Bryan Burwell

The Mitchell Report didn’t do much, but it did give us names, plenty of them, enough to give Barry Bonds plenty of company in that infamous club that used to be exclusively his. So now the Liars Club is packed with men who deserve the same treatment that has been deservedly smacking Bonds in his face for the past couple of years.

Funny, though, how muted that anger is now. The sports world is full of apologists with bending backs and a world full of excuses and alibis for the cheats who have been caught red-handed, just like Bonds. The media apologists, the PR flacks and the hired lawyers keep writing the same script for the cheats, and it goes something like this:

Believe them, not your lying eyes.

Everyone in baseball wants to “turn the page” now that George Mitchell has told all its dirty secrets, outed its glamorous superstars, shamed its faceless role players and confirmed that its conveniently blind owners and consistently obstructionist labor leaders have their fingerprints all over the crime scene.

They want to pretend that it’s all over now, and baseball’s steroid era has officially ended, which anyone with a brain knows isn’t so.

But most of all, they just want you to be stupid.

The embarrassed athletes who are coming out of the woodwork to clear their names are desperately trying to wash the stink of guilt off their hides.

Here’s the new rap. The bad men used steroids to cheat and break records. But that’s not me. I was just a gritty foot soldier caught up on the wrong side of the steroid war.

First it was busted New York Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte, who over the weekend issued a well-crafted “apology” that was filled with so much bogus sincerity. "If what I did was an error in judgment on my part, I apologize," Pettitte said. "Everything else written or said about me knowingly using illegal drugs is nonsense, wrong and hurtful. I have the utmost respect for baseball and have always tried to live my life in a way that would be honorable. I wasn't looking for an edge; I was looking to heal."

First of all, never begin an apology with “If.”

“If” is one of those words that immediately begs for latitude. “If” is one of those words that wants you to accept that whatever happened was just some quirky bit of happenstance.

There is no wiggle room for Pettitte, neither is there any quirky happenstance.

He did it. Period. He cheated, just like Bonds cheated. Welcome to the club.

And then Monday afternoon, former St. Louis Cardinals second baseman Fernando Vina followed Pettitte’s crocodile tears with an equally flimsy apology that once again tried to shape him as a gritty, self-sacrificing team player, not a drug cheat looking for a chemically enhanced competitive edge.

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“Did I do it to hit more home runs or get an edge? No. I did it to get back on the field,” Vina told ESPN’s obviously skeptical Bob Ley, who kept peppering him with straight questions that produced only crooked answers.

The spin we’re getting is that human growth hormone is just some miracle drug that simply heals weary muscles and serves as a helpful aid to rehabilitating athletes. It’s like someone decided that instead of rubbing a little dirt on it, we’re substituting a syringe of HGH. They seem to forget to read the page that tells you that HGH is the new drug of choice for drug cheats looking to get bigger, faster, stronger and leaner because unlike conventional steroids, there is no way to detect it in your blood or urine.

So spare me the spin doctoring on this one, OK?

You can’t turn the page until you are at least willing to admit a smidgen of the truth. The truth is told in the pages of Mitchell’s report and the exhaustive reporting of the real heroes of this process — the investigative sportswriters and authors from San Francisco to New York who never kept their heads in the sand as baseball kept running through the pharmacy on the way to a popularity boom.

And let’s never forget the truth that our friendly publicity-seeking tattletale Jose Canseco told, too. Their truth is so much more credible than the one being created by the Liars Club.

So when I listened to Vina get amnesia when Ley grilled him about all those personal checks that were written to admitted baseball steroid peddler and drug snitch Kirk Radomski, and the best that Vina could come up with was that they might have been gracious “tips” for some shlepper who had picked up his laundry, washed his car, copped him some custom car rims or executed some other errand as a hustling clubhouse gofer, I wanted to chuckle.

And the newest “victim” is Roger Clemens, who we’ve been suspecting for years. He is the chief protagonist in the Mitchell Report, clearly branded as a man who tried quite successfully to resurrect his fading career with a steroid-filled syringe. Clemens' strategy is to simply tell you that he deserves the benefit of the doubt, the same benefit that no one gave to Bonds.

There is a reason why no one cut Bonds any slack, and it’s the same reason that Clemens doesn’t deserve it.

The evidence of Clemens guilt is overwhelming, and thankfully not everyone is rolling over and playing stupid and falling for the Clemens sympathy bid. Houston Chronicle columnist Richard Justice was able to connect the dots on Clemens and the Mitchell Report findings.

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Justice cleverly noticed two interesting facts:

1. In the Mitchell Report, one of the many entries concerning Clemens said this: “Clemens asked McNamee to inject him with Winstrol, which Clemens supplied. ... McNamee injected Clemens approximately four times in the buttocks over a several-week period. ... Each incident took place in Clemens' apartment at the SkyDome.”

2. Justice then did a little careful research and noticed that during this particular time during the 1998 season when McNamee gave the pitcher the steroid injections, Clemens was 8-6 with a 3.77 ERA. From that point on, Clemens went 12-0 with a 1.77 ERA.

But Clemens doesn’t want you to pay attention to that nagging bit of truth. He prefers that you instead extend him a little time until he can gather his toadies together to smear McNamee and his sworn testimony.

What Clemens needs to do if he wants anyone to believe him is testify under oath before Congress. Under the threat of perjury, tell us your truth, Roger. Otherwise, you get no free pass. Until then, we will just watch the Liars Club of Baseball grow with big names and small ones, superstars and journeymen.

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