Mike Celizic

Yesterday, Roger Clemens was maybe the greatest right-handed pitcher of all time. Today, according to the Mitchell report, he could be just another cheat, destined to reside forever with Barry Bonds as the elite tenants of Asterisk Land.

There were a bunch of really big names in the report that Bud Selig asked for on the state of steroids in his game. Bonds we already knew about, and now we get Clemens.

I suppose someone, somewhere will be surprised by this, but for those who have been paying attention to the game for the past 15 or 20 years, it’s not a surprise, it’s a confirmation. If the best hitters were juicing up, the excellent logic went, the best pitchers had to be doing the same thing.

There are some big names in the report. But none will overshadow that of Roger the Roidman.

We’ll never know for certain if Clemens or most of the others named by Mitchell — and I’m positive he didn’t come close to getting all of the suspected drug cheats — actually did steroids, HGH or other performance-enhancing drugs; to this day we’re not really certain that Bonds and Mark McGwire did them. The evidence is anecdotal and second-hand, but it’s compelling and believable.

No matter how shrilly those named profess their innocence, they’re tarred forever, and the game along with them. And none more than Clemens.

The reason is because Clemens, like Bonds, was going after all-time records. For Bonds, it’s been home runs. For Clemens, it’s wins and strikeouts. His 354 career wins are the highest total by a righthander since 1930 and the second-highest to leftie Warren Spahn’s 363 in that same time span.

With pitching victories harder to come by these days and homers easier to come by, Clemens’ totals are comparable in every way to Bonds’. And now they’re just as suspect.

Clemens, like Bonds, was a certain first-ballot Hall of Famer. Now, it’s unlikely either will get in on their first ballot. The writers who vote don’t appreciate fraud.

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At the same time, both will probably get in the Hall because they played in a league that was juiced from top to bottom, and they were the best of their era. Personally, I’d like to see it noted on their plaques that they were named in the Mitchell report.

In Clemens’ case, I won’t vote for him for the Hall of Fame until I get a chance to vote for Greg Maddux first. Maddux, the finesse pitcher, has 347 career wins, and he’s not done yet. He will probably pass Clemens this year, and it’s time he starts getting credit for the enormity of his accomplishment. I can’t say for sure that Maddux never took performance-enhancers, but if he did, he should get his money back, because his physique doesn’t reflect it.

The other early name to come out is Clemens’ good buddy and workout partner, Andy Pettitte, who just agreed to take $16 million from the Yankees for another year’s work.

No name can be a surprise in this report — the game was awash in drugs from the mid-90s at least through 2002, when testing was instituted. But if Pettitte is, as reported, named in the report, he’s really got some ‘splainin’ to do, because Pettitte has always taken pride in telling one and all that he reports to a higher authority than the commissioner of baseball, one even higher than George Steinbrenner.

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One of the more vocal Christians in baseball, Pettitte is big on thanking the Lord for his victories and giving all credit to God for his success. If he used steroids, then all his talk of morality reflects horribly on his fellow believers. It’s not Ted Haggard hypocrisy, but it’s in that ballpark.

But that’s what the culture created, and it’s major league baseball’s fault. The game celebrated Mark McGwire’s assault on Roger Maris and then Barry Bonds’ assault on McGwire. It made a comic-book hero out of Clemens. It gleefully counted the gate and put out reports about soaring attendance and patted itself on the back, all the while ignoring the chemicals that were fueling it all.

The game ignored it long after football had started to crack down on steroids. And if there were no rules against it and no way to get caught until relatively recently, why wouldn’t the players do it?

There is no reason, and, according to the reports, what was good for BALCO Barry had to be good for Roger the Roidman.

It’s a bad day for him, but a worse day for baseball.

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