The reports about what Pettitte said in his deposition to the subcommittee confirm just how clueless Clemens is. Pettitte is supposed to be his buddy, the guy who followed him to Houston and then back to New York, the guy who worked out and sweated with him under McNamee’s direction. According to Newsday, Pettitte substantially corroborated McNamee’s story about shooting both pitchers with HGH and steroids.

Clemens is probably wondering about what happened to loyalty to friends and teammates and whatever happened to “what happens in the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse.” That’s fine when it’s about some story the newspapers are pursuing, but this is Congress, and federal prosecutors. These guys can — and will — put you in jail if you lie to them.

Greg Anderson, Barry Bonds’ trainer, went to prison rather than rat on his former boss. So far, he’s the only person in these investigations who’s refused to save his own backside by refusing to rat out a friend. That doesn’t necessarily make him a good guy; Bonds may be paying him enough money to make it worth the time in the slammer.

And if Pettitte told on his old friend, that doesn’t make him a bad guy. Pettitte, after all, confessed to taking HGH shots and expressed his repentance for doing it. If anyone can tell me why he should lie to protect Clemens and face time in federal prison, please do. I might lie for my family, but not for a work-out buddy.

We keep telling athletes what the real world’s like, and they keep telling us we’re the problem. Well, this isn’t a rumor or a slip of the tongue that the tabloids blew up into a major story. This isn’t our problem. It’s his.

Clemens has responded mostly with outrage, which doesn’t impress elected officials who have been faking that emotion since they ran for class president in the eighth grade. Maybe the best lie we can be certain he told was when he roared that he didn’t give a rat’s patoot about the Hall of Fame, that this was about more than that.

That’s where he really gave himself away, because that’s exactly what this is about — his legacy and his standing among the immortals. If it weren’t for that, there’d be no reason to play the offended hero as he had. He’s got his fortune. His future prosperity and that of his children is assured. He can’t lose any of that.

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Telling the truth would jeopardize none of that, nor would it change his life after baseball in any meaningful way.

What he can lose is the Hall of Fame and the ability to claim he’s the greatest right-handed pitcher since Walter Johnson. That’s worth lying about. That’s worth standing up to George Mitchell and Brian McNamee and Andy Pettitte and everyone else who says he didn’t play it strictly by the rules and declaring his innocence as loudly as Floyd Landis, Marion Jones and Rafael Palmiero declared theirs.

I’m not saying that everything McNamee said is true and everything Clemens has said is a lie. But on both sides, some of it is.

On Wednesday, Clemens is going to find out just how much it’s going to cost him.

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