The East Windup Chronicle — your home for Korean baseball and Roger Clemens drama coverage. No wonder  our readership is  suddenly growing.

Right. So another Clemens story. Wait! Don’t go away. One of the more fortunate aspects of the ongoing Clemens steroid drama is that it’s produced some compelling sportswriting for a change of pace. Interpret that however you will, but here’s a great piece by the New York Times Alan Schwartz titled Clemens Faces Dangers of Spin in Steroid Case.

Roger Clemens has not stumped in New Hampshire, has not yukked with Stephen Colbert, and most certainly has not welled up in a coffee shop. Yet he is running perhaps America’s most provocative campaign.

The premise here is the media campaign Clemens has undertaken to proclaim his innocence. He goes into detail about the image of pre-steroid Clemens, setting up how this very image seems to be what’s hampering him now. I think he’s dead on in his assessment.

Unlike that of a measured and calculating politician, Clemens’s fierce and occasionally unbridled response to attack evidenced what made him so successful (and at times polarizing) as an athlete: a visceral, almost manic competitiveness that can explode into imprudence. A boot-wearing Texan in the John Wayne mold, Clemens won 354 games and a record 7 Cy Young awards not by meekly pitching around threats but by firing fastballs, some of them up and in. A former catcher, Charlie O’Brien, once said reverently: “When things get tough, Roger wants to go harder, to throw faster. You can see smoke coming out of his nose.”

Clemens’s appeal to the public has been based not on dousing his characteristic fire but on flaunting it.

He compares Clemens saga and subsequent “I didn’t do it” media campaign to those of Martha Stewart and the Duke Lacrosse players.

“In my view, you have to make a contrary impression as soon as the news comes out,” said Barry Langberg, a lawyer who represented Carol Burnett and Aretha Franklin in successful defamation lawsuits against tabloid newspapers. “And then you shield the person from direct confrontation. I would not say that has been done in Mr. Clemens’s case, but of course it’s hard to know how much he is responsible for it.”

If Clemens is telling the truth about never having taken steroids, Langberg and other experts said, he is failing to leave that impression — and instead leaving himself open to public and legal consequences. His contentions that injections he received were merely of the painkiller lidocaine and the vitamin B12 have not rung plausibly with the public, they said, despite his emotion.

Langberg goes on to criticize Clemens and his lawyer for waiting until five days after the release of the Mitchell Report to proclaim his innocence. Langberg, and also a crisis-management consultant from Washington named Marina Ein, also say they both would have strongly advised against Clemens’s appearing on “60 Minutes.”

“He fell into a trap he didn’t see,” Ein said. “Early in the interview, he said about steroids, ‘Where would I get the needles?’ But later, talking about how McNamee’s injections were only lidocaine and vitamin B12, apparently needles were no problem. I guarantee you that the authorities are going to jump all over that. He did exactly what you should fear would happen.”

In the next day’s testy news conference, Clemens reiterated his outrage, pointed it toward the reporters, and also warned that “I would be afraid for McNamee” if he ever visited Houston. At one point, Hardin passed him a note that said, “Lighten up.”

Whoops. The article goes on to cite some examples of Clemens losing his temper and responding as if he’s above the law. One of the incidents being during the 2000 World Series when he threw the end of a bat at Mike Piazza, later claiming he thought it was the ball. Schwartz writes, “Clemens was so wired for battle that he blew past the limits of competitive decorum.”