Roger Clemens says he looks forward to telling the truth. His former trainer Brian McNamee says that he only told the truth. Andy Pettite told his version of the truth, and he will likely be the key witness in this whole thing. Alex Rodriguez, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Jose Canseco, and many more told their truths as well. It becomes a he said; he said: my version of the truth verses your version of the truth. Who can prove what? How far will it go into a person's inner sanctum? What consequences are there if somehow or other the facts are presented that your version of the truth is false?
In this case, if Roger Clemens lied, he did so under oath. Again, in my naive world, I like to think that if you raise your right hand and place your left hand on anything - the Bible, a stack of baseball cards, or even The Wall Street Journal - that you have now committed yourself to truth telling. A lawyer friend of mine joked that lying under oath happens all the time. Whew! There goes my faith in the system, but then again it becomes the court's duty to decipher truth from lies. My friend says good lawyers can pick away at the veneer of lies and get to the truth. Hmmm..
Whatever happens to Roger Clemens is going to happen. I have heard reports claiming that he could get anything from thirty years, to thirty days, to a suspended sentence. I can tell you this, and I'm saying this as a Met fan, I don't see any good coming from Roger Clemens staying even one minute in jail. What will that prove about the system and about lying? What will that teach the kids who look up to sports figures? Nothing, if Clemens goes on and still claims he told the truth, was wrongly accused and incarcerated, and then comes out and writes a book about the whole thing and makes even more money, he stands to be more of a folk hero than anything else.
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