By Lily Kuo
WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) – An ex-Major League Baseball
player testified on Tuesday that he witnessed former pitching
ace Roger Clemens being injected with a vitamin as Clemens’
defense sought to undermine prosecution claims he received
performance-enhancing drugs.
Clemens, 49, is on trial for the second time on federal
charges of lying in 2008 to the House of Representatives’
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform when he denied
having used performance-enhancing drugs. The committee was
investigating drug use in Major League Baseball.
The core of the government’s case against the seven-time Cy
Young Award winner for best pitcher has been testimony from his
former trainer Brian McNamee, who says he personally injected
Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone.
Clemens has said that McNamee injected him with shots of a
liquid form of vitamin B-12, used to help ward off sickness, and
the anesthetic lidocaine instead.
Mike Boddicker, a former pitcher who played with Clemens on
the Boston Red Sox, testified that he walked in on Clemens
getting a shot in the buttocks from a trainer of vitamin B-12,
in either 1989 or 1990.
Prosecutors previously tried to debunk Clemens’ claims that
he received shots of the vitamin, not drugs, with testimony from
an ex-Yankees trainer that the vitamin was kept under lock and
key and that McNamee, Clemens’ strength and conditioning coach
while he played for the Yankees, would did not have had
authority to give injections of it.
Boddicker said trainers at the Boston Red Sox administered
shots of the vitamin.
“It was pretty commonplace for trainers to give shots back
then,” Boddicker said.
Boddicker, who also played for the Baltimore Orioles, said
he believed he witnessed Clemens receiving a vitamin B-12
injection because a vial with the label for the vitamin was on
the table next to Clemens, and the trainer asked if Boddicker
also wanted a shot.
Prosecutors have sought to link Clemens to syringes and
cotton balls and other medical waste that McNamee says came from
an injection of performance-enhancing drugs in 2001.
Clemens’ lawyers have tried to prove that the former
pitcher’s stunning late-career success was the product of hard
work and smart pitching, not performance-enhancing drugs.
Clemens won his seventh Cy Young Award in 2004 – the summer
he turned 42 – in his first season with the Houston Astros,
after ending the season with an impressive 2.98 earned run
average.
Jury deliberations for the trial, which is in its 8th week,
could begin next week, said Judge Reggie Walton who is presiding
over the case. Court proceedings began on April 16.
Clemens’ first trial ended last year in a mistrial.
(Reporting By Lily Kuo; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
