It’s been almost a decade since former U.S. Senator George Mitchell released a 409-page report on Major League Baseball’s guilt-ridden history of steroid usage, but one of the 89 players mentioned in the investigation still has some choice words on the matter.
Roger Clemens, who was accused by Mitchell of receiving anabolic steroid injections from his old trainer, Brian McNamee, spoke on the Audience Network’s “Undeniable with Joe Buck” program Wednesday, and he expressed a rather low opinion of Mitchell, McNamee, and others during the interview.
“I’d have probably told everybody, excuse my language, to go s— in their hat,” the seven-time Cy Young winner told Buck. “Now that I know what I know, it’s shameful, what Mitchell did. I passed every test. I opened up my life to them. I told them, ‘Come check whatever you want.’ They spent a lot of our taxpayers’ dollars. We did it the right way. We dealt with facts.
I don’t even want to mention [McNamee’s] name, because it makes me sick to my stomach. Like I told y’all, I look for the good in people. I don’t think people are trying to get into my life.”
After denying claims made in the report, which was released in Dec. 2007, Clemens and McNamee testified before a congressional comittee less than three months later, and in 2010, the former Yankees ace was indicted on a total of six felony charges, which included obstruction of Congress and perjury. A mistrial was announced in 2011, and Clemens was acquitted the following year.
But the now 54-year-old still carries some conspiracy theories, one which suggests that Mitchell was involved in bribery with the comittee Clemens once faced.
“I’d like to find out that if [Congressman Henry] Waxman had a referral fee from Mitchell. I think Mitchell got paid, before my name got put in [the report], I think he got paid close to $40 million. It was nothing short than a ‘Jerry Springer Show,'” Clemens said. “What I know now is I should have set my wallet on the table because that’s all it was, was about money.”
From 2007 to 2009, Waxman was the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Clemens won 354 games and two world championships in his 24-year career, and on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, 54.1-percent of BBWAA voters had his name checked off.
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