Lies, Damn Lies, and Clemens

Andy Pettitte "misremembers." Pettitte's wife must also misremember or she is lying to help her husband. Clemens claims Toronto Blue Jay's medical doctor, Ron Taylor, gave him bad medicine. His nanny similarly misremembers being at Jose Canseco's house. Clemens agents and lawyers were to blame for his silence during Mitchell's investigation. And, of course, Brian McNamee is about Clemens despite being generally honest about Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch and risking jail time by concocting a story about Clemens. Not surprisingly, in The World According to Roger, everyone is to blame except Roger.

Too many fine baseball writers have and will be penning columns about today's events in DC so I'll simply point to Tom Verducci's piece over at SI and Dan Shaughnessy's piece in The Globe. (Note to readers: I will almost never link to a CHB article--I think he is spreads far too much dissention by ignoring too much evidence or just failing to investigate--but I thought he did a decent job today so there it is.) However, since this is one of the rare moments when politics and baseball collide, I wanted to make two claims. First, the clear divide among the Committee members--pro-Clemens (who tended to be Republicans) and anti-Clemens (who tended to be Democrats)--might best be explained by understanding their baseline for judging guilt and innocence. Second, today's congressional hearing made courts look pretty good.

Quite clearly, most members of the House Committee made up their minds about whether Clemens is telling the truth or lying before the hearing. Those supporting Clemens attacked McNamee regularly and, at times, quite viciously. Those suspicious of Clemens attempt to impeach the numerous inconsistencies in his public and private statements. Oddly, the split in the committee was largely along party lines, which was bizarre in and of itself. However, it became clear that the pro-Clemens and anti-Clemens faction were using different baselines from which to judge Clemens. The pro-Clemens faction seemed to be relying on the character of Brian McNamee as the baseline for judgment. An evaluation of McNamee's character will find shady dealings, lies, criminal activity, etc. There is little in Clemens's past (besides the use of performance enhancing drugs...I mean alleged use of PEDs) that would cause one to hold Clemens in the same regard as McNamee (unless you are a Red Sox fan). So, if you are using character as the baseline, Clemens wins. Particularly useful here, note how little those sympathetic to Clemens raised Pettitte's damning statements. (And, by the way, one doesn't "misremember" when a friend tells them they used illegal drugs to gain an advantage in their shared profession. This is akin to subverting the rules that those in the profession are supposed to play by. If one of my friends and colleagues at UNLV came to me and informed me that they plagiarized an article that was recently accepted for publication at a top journal, I'm going to remember the event quite vividly.)

On the flip side, those skeptical of Clemens's stories seemed to use the totality of the evidence as the baseline of evaluation. McNamee alone wasn't enough. Nor was Pettitte. Nor was the medical testimony. Nor were lots of circumstantial evidence. But, if you do the math, the totality of the evidence casts a large, dark shadow of guilt over Clemens. If you read the transcripts, you see those hostile to Clemens are all over the map in their lines of attack. (If you want to read the most sophisticated, interesting, and thoughtful line of questioning, read Representative Elijah Cumming's questions--both rounds. Truly insightful.) The disjunction in the lines of inquiry makes sense if they were concerned with multiple data points as the best way to come to a conclusion.

Finally, as a scholar of law and courts, I couldn't help thinking that the congressional hearings made courts look good. Most members of the committee had come to a conclusion before the hearing. (The fact that Clemens met with 19 committee members before the hearing likely explains this predisposition and raises ethical questions.) Several of the committee members asked irrelevant and/or ill-informed questions. They seemed more concerned with protecting specific interests than with realizing the truth or, perhaps more importantly, using the hearings as a means of crafting future policy. I complain regularly about the shortcomings of adjudicative institutions but, today, I found myself feeling better about judicial competency, if only in comparison.