As if this whole Roger Clemens-Mitchell Report fiasco couldn’t get any weirder, it’s being reported in the NY Daily News this morning that not only was Clemens cheating on his wife for ten years starting in the early 1990s, he was actually carrying on the affair with singer Mindy McCready… beginning when she was 15 years old.

This is going to get downright awkward.

Of course, for his part, Clemens is denying that the relationship between he and McCready was ever sexual. His lawyer, Rusty Hardin, has said:

“(Clemens) flatly denies having had any kind of an inappropriate relationship with her… He’s considered her a close family friend… He has never had a sexual relationship with her.”

Right. It’s totally normal for a (then) 28-year old man to start hanging out with a fifteen year-old girl. Like it was totally normal when Lester Burnham did it. And that turned out well.

Here are some details as best I can gather:

1. He first picked her up in a Fort Myers karaoke bar after hearing her sing. What the hell is a fifteen year old doing in a bar anyway?
2. Clemens used to take her on road trips during his time with the Red Sox, Blue Jays, Yankees and Astros. I’m sure it was completely innocent. She’s just a family friend.
3. McCready used to received FedEx boxes filled with cash, courtesy of Mr. Clemens.
4. They “partied” with Michael Jordan and Monica Lewinsky. I’m not sure why this part is news.

But of course, this accusation is going to spill over into the courtroom on a totally unrelated issue. The legal fisticuffs going on between Clemens and Brian McNamee will surely bring about more on this. For one, the Clemens defense team had been trying to portray the Rocket as the ultimate family man - one who would never put his family in harm’s way by tarnishing his own reputation by using performance-enhancing drugs. Now that argument becomes very difficult to back up.

Moreover, believe it or not, Jose Canseco’s credibility (who’d a thunk it?) comes into question as well. The soon-to-be action star has been in Clemens’ corner throughout this whole issue. Although Canseco had outed several players as steroid-users in Juiced, Clemens wasn’t one of them (although he does say that the two had discussed the topic). More recently, Canseco has come out and denied that Clemens attended “the party” at his home back in 1998, one that has become a major crux in the legal proceedings. But in Juiced, Canseco wrote of Clemens:

Here’s something you probably don’t know about Roger Clemens: He’s one of the very few baseball players I know who never cheated on his wife. I was amazed by him, to be honest. His wife should be very proud of him…

I went out with him a bunch of times when there were beautiful women around, and he had a lot of opportunities and never took them. I was with him enough times to realize: This man never cheated on his wife. He was one of the rarities, the anomalies, in baseball. I can hardly think of anyone else who never cheated on his wife.

For those of you who dislike Clemens and Canseco, Happy Birthday.

In this week’s Metro column, I note the ignominious end of Roger Clemens’ storied career. A virtuosic performance has worthy of the big screen has rapidly degenerated into a tawdry television drama. Two thumbs way down.

And though much ink and many pixels have been devoted to whether or not Clemens used steroids, whether he “seems guilty,” the PR of filing a lawsuit, what that tape was all about, and how Andy Pettitte must feel about all of this, it’s basically all been speculation. Leave it to Baseball Prospectus to actually look at the particulars of his lawsuit.

This is the article I’ve been waiting to read. After all, the Mitchell Report only had teeth because of the BALCO trial. By filing a lawsuit, could Roger Clemens be opening up a whole new can of worms? I suppose that depends on the particulars of the case. From BP writer Derek Jacques:

A claim of defamation (usually broken down into slander for spoken statements and libel for statements made in writing) accuses someone of saying or writing something untruthful that is then “published” to a third party, for the purpose of injuring the reputation of the person making the claim. Because a statement can’t be defamatory if it’s true, the truth of the allegations McNamee made against Clemens is the main issue of the suit. The question is simply whether or not McNamee injected Clemens with steroids and HGH in 1998, 2000, and 2001.

[...]

Defamation is a notoriously hard case to prove. In this situation, the allegations are all about the actions of two men alone in a room together with no other witnesses, and likely no physical or documentary evidence to connect or divorce them from what McNamee says they were doing. Clemens will face an uphill climb making his case, both because he bears the burden of proof and because he has to prove a negative—that an event that McNamee doesn’t tie to a specific date and time didn’t happen.

Clemens lamented during his 60 Minutes interview that people were treating him as “guilty before innocent,” instead of innocent until proven guilty. Ironically, filing this lawsuit puts the burden of proof right where he didn’t want it: on him.

And for those who were hoping that the Mitchell Report would close the door on the steroids era and let our beloved sport heal, the Clemens lawsuit effectively crushes those dreams:

Before this matter reaches trial, there would likely be months, perhaps years, of preparation, discovery, and depositions. If you give skilled litigators enough time to dig through someone’s life and financial records, all sorts of interesting and unexpected things can happen.

In other words, yes, the seal has been broken on a new can of worms. The only remaining question: is it a can of harmless earthworms, a can of annoying ringworms, or a can of fearsome Mongolian Death Worms?