Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Pettitte Knew About Clemens' PED Use

Well according to McNamee and his lawyers, he did. And they believe he will discuss it during his deposition on Monday.

From The New York Times:
WASHINGTON —Andy Pettitte will soon give a sworn deposition to staff members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and lawyers for his former personal trainer, Brian McNamee, say they believe they know part of what he will say.

Pettitte and McNamee talked in 2001 and 2002 about Roger Clemens’s use of steroids and human growth hormone, McNamee’s lawyers, Earl Ward and Richard Emery, said Tuesday.

As a result, Ward and Emery said they believed that Pettitte, who has acknowledged receiving H.G.H. from McNamee in 2002, will provide the first account of contemporaneous conversations with McNamee about Clemens’s use of performance-enhancing drugs in earlier years.

Emery and Ward said that not only did McNamee and Pettitte talk about Clemens’s drug use on several occasions, but that Clemens might have influenced Pettitte the first time Pettitte asked to use a performance-enhancing drug.

“There was a conversation in the gym where Pettitte came over to Brian and told him, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about that stuff?’ ” Emery said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “It appeared to be after a conversation with Clemens, but he didn’t know what was said in that conversation.”

Ward, in a separate telephone interview, said, “Brian discouraged him at first, and then less than a year later he came back and that is when Brian injected him.”

This is bad news for Clemens. All his efforts to defend himself and save his reputation, would turn out to have been useless if Pettitte testifies that he knew Clemens cheated. But would Pettitte really do that? Would he rat on his friend and former teammate?

Well there are two reasons why he might.

First, if it's true that Clemens played any hand is influencing Pettitte to use HGH, Pettitte may blame Roger for this whole mess, and see this as a way to get back at him. And second, the most important reason, he's not going to want to risk perjuring himself and end up like Barry Bonds.

These tough times for Roger may have just got a whole lot tougher.

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