Have a seat. This is going to take awhile.

A couple of entries ago, I pondered how experts in body language might assess Roger Clemens’ appearance on 60 Minutes.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Yesterday the Houston Chronicle published this piece, posted within hours of the segment, and today The New York Times did this one based on his Jan. 7 press conference. There are links to related items, including an excerpt from the telephone conversation.

Both pieces state that Clemens seemed nervous and agitated; what a surprise. The Times’ article, however, notes a retired F.B.I. expert on body language “warned against concluding that Clemens was lying. Even the most skilled body-language experts are right in only about half of all cases, he said, and investigators often study body language to decide when to dig deeper. It is not evidence that someone has committed wrongdoing; Clemens might have been showing stress from defending against potentially career-killing allegations. ‘He clearly shows signs of distress, but we don’t know why he’s being distressed,’ the former agent said.”

That the ballplayer, who told Mike Wallace he was strongly leaning toward retiring from the game, produced a secretly-recorded tape of a phone call he had with Brian McNamee last week, is also disturbing, since it’s illegal to do so in many states without the party being told of such an action.

Richard Sandomir, the Times’ sports media guy, also weighed in on both the press conference, as well as the 60 Minutes interview

…[T]he 17-minute audiotape of last Friday’s Clemens-McNamee phone call, … proved little, offered nonsense worthy of the Marx Brothers and made McNamee sound sympathetically tragic.

Without trying to sound too cynical, I think Clemens’ is playing the wounded warrior role to the hilt. On Sunday he expressed his disgust with not being given a shred of credit or benefit of the doubt despite all he’d done for the game. His questions to Wallace did not strike as as convincing. Where’s the person who sold the steroids? Why doesn’t he come forward? As if that absence proves his innocence. And as some sports pundit, whose identity presently escapes me, noted, the fact that Clemens has been around for 25 years or so is similarly no defense.

From the Sandomir column:

Clemens got to portray himself as a John Henry-like figure whose career was based on hard work, not a vial of that nasty Winstrol. And Wallace elicited a confession that Clemens seemed very eager to spill, about the only injections he got from McNamee being the vitamin B12 and the painkiller lidocaine.

But in admitting that he downed Vioxx “like it was Skittles,” Clemens seemed not to realize that his recklessness with a painkiller that is now banned may lead as many people to marvel at what he would do legally to keep his body pitching as to wonder if he would be incautious enough to illicitly juice himself.

ESPN’s Shaun Powell wrote “Odds, and history, don’t bode well for Clemens’ denials” and several Sports Illustrated writers contributed to the magazine’s online analysis.