I thought Roger Clemens sounded fairly convincing during his “60 Minutes” interview with Mike Wallace last night. If you missed it, you can see the segment here.

Clemens lost me when he spoke of his reluctance to sue Brian McNamee, the trainer who accused Clemens in the Mitchell Report of receiving multiple steroid and HGH injections.

“I don’t know if I can defend myself,” Clemens said. “I think people — a lot of people have already made their decisions. And that’s our country, isn’t it? Guilty before innocence — that’s the way our country works now. And then everybody’s talking about sue, sue, sue. Should I sue? Well, yeah, let me exhaust — let me, let me just spend,” he said, gesturing as if he were peeling off bills.

“Let me keep spending. But I’m going to explore what I can do, and then I want to see if it’s going to be worth it, worth all the headache.”

According to baseballreference.com, Clemens has earned at least $121 million in salary over his career, and that’s not even counting 2006 and 2007, when he returned from retirement with the Astros and Yankees. So the figure is probably closer to $160 million (also not counting endorsements).

Now that Clemens has taken this one step further and sued McNamee for defamation, his denials have gained more credibility. It seems to be Clemens’ word against McNamee’s at this point, and while there have been suspicions about Clemens’ steroid use in the past, he’s innocent until proven guilty in my book.

Clemens will be holding a press conference today at 4 p.m., broadcast live on ESPN2.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 9:10 am and is filed under Around MLB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.