Steroid Perception Has Little To Do With Evidence

Years ago, when I was still dating Mrs. Marchman, a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, I managed to con her into taking in a game at Yankee Stadium. Two things struck her above all else. The first was that Yankee Stadium is an outhouse compared to Wrigley Field, and the second was that Roger Clemens, whom she had never before seen in person, was revolting. All through the game she wondered aloud about the living legend: What was wrong with him? Why did he have a giant blockhead? How could he possibly have gained so much muscle since his prime? Exactly what drugs was he on?

If Clemens's trainer, Brian McNamee, is to be believed, the 354-game winner was on Deca-Durabolin, Winstrol, testosterone, and human growth hormone. These charges are not surprising. (Nor is it surprising that Clemens has emphatically denied these claims.) What is surprising is that many fans were surprised by McNamee's allegations when they were first made public last week in George Mitchell's report on baseball's drug scandals. Fans, including Boston's Curt Schilling, speculated about retroactively stripping him of his Cy Young awards; Hall of Fame voters cited the new charges and proclaimed they would now not vote for Clemens. Everyone acted as if new information were in hand. Where have these people been?

On a scale measuring obvious steroid use, with 1 representing my 3-year-old and 10 representing Jose Canseco, I would have pegged Clemens at about 9.99 before the release of Mitchell's report. Over the course of his career, Clemens changed from a perfectly normal looking pitcher into a grotesque freak sporting the same encephalitic head popularized by Barry Bonds. After turning 34, he won four Cy Young awards, posted his best single-season earned run average, set an American League record for consecutive wins, and performed various other improbable feats. Last year, he responded to accusations that he'd used HGH by boasting about passing tests that didn't screen for that substance. He even once seemingly tried to impale Mike Piazza with a broken bat in a World Series game, an incident characterized by Mrs. Marchman and, roughly, every single other person in the entire world who saw it, as roid rage.

None of this is proof against Clemens; even his trainer's charges, which were made by a confessed drug dealer under federal pressure, don't count as credible evidence. Still, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds were presumed by nearly all to be steroid users when there was less evidence against them than there was against Clemens even before the release of Mitchell's report. Clemens has at times looked as much like a drug user as McGwire or Bonds ever did, and his achievements have been just as unreal. His 1997, in which he won the American League Triple Crown for pitching while posting a 2.05 ERA, was much more impressive than McGwire's 70-home run campaign, and he looked no less like a cartoon character than McGwire did. And yet despite all of this, he wasn't the subject of speculation anywhere near so intense.

Clemens's legacy, if he is to have one, should be the way in which he perfectly symbolizes the dissonance and self-deception that lay at the center of baseball's drug scandal. It doesn't really matter why Clemens wasn't openly accused of drug use despite showing all the signs that led the public to deem McGwire and Bonds guilty even before there was concrete evidence against them. What matters is just that he wasn't.

The essential thing about the waves of scorn that wash over players like Clemens, Bonds and McGwire is their very randomness. Some players, like Alex Rodriguez, walk around looking like pro wrestlers and put up historically unprecedented numbers without being considered dopers. Some, like Sammy Sosa, are generally assumed to be users despite being implicated by nothing but the most inferential evidence. Some, like Gary Sheffield, can admit to use without anyone much caring. Some, like Luis Gonzalez, can deny it without anyone much caring. What the players have actually done — the evidence against them — seems to bear no real correlation to the intensity and openness of the speculation.

More than anything else, Clemens's disgrace should remind us of how little we care to know about what's happening right in front of us. The same broadcasters and writers baying most loudly for Clemens's blood now are generally the same ones who wrote the most glowing paeans to his brutal workout routines. Those previously most liable to call him a warrior, a leader, an example for younger pitchers and all the rest of it are the same ones claiming to be most shocked and dismayed. How, though, can the plainly obvious shock or dismay? Right now Clemens is no more or less grotesque than he's been for years, no more or less obviously worthy of suspicion and doubt. If he wasn't an outcast last week, he shouldn't be one today. What, after all, has changed?

tmarchman@nysun.com