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The Strange New Offering from the Clemens Team

By Rick Karcher, Michael McCann, Geoffrey Rapp, Greg Skidmore, and Howard Wasserman

Yesterday, in an effort to undercut suggestions that the longevity of Roger Clemens could only have been the product of steroid use, Clemens's agents released the "Roger Clemens Report." According to the New York Times:

His agents, Hendricks Sports Management, issued a 45-page statistical analysis Monday arguing that Clemens prolonged his career by making adjustment in his pitching, not by drug use.

?Clemens?s longevity was due to his ability to adjust his style of pitching as he got older, incorporating his very effective split-finger fastball to offset the decrease in the speed of his regular fastball caused by aging,? the report says.

Leaving aside the fact that it is long on assertion and short on analysis, the report is one of the strangest items to surface in connection with Roidgate 2008. It looks to me like the bulk of the report was recycled from submissions made to teams and salary arbitrators when Clemens sought to negotiate or obtain new contracts. The tables -- comparing Clemens to Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling, and other "stars" and tracking his performance over time -- are precisely the kind of thing that agents use to negotiate higher salaries for their clients.

Full post as published by Sports Law Blog on January 29, 2008 (boomark / email).