Rocket Crash Lands in Washington

(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Hoo, boy. If you stayed home to watch today's Congressional hearing you were in for a treat. We had everything from stupid questions and feigned indignation, to hubris uncovered and a body destroyed.

In short, we had what we always have when baseball comes in front of Congress.

There were a few new facts that came to light today. Among them, the fact that Roger Clemens' nanny corroborates McNamee's claim that Clemens was at Jose Canseco's gathering, that an independent expert examined the MRI of Clemens' buttocks and determined his abscess couldn't result from B12, and that you don't need to be much smarter than a 5th grader to be a congressperson. Most importantly, however, we learned that Andy Pettitte is a much more upstanding man than his friend. It was there, in the made-public sworn affidavit of Pettitte, that we find the most compelling evidence. Pettitte backs up McNamee's side of the story, and is such a God-fearing man that even Clemens himself has a hard time doing anything but claim that Pettitte "misremembers."

>Beyond this evidence is how strikingly arrogant Clemens is, and how visibly frustrated he becomes when placed in a situation where he is not in control. On repeated occasions he interrupted Rep. Waxman and other representatives to comment on his own, and was even allowed to speak entirely out of turn and independent of any line of questioning to make a statement regarding his wife. As Howard Bryant writes in this fine piece at ESPN.com, Clemens decided to point the finger at everybody around him: his trainer, his agents, his lawyers, the MLBPA, the commissioner's office, the faulty memories of his teammates, and even his wife. It was their fault that he is being investigated, their fault that he is being unfairly targeted on a national stage.

Please.

The funny thing about all this is that baseball will emerge unscathed. The Mitchell Report managed to withstand the criticism thrown its way, becoming an even stronger and more important document. So many players have gotten caught and come clean that there is a strange sense of absolution in a lot of ways. Once again, players like Andy Pettitte stand next to players like Roger Clemens and look to be made of much purer stuff. 

I've moved on. While I'm interested to see how the Clemens legal situation evolves over the coming months, I have no more interest in partaking of a league-wide witch hunt. Ex-players with blogs and microphones can spare me the clubhouse rhetoric and affected innocence; there has been enough evidence to convince anybody that there was a serious problem. Now we should all attempt to move on.

As camps open tomorrow and practice fields fill with young, impressionable minor leaguers, teams find themselves in a position to promote the right kind of development. Fans young and old now have a more precise lens with which to view their heroes, and such heroes will hopefully be chosen for the right reasons.

Unfortunately for Roger Clemens, he no longer gets to be one of them.