Bryan Burwell

As he sat there for hours on end, Roger Clemens was no longer the snarling hurler in total command. This was an unfamiliar role that was more intense than any World Series challenge. The pitcher was on Capitol Hill, not a pitcher’s mound, and now he alternately played the role of the martyred super hero, the bumbling liar and the defiant punching bag.

For nearly four grueling hours of uncomfortable testimony, Clemens sat inside a crowded congressional hearing room on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., blaming his pathetic predicament on half the world. It was his momma, it was his wife, it was his ex-trainer, it was Bud Selig, it was his “misremembering” buddy, it was those meddlesome Mitchell Report investigators, and it was the turncoat media.

It was everybody, but the most obvious one of all, Roger Clemens himself. But now, so exhausted from tossing everyone in and out of arms reach under the proverbial bus, the man we once believed was the greatest pitcher of our lifetime had inadvertently stumbling upon the only truth uttered from his lips all day long.

As the day wore down, and Clemens had absorbed another tongue lashing from another disillusioned congressman, the humbled man tried to salvage a little self-respect with an awkward soliloquy. “Steroids are bad for you, they break you down,” said Clemens, sounding eerily like Mark McGwire.

“And that,” he said, “is a self-inflicted penalty. I want the kids to know that.”

So this was the self-inflicted penalty that Clemens had to face. He had arrogantly walked into the halls of Congress thinking that he could will his way out of his self-inflicted steroids scandal. He thought he could go in there and charm everyone with his stardom, then intimidate them like he used to do on the mound. But it didn’t work. The longer he talked, the more he looked like a guilty man and sounded like a liar. He wanted to make his accuser, former personal trainer Brian McNamee, look like a low life and a scoundrel, but it didn’t work.

“It’s hard for me to believe you,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., “and you’re one of my heroes, but it’s hard to believe you.”

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This whole thing has backfired on Clemens. The high-priced attorneys, the blustery defense, the woe-is-me pity party, and every shameful excuse he concocted that used his mother and his wife as alibis for his own culpability as the star of the Mitchell Report.

From the very start of the day, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and then Rep. Cummings let Clemens know that they had grave doubts about his stories and excuses. Waxman opened the hearing by carefully outlining every inconsistency and outright lie that Clemens told during last week’s deposition. Then Cummings grilled him for a few painful minutes and rattled the pitcher with a line of questioning that left no doubt that whatever Clemens was selling, he wasn’t buying.

And then Waxman ended the proceedings by basically accusing Clemens of witness tampering in the way Clemens and his attorneys arranged for a meeting with his former nanny before turning her contact information over to the congressional investigators.

So now we can see how this is going to backfire on the man who should have gone down as the greatest pitcher of our generation, but will now join the celebrated roster of baseball’s Liars Club. He’s in the fold with McGwire and Rafael Palmiero, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds. He’s on that list of baseball superstars whose Hall of Fame legacies have been destroyed by their own arrogant excesses.

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