Fun times at Canseco's pad

Clemens is innocent. I mean, if he wasn't he wouldn't have been OCD enough to keep a 10-year-old golf greens fees receipt, right?

Well, either Clemens has a fake document or he's been using Canseco's private course. A report from the New York Daily News says that "a man" has a photograph of Clemens at the infamous steroid-soaked soiree.

Well, not just any man. A man who was apparently 11 years old at the time and was just taking a few pictures of his favorite hardball heroes.

Okay, so this hasn't suddenly become an open-and-shut case. It is just an innocent kid's memorabilia that just may turn out to be some of the most powerful catalysts in cleaning up a tainted game. Naturally, Brian McNamee's attorney, Richard Emery, is feeling pretty confident:

"We have reason to believe it's reliable evidence," Emery told the Daily News on Thursday. "We believe there's photographic evidence that shows Clemens was at a party he says he wasn't at."

Is there any proof that Clemens and Canseco were talking steroids while they were tossing back a few beers? Of course not. But in the court of public opinion, this just pokes another gaping hole in Clemens' already questionable defense. Andy Pettitte has admitted to taking HGH. As has Fernando Vina and Paul Byrd, and Chuck Knoblauch has all but admitted to it. All three were named in the Mitchell Report. Hell, even Clemens' wife has admitted to taking HGH, although it can be argued (very easily) that the confession was set up to add credibility to Clemens' argument after he ratted her out publicly.

In the court of law, if Clemens was at the party and not out golfing, as he has attested, he has deliberately committed perjury, and, according to the NYDN, a referral fo this matter to the justice department...

"...would satisfy two groups that were vocal critics of the committee's inquest: Those who thought a failure to investigate Clemens' challenges to former Sen. George Mitchell's report on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, next to the federal indictment issued against Barry Bonds, signified a racist double-standard; and those who thought Congress had no business investigating baseball's drug problem to begin with."

A jump from the current hearings to a Bonds-esque investigation is a huge step, and they've got the evidence to make the move forward. The committee representatives repeatedly pointed out that either Clemens or McNamee was obviously lying under oath, and when combined with Clemens' name in the Mitchell Report, all the people mentioned in the report coming forward with admissions, Pettitte's argument against Clemens (oh, wait, he "misheard" Clemens), is there really much more reason to believe Clemens? And we haven't even seen the results of McNamee's creepy dirty syringe and beer can evidence. Even an 80,000-word report attesting to the benefits of hard work and HGH isn't enough to convince the American public otherwise. He's ratted out his wife, called his best friend a liar and thrown his former trainer under the bus. Does anyone think this guy deserves the "benefit of the doubt" anymore? Apparently not.