She turned me into a newt!

Congress has called Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, and Chuck Knoblauch to testify on steroids. Reportedly, after Clemens testifies, he will be thrown into the Potomic to see if he floats.

Really, this is getting a bit silly. Pettitte has admitted wrong doing, your satisfaction may vary. Knoblauch can shed little light on the current game and can only incriminate himself.

The prized buck is Clemens. Congress isn't waiting for pending lawsuits between Clemens and McNamee. They're going to force his hand to either be a Canseco or a McGwire. And be sure, there isn't much middle ground for Roger. Bonds testified under oath that be never used steroids and the government spent the better part of four years trying to build a case against him. Clemens can't issue a flatout denial without risking further persecution.

How fair is this? Is baseball so important that Congress needs to waste its time? If baseball didn't have an anti-trust exemption, would this even be an issue in front of Congress? Where is the NFL in all of this? Haven't they had a difficult time with steroids? Why the double standard?

Clemens is being put in a thankless position by being forced to respond to allegations that would never have held up in a court of law. Mitchell provided no physical evidence against Clemens. All we have is McNamee's testimony and Clemens silence.

Until now. Regardless of what Clemens says, it will not reflect well on him. If he issues a denial, people will site Rafael Palmiero, who said implicitly that he never roided, only to test positive a few years later. If Clemens takes the fifth, shades of McGwire will further tarnish Clemens Hall of Fame chances. If he admits it, well, I think we all would be plenty shocked.

The other question is, why the Yankee-centric panel? As a lifelong Yankee fan, I certainly can't claim a lack of bias, but there were dozens of names in that report, and the only three called happened to play on the same team.

This just highlights how incomplete the Mitchell report really is. To limit the scope of a Congressional hearing to the clients of two New York distributors is like saying crime only exists in New York. The steroids scandal runs much deeper than the Mitchell report, the extent to which we will likely never know. All the media and Congress can do now is drive what little evidence they have into the ground. --