The Clemens Report: "The gift that keeps on giving"

According to a Jan. 29 column by ESPN’s Tim Keown.

The upshot:

The bulk of the report is a skull-crushing dissection of nearly every start the man ever made. It is placed in the context of run support and other factors I think are supposed to make you believe Clemens is just a guy trying to make his way in the world, through the good and the bad, just like you and me.

And, therefore, not a steroid user.

In other words, A+B=Clemensisnotasteroiduserandneverhasbeensoleavehimalone.

Others to weigh in on the entertaining document include:

Sports Illustrated‘s Tom Verducci: “Do all the numbers prove that Clemens did not use steroids? Of course not, not any more than the sudden spikes in any career prove something fishy was going on.”
Wallace Matthews in Newsday: “Like his previous three attempts at self-acquittal, this one, too, will blow up in Clemens’ face. Provided anyone is still awake at the end of the report.”
Zachary Levine, a.k.a. “The Unofficial Scorer,” for the Houston Chronicle’s Web site: “I’d hoped to have a steroid-free week here on the blog, but 45 pages of sleep-inducing reading this morning changed that in a hurry.”
ESPN radio’s Mike Greenberg offers an opposition viewpoint, to a degree: “Whatever he thinks he can do and could possibly do to defend himself, I don’t know why anyone would have a problem with it. I don’t know that this particular thing makes any difference to me, but I certainly don’t have any problem with it.”
Joe Sheehan, Baseball Prospectus: “There’s no new information contained here. It’s not an analysis, not a study, not an investigation. It packages the facts of Clemens’ career, makes a handful of salient comparisons, and calls it a day.”

The consensus upshot of these and similar pieces is that the report only proves that the pitchers used as examples — including Clemens — had good seasons and bad seasons; it doesn’t prove anything one way or another about possible PED use.

Save a tree; don’t bother printing it out.