Visitors show support, contempt for Clemens outside hearing

WASHINGTON - At 11:30 a.m. on any other Wednesday, Marshall Rader and David Gorsky would have been sitting through band or environmental science classes at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Va.

Instead, the seniors brushed up on baseball history from the back row of a congressional hearing room as former New York Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens fielded questions about his alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs.

With parental permission, the two students skipped school for a chance to see a baseball player they once admired but now find disappointing.

"I used to think he was this great pitcher, and now he's like this liar," Gorsky said.

Clemens has vehemently denied using the drugs, contradicting allegations by his former trainer, Brian McNamee, who also testified Wednesday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

A report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball written by former Sen. George Mitchell named Clemens, along with more than 80 other players, as drug users.

As testimony droned on Wednesday, the second day of the hearings on the Mitchell Report, aides shuffled baseball fans and curious visitors through the room in groups of five for 20 minutes apiece.

Rader, 17, and Gorsky, 18, waited two hours to see Clemens walk down the hall - Gorsky yelled "cheater" as he passed - and two more hours to see 20 minutes of sports history in the making.

Just ahead of them in line was Nick Corsetti, 21, a trade institute intern from Villanova University who roots for the Boston Red Sox, the Yankees' archrival. He waited four hours, hoping his brief visit to the hearing room would include some clear answers from the seven-time Cy Young Award winner.

Corsetti, from Middlefield, Conn., expressed no sympathy after hearing testimony from Clemens and McNamee.

"One of them is lying under oath," he said. "I don't know - it's going to be interesting."

That Clemens could be dishonest was unfathomable to Natalya Seliuk and her fiancé, Patrick Read, both lifelong Yankees fans who moved from Syracuse, N.Y., to Arlington.

"The honor and integrity oozes off this man," said Read, 37, a sales consultant and writer who wore a blue jersey bearing Clemens' number, 22.

He said the same can't be said for McNamee. Read said he has collected reports of McNamee's public statements and compared them to what is in the Mitchell Report, concluding that the trainer has downplayed his knowledge about performance-enhancing drug use.

Seliuk, 30, dubbed Clemens a "legend" and said she felt badly for the beleaguered pitcher as he answered questions.

"They're brutal," she said. "It's like he said, she said."

Douglas Perry, 65, a lifelong Yankees fan who teaches at Gig Harbor High School in Gig Harbor, Wash., said he ducked away from a field trip attending a different hearing because he wanted to see Clemens' body language during the questioning.

He criticized the Mitchell Report as being incomplete and a "disservice" to baseball, but Perry also said he had no preconceived opinion about the allegations against Clemens.

As a teacher, Perry said his larger concern is that young people get a positive message from the athletes they look up to.

Rader and Gorsky, the high school students from Arlington, said they won't let the steroid debate cloud their affinity for professional baseball and its players.

"I'm not really a skeptic who thinks everybody's on drugs," Rader said.

It's those skeptics who worry Read. He said the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs has created the biggest scandal in baseball history.

"How are we going to recover from that?" he said. "I'm really concerned about that."