* Announcement: Bill James on 60 Minutes

From ACTA Sports, publisher of the Bill James Hold Mine 2008:

Bill James…will appear on the CBS TV news show 60 Minutes on Sunday March 30. The program will air at 7:00pm ET/PT.

Morley Safer and the 60 Minutes crew interviewed James over the course of three days at the World Champion Boston Red Sox spring training camp a couple of weeks ago. They also filmed segments with Red Sox staff, including manager Terry Francona and general manager Theo Epstein.

Baseball/TV fans will recall the venerable news program featured segments on Alex Rodriguez and Roger Clemens in recent months.

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.

First it was no injections, now, not so much

According to an Associated Press report, Roger Clemens admits to receiving injections…of painkillers and vitamins.

Clemens made the admission during his 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace. The segment will be aired Sunday, jan. 6.

During the CBS interview, recorded last Friday at Clemens’ home in Katy, Texas, Clemens was asked whether McNamee had injected him with any drugs.

“Lidocaine and B-12,” Clemens responded. “It’s for my joints, and B-12 I still take today.”

Lidocaine is a local anesthetic that can be used by dentists and in minor surgery. It also is available as part of ointments used to treat skin inflammation.

Clemens told CBS that McNamee’s accusation was “ridiculous” and said he “never” used banned substances.

“Swear?” CBS’s Mike Wallace asked Clemens.

“Swear,” Clemens responded.

Don’t you just totally believe now?

The New York Times is hauling out their big bigs for this one. Sports media writer Richard Sandomir’s Jan. 4 column ponders whether the veteran reporter “Will … be as effective as the Wallace of yore? Is he still a journalistic bulldog who will ask the relevant questions? Will he make Clemens squirm if need be?” and asks viewers to judge for themselves, not the pre-program hype. Meanwhile George Vecsey asks “What Did Pitcher Know and When Didn’t He Know It?“

A-Rod on 60 Minutes: “I did not inject steroids with that woman…”

Hot on the release of the Mitchell Report, 60 Minutes aired a segment on Alex Rodriguez, the former and future highest paid player in the game. Among other revelations, the 2007 AL MVP says he has never taken performance enhancing drugs. Of course, everyone is pretty much skeptical of anything any athlete has to say lately. (”How can you tell when a ballplayer is lying? His lips are moving.”)

The story