Clemens' answer: Lidocaine and B12

Roger Clemens has finally spoken on the allegations of steroid use, and it's nothing truly new. He added one little nugget of new information in the interview that aired on "60 Minutes."

Clemens says that trainer Brian McNamee injected the seven-time Cy Young Award winner with lidocaine (a pain-killer) and Vitamin B12, which is used to combat anemia. In my opinion, that sounds a lot like the flaxseed oil that Barry Bonds used to try to explain away the "cream and the clear" to the grand jury in the BALCO case.

The New York Times interviewed a doctor to theorize on why Clemens would inject Lidocaine and B-12:

In a telephone interview Thursday, Dr. Jerome Groopman, a hematologist and professor at Harvard Medical School, described lidocaine as a common local anesthetic whose injectable form would probably require a prescription. Groopman said that vitamin B12, which does not require a prescription, is administered to patients with a serious deficiency of the vitamin, usually the elderly, and that its value as an energy enhancer was “an urban legend.” “For someone like Roger Clemens, who certainly looks robust, the likelihood that he would be deficient in vitamin B12 is a stretch,” Groopman said, noting that he had not seen Clemens’s medical records. “It would have no physiological effect. It would only have a placebo effect.”

Hard to believe this would all be about a placebo effect and some kind of local anesthetic. McNamee is a certified trainer - he'd certainly have to know the difference between lidocaine and HGH, right? And there's still the matter of McNamee saying he received drugs from Kurt Radomski that McNamee says he injected into Clemens, according to the Mitchell Report. Radomski wasn't running a lidocaine and B-12 business.

McNamee's lawyers are threatening a defamation suit against Clemens if he says anything that harms McNamee's reputation. So it's likely all going to be about lawyers collecting fees from here on out.

It all comes back to one argument: Who do you believe? Does McNamee have a reason to lie under oath to investigators? (Would have been nice to hear from McNamee, 60 Minutes - did you try?) As Richard Justice of the Houston Chronicle wrote:

[McNamee] simply had no reason to lie unless he hates Clemens so much that he was willing to risk jail time to ruin the pitcher's reputation. To buy into the Clemens defense, you have to believe McNamee told the truth about Andy Pettitte but made up a whopper about the Rocket. That said, McNamee isn't exactly the world's most credible witness, either. If Clemens was looking for a trainer — and no funny business — he could have done better than McNamee.