Yes, just when you thought the saga of Roger Clemens couldn’t get any stranger, it gets stranger.  I admit I haven’t been following this whole Roger/steroids story as much as some (I’m not a big baseball fan), but when Shaun Daily mentioned this on his BTR show yesterday, I sat up and took notice.  It seems that he and troubled country singer Mindy McCready met when she was fifteen and this developed into a long sexual relationship:

Roger Clemens carried on a decade-long affair with country star Mindy McCready, a romance that began when McCready was a 15-year-old aspiring singer performing in a karaoke bar and Clemens was a 28-year-old Red Sox ace and married father of two, several sources have told the Daily News. […]

Contacted by the Daily News Sunday through his lawyer Rusty Hardin, Clemens confirmed a long-term relationship but denied that it was of a sexual nature.

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

Apparently, Mindy began travelling with Roger after they met in a bar where she was singing at age fifteen:

Hardin said the Rocket’s wife, Debbie, knew McCready and that the singer had traveled on his plane. […]

[Brian] McNamee, who worked with and traveled with Clemens extensively over the last decade, has confirmed that he saw Clemens and McCready together on many occasions, including in Clemens’ room at his apartment in the former SkyDome, now Rogers Centre, in Toronto, and that Clemens talked of McCready often. Should McNamee decide to countersue for defamation, McCready could surface as a witness for that case as well.

According to sources, Clemens was with his Red Sox teammates in a Fort Myers, Fla., bar when then-teenager McCready caught his eye. After Clemens threw a shirt with his and several teammates’ signatures onstage, an introduction was made.

“It was love at first sight, no doubt about it,” said a source with intimate knowledge of the relationship.

According to the source, McCready did not learn that Clemens was married to Debbie Clemens until McCready attended a baseball game with her two younger brothers and read Clemens’ bio in the program. The source says that McCready was too young to be angered by the news that Clemens was taken.

Roger has sued his former personal trainer for defamation of character, a bit ironic and a huge risk since when you do so, you claim you had unsullied character to begin with:

From a public relations standpoint, Clemens’ decision to file the suit against McNamee the night the Rocket appeared with Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” could end up being the biggest risk he has taken yet. Clemens, under investigation for perjury, has already endured the ignominy of publicly admitting his wife’s own human growth hormone use, having photos of bloody gauze and needles linked to him and embarrassing scrutiny of an alleged injection-site abscess on his buttocks. […]

“The issue in Roger’s suit against McNamee is Roger’s reputation and how it has been damaged,” said Richard Emery, one of McNamee’s lawyers who is handling the defamation suit. “If it’s proved that he’s a philanderer, his reputation is already damaged. When you sue for defamation, you put your whole reputation in the community at issue. Anything is fair game, including his claim of sanctimonious purity. We would cross-examine him and other witnesses who might impact on his alleged behavior. We would probably subpoena her and witnesses who knew [of the relationship]. He’s a ‘family man’ - he implies that. It’s about what his damages are. All is fair game.” […]

The seven-time Cy Young Award winner’s orchestrated public relations blitz began shortly after the Dec. 13 release of the Mitchell Report on drug use in baseball. It focused as much on Clemens’ family-man reputation as it did on McNamee’s checkered past and apparent lies about his involvement in an incident in Florida in 2001 for which he was investigated for sexual assault. No charges were ever filed in that case, but Clemens’ lawyer Hardin papered the media with accounts of the incident.

The relationship with McCready paints a very different picture of Clemens than the one drawn by Jose Canseco in his book “Juiced,” where he went out of his way to say that Clemens was one of very few professional ballplayers who was faithful to his wife.

And it smacks of a different Clemens than the one who spoke passionately of his family in his opening remarks to Congress Feb. 13. Debbie Clemens was seated behind her husband at the hearing.

“Anyone who has spent time around me knows that my family is and has always been my top priority,” a portion of the statement read. “My wife, Debbie, and my sons - Koby, Kory, Kacy and Kody - mean more to me than anything in the world. Having said that, baseball has definitely provided me with significant opportunities off the field.”

Though they took breaks from each other, when Mindy was going through her well-publicized legal problems (prescription drug abuse, identity theft, an overdose when she was pregnant, abuse by the father of her child, some time in the pokey for hitting her mother, among other things), he allegedly sent her wads of cash via FedEx:

Even during her troubles, the sources say Clemens was never far from McCready. Clemens would frequently send bundles of cash in FedEx packages, they say, as she dealt with her legal issues. According to one of the sources, Clemens even reached out to McCready through an intermediary while she was in jail last year, although McCready had cut ties with the Rocket as far back as 2006.

Oh, and his denial up there that he ever had a sexual relationship with Mindy?  Footbullet, since Mindy admitted it:

Barricaded behind tightly drawn blinds at her Nashville home Monday, country singer Mindy McCready confirmed a long-term affair with embattled pitcher Roger Clemens.

“I cannot refute anything in the story,” a tearful but resolute McCready told the Daily News, which broke the story at midnight Sunday. […]

After the teenage McCready met Clemens at a Fort Myers bar called The Hired Hand, she returned with the Rocket to his hotel room, but there was no sex that night, sources told The News.

It wasn’t until later, after McCready had moved to Nashville and become a country singing star, that the relationship turned intimate.

Roger is currently under investigation and this will be key information in his defamation of character suit:

Clemens is under FBI investigation for perjury after denying, under oath, accusations by his former personal trainer Brian McNamee that the seven-time Cy Young Award winner used performance-enhancing drugs.

The Rocket filed a defamation suit against McNamee on Jan. 6. McNamee’s lawyer Richard Emery said revelations of the affair would have a big impact on that case because they influence Clemens’ claim that his reputation was damaged.

“If the case heads to trial and is not dismissed, as we feel it should be, we will be calling [McCready] as a witness,” Emery said.

“The point is whether he was damaged by the allegations that he used steroids - he claims he was hurt. But if there are other women - and there’s not just one case, but many - and he holds himself out as a family man and an American paradigm, it’s relevant.

“None of this would have been revealed but for his lawsuit and sanctimonious testimony before Congress.”

So basically Roger’s suit and testimony that he’s a devout family man who didn’t have sex with Mindy?  Yeah, major footbullet.  In other words, we might not have known about this had he not filed the suit and said that his reputation was damaged.  Well, not sure how you can damage an already bad reputation, but hey…if he says so.

I do wonder just when the relationship turned sexual, since “sources” say that their relationship wasn’t consummated until after she became a country star.  According to Wikipedia, she was eighteen when she moved to Nashville and began her recording career.  It’s convenient that she was over the legal age of consent in probably every state when it is claimed the sexual relationship began.  So Roger waited three years, until she was legal, to have sex with her?  Guess in his eyes this makes him a hero, if it’s true, since he can then claim that at least he wasn’t a pedophile.

Regardless of whether they had sex when she was fifteen or eighteen (or older), they did, by all accounts, have a relationship of some sort beginning when she was fifteen.  It may have been legal in the sense that he wasn’t having intercourse with her, but big deal…there are many other kinds of relationships that can be just as damaging to a young girl.  Having an emotional affair with someone can be just as destructive to a person as actually going ahead and having sex.  Roger was married with two children…he had no business beginning any sort of relationship with any female of any age who was not his wife.  Period.

However, I will say that if it does emerge that they were having sex when she was underage (and I suspect Mindy is withholding some information that may or may not come out if she is called as a witness…may I remind Mindy that she is still on probation and that perjury is a crime), I hope there is a way to punish him retroactively.  I do have to ask where her parents were during all of this, since there is no way I would let my teenage daughter sing in bars and go jetting off to parts unknown with a grown, married man.

Mindy herself, however, isn’t innocent in all this…she should have said no, not only because of his age at the time but because of his marital status.  But I can see where, to a teenage girl, attention from a famous, wealthy, attractive sports star would be hard to turn down, and that is where her parents should have stepped in.

And what about the effect this had on this young woman?  I’m not naive enough to blame Roger for all of Mindy’s problems.  She’s made some poor decisions and definitely screwed up her life because of them.  But while I can’t lay all the blame at his doorstep, it would be foolhardy to claim that he had no influence on her developing psyche.  After all, she was a fifteen-year-old teenager.  I keep saying that, but it bears repeating.  A girl that age has no business being with an adult man over ten years older than she was.  Besides, he was married, although the article does state that when Mindy found this out she wasn’t too fazed by the information.

Had Roger Clemens kept his big mouth shut, it’s quite possible none of this would have come out.  But had Roger Clemens kept it in his pants, there wouldn’t have been anything to cover up in the first place.

Well, other than that little alleged steroid thing.