Dear Mr Clemens,

Today you went before Congress and testified under oath, along with your former friend and trainer Brian McNamee and Charles Sheeler, an attorney who helped with the Mitchell Report and blew any chance of credibility that you might have had.

Never mind that you and your legal/PR team thought it was a good idea to spend the last few days on Capitol Hill essentially lobbying lawmakers with your visits, meeting with 5 lawmakers in 4 hours yesterday making you look smarmy and more concerned about your image than the actual facts. But today, in front of millions of people you looked and sounded defensive, arrogant, uneducated (He must have “misremembered”?), and worst of all rehearsed.

True, Brian McNamee was shredded by lawmakers for lying and withholding evidence, was called almost every name in the book, and made to look like nothing more than a drug dealer, but he was not the one who had his legacy and career to lose. Face it, McNamee’s life, as soon as the Mitchell report came out, was essentially over, any chance of a real life with any credibility was over. He had to know that as soon as his name was associated with naming Major League ball players, it would be a crusade to crush and smear him, well it worked.

During your testimony you wanted the world to believe that McNamee shot up your best friend, Andy Pettitte AND your wife with HGH, all without you knowing what was going on? You wanted us to believe that McNamee was telling us the truth about Pettitte and your wife but was lying that he injected you? You also wanted us to believe that you contacted your former nanny, whom you hadn’t spoken to in nearly seven years, because you wanted to help Congress.  Not to try to talk to her before she testified to try and cover up the fact that you were at a party at Jose Canseco’s house? The same nanny who testified that she was there with your wife and children and you…?

I am sorry Roger, as Representative Cummins so eloquently stated, “You’re one of my heroes, but it’s hard to believe you.” No big binder of canned responses, no slick legal and PR team, and no matter how willing you are to throw your friend, wife, trainer and others under the bus for the sake of your legacy, can your legacy or truthfulness be saved.

I know that everyone is complicit in the steroids issue, the owners, the players, the union, and many others, but that doesn’t give any one player the right to knowingly and brazenly break the rules, then lie when they are caught. Unfortunately all today proved was that there a bunch of rats in this whole deal and that we will never know the extent of the truth but we do know this. Your legacy will always have to have an asterisk, a footnote, that has a huge question mark not because we don’t know if you were juiced, but because your integrity, the only thing we take with us when we die, was tarnished in a major way one cold day in February.