Roger Clemens Still Suing Brian McNamee

It's a slow, slow baseball news day. A few minutes ago I was staring into space, and wondering how in the hell I made it through the last offseason. Than I remembered that approximately 79% of my posts between November and March were about Roger Clemens. As if on cue, this story about the nearly forgotten Clemens v. McNamee lawsuit pops up:

[McNamee lawyer Richard] Emery said that if [Judge] Ellison doesn't dismiss the case, Emery will open up discovery immediately and begin deposing the women Clemens was involved with — including country singer Mindy McCready, who had a lengthy affair with Clemens starting when she was a teenager. Emery said he will also depose Clemens' family members and his former Yankee teammates.

"I was thinking about the whole thing, and it's incredibly stupid on Clemens' part to press forward with this, unless the Mitchell Report can be considered defamatory," Emery told the Daily News before the hearing. "There is no doubt that (Clemens) was hurt by the Mitchell Report, but if he's serious about doing something, he should sue Mitchell and the media and Major League Baseball."

For those of you who care -- and I'm guessing most of you dropped out when the McCready stuff popped up -- virtually nothing of note has happened in the suit for several months. McNamee has moved to dismiss the case on the grounds that his statements to George Mitchell were privileged because, since there were some federal agents hanging around, Mitchell was somehow transformed into a governmental criminal investigator. There have been responses and replies and now this oral argument, and the judge still hasn't decided anything.

If McNamee wins this motion, he basically wins the lawsuit. Of course, as I mentioned multiple times last winter, that would not establish that what he said about Clemens was true, just as Clemens winning the lawsuit on any number of legal grounds would not establish that what McNamee said was false.

Of course, this lawsuit was never about what is true and what is false. It was all posturing, counter-posturing, and spin.

UPDATE: The Chron is now reporting that Clemens is dropping his claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress. As I noted several months ago, this was a farkakte claim for Clemens to be bringing in the first place, so the fact that he's dropping it may be the first sign we've seen of sanity from his legal team since this melodrama began.