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Sometimes you need a lowlife to provide what the more legitimate supplier will not. A "real" PhD might have told Clemens to take some time off to rest. A "real" PhD might have told Pettitte to consider the same after his surgery. Then again, you could probably find a less scrupulous person with a real PhD who would have provided the same services as McNamee. The players wanted HGH and steroids and they found the only people who would provide them.
The problem here is that we are too focused on one lowlife and we treat him as the abberation. McNamee should not be singled out as much as he has been. He should be looked at as one of many. The failure of the last few months has been the narrowing down of a rampant problem in baseball (and all sports) to a list of 80 in the Mitchell report and finally to a he said/he said confrontation between two people. We know that there were McNamees and Clemens', not just in the Yankees clubhouse but in the clubhouses of the Mets (Radomski, etc.), Giants (Bonds, BALCO, etc.), Cardinals (McGwire) and Orioles (Palmiero, Sosa). There is no reason to believe that there wasn't a McNamee in every clubhouse in baseball. And as long as we continue to focus on Clemens and McNamee we can be sure this broad-based problem will remain.
