103

103 -That’s the number of federal officers used in the Roger Clemens’s perjury case. Yes, that’s the real number. Our federal government has had 103 federal employees working on a case to prove whether or not Roger Clemens lied about his steroid use. If you can find a bigger waste of government’s time or a bigger waste of our tax dollars, let me know.

Honestly, I can’t understand how this or the Barry Bonds perjury case even came to be in the first place. I can’t even fathom how anyone in government thinks steroids in baseball is a large enough issue to have a Congressional hearing about to begin with. While some baseball fans might be outraged over steroids, I doubt there are many out there who said to themselves, “My god, if only the government would step in and do something about this. Use every resource possible just make sure these guys stop hitting home runs!”

The reason Congress got involved in this mess in the first place was because this issue was apparently creating such a competitive imbalance that something needed to be done. The problem with this is what exactly can Congress do in the first place? Nothing can be done to these guys at all because they didn’t commit a crime. So while everyone wanted blood after the Mitchell Report was released, there really wasn’t any blood to be shed. The only thing they really had was the testimony of the guys who denied to taking steroids, so they ran with these high profile perjury cases.

In my opinion, this is about as low as it gets. I mean Congress called for these hearings, invited these guys to talk about something that isn’t a crime, and then charged them with perjury for potentially lying about it. Roger Clemens even volunteered to have this hearing that led to his eventual perjury trial. He voluntarily tried to clear his name and now he could potentially be the poster child for the steroid era.

I think Clemens is as big an asshole as there is in sports but he doesn’t deserve this. I don’t know whether he took steroids, HGH, or ate baby fetuses, but by all accounts he’s one of the hardest working players in the history of the game. Congress got involved in this for the competitive imbalance so we’re going to make one of the hardest working athletes of all time the face of this scandal? Look, Roger is a shitty guy on all accounts but I think it’s tough to argue steroids made his Hall of Fame career.

Is there really no self-evaluation coming from the government in this entire process? That’s my question. Couldn’t it had been realized far sooner that maybe we don’t need to have 103 federal officers working on a perjury case involving a baseball player? It seems to me like the government used federal agents across the whole country to conduct a massive investigation on whether this guy did something that wasn’t a crime. In my opinion, that’s more of a crime than anything Roger Clemens did or did not do.