i don't believe roger clemens

I don't believe Roger Clemens one bit when he says he has never used steroids or human growth hormone. I just don't.

- If I was Clemens and MacNamee injected me or my wife with HGH without my knowledge, as Clemens claims, I would be screaming bloody murder about assault, not just calling him a liar. This does not add up if Clemens had truly never used steroids.

- Contrary to what the Clemens camp says in "The Clemens Report", his stats do not exonerate him (ie he got better after the steroid use was supposed to have started, and at a time in his career when virtually all athletes are in decline) -- see the Freakonomics blog here (post #1; a summary) and here (post #2; more math). I'm not a statistician by any stretch of the imagination, but I agree strongly with Wolfers et al. that comparing Clemens to three of baseball's most successful late-career pitchers (and not to the hundreds or thousands of pitchers who were not as successful during the same era) is awfully dodgy, and you don't need to know much about math to understand that. And I think that using a pitcher's ERA as the primary measure of his ability (as the Clemens camp does) is also questionable.

- Andy Pettitte stated in a letter to Congress that Clemens confessed to him, on two occasions, that he had used HGH, and Pettitte, by virtue of the fact that he confessed to HGH use himself, has far more credibility than Clemens (though I still question Pettitte's honesty about the extent of his drug use) and has no obvious reason to say that Clemens told him this if it's not true. Particularly as Pettitte and Clemens were apparently close friends (Clemens indicated that they still are, though that's something else I don't believe).