences.

When Clemens sat out the start of the 2006 season, keeping the Astros waiting for months on yet another unretirement, Pettitte joined other veteran teammates in growing annoyed by The Rocket’s prima-donna vacillating.

So not only is Pettitte, as Davidoff’s piece notes, mad at Clemens for his defense tactics concerning the Mitchell, but it seems that the two had fleeced the media. And, oh yeah, had the media bothered to report this story two years, they would have found out that Clemens and Pettitte weren’t best friends then either. But, hey, that would actually require reporting and effort.

Now, I don’t care about the facts in this story. Does it matter to me if Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte are friends? No. Do I care if they’re close or not? No. It impacts my life and the Yankees about as much as that overblown story concerning the quote-unquote fight that Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez are in. Whatever. This is baseball, not high school.

But this story matters because it’s yet another example of how the media gets things wrong. Switching gears for one minute, if you take a peak at The New York Times’ coverage of Saturday’s Democratic caucuses in Nevada, the article leads with the fact that Senator Hillary Clinton captured more votes than her opponents, and then the reporters conveniently slip in the fact that Senator Barack Obama will actually get more national delegates. You know how one becomes a presidential candidate? By capturing more national delegates. So who really won, other than the people reporting the story and selling papers?

This story from Nevada and the Clemens-Pettitte story are from opposite sides of the news spectrum. One is about a highly-charged partisan battle for the chance to run for the White House; the other focuses on two baseball players from Texas who are dealing with accusations from a shoddy report. Yet, these stories both have one thing in common: They are complex issues with shades of gray that media insists on presenting in black and white.

Everything is win or lose. Clinton either wins the most votes or loses the most votes; forget the more important delegate count. Clemens and Pettitte either are best friends because they follow each other to Houston or not. There is absolutely no leeway for anything else. Maybe Clemens and Pettitte were friends, but the Mitchell Report strained that relationship. Maybe Davidoff is right or maybe not. How are we to judge a story when, three years later, the media basically says they covered it wrong the first time? Does anyone care what the facts are?

There is, of course, one final explanation that would get the media off the hook, at least in this one case. Roger Clemens planted this story about his non-friendship with Andy Pettitte so that when Congress questions him about Pettitte’s admitted HGH use, he can avoid answering by pointing to the “revelation” that the two aren’t that close. I wouldn’t put that past the Rocket; would you?

Nothing in this post is an endorsement of any political candidate or party. I don’t care for whom you choose to vote. Please leave the partisan politics outside of the comments.

Hilarious:

“This is a textbook case of slander: If steroids had not injected themselves—maliciously and with premeditation—into Mr. Clemens’ bloodstream on multiple occasions, people would not be accusing my client of taking steroids,” Clemens’ lawyer Rusty Hardin said in a statement released Tuesday.

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.