Defamation of a Character

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. Every day, it seems, a new Roger Clemens girlfriend is revealed. And each time, just as it appears that there could not possible be another, we hear of a new lady emerging as unexpected and slathered in make up as a clown from a VW Beetle.

This begs the question, who’s next? It can’t just be three, can it? There must be more. So in the hopes that Roger will sue him for defamation of character, leading to even further public humiliation for the Rocket Man, Jose, gives his list of women who have had affairs with Roger Clemens:

• Rue McClanahan: Remember her character on Golden Girls? She was a really slutty southern dame, which seems to put her right in Clemens’ wheelhouse. Also, if you balance her out with Mindy McCready, that gives him one appropriately-aged mistress.

• Margo Adams: Clemens and Wade Boggs were having simultaneous affairs with Adams. This resulted in an awkward instance wherein Adams got pregnant, and Clemens insisted it was a Boggs error, but Boggs countered that Clemens should not have “pitched inside.”

• Trot Nixon: No wait. He f*cks Roger Clemens, not the other way around.

• Suzyn Waldman: You heard the tape of her. What else could it have been?

• Mata Hari: Traitors run in packs.

• Kim Khardasian: With all of those Ks in her name, how could Roger resist.


2. In a bit of a surprise, Hideki Okajima blew a save last night, allowing an inherited runner to score in the eighth on a sacrifice fly following a double. He ended the inning with two strike outs.

Manager Terry Eurona’s decision to bring in Okajima after Manny of the Carmen had allowed a lead off single puzzled some fans. Jose agrees that departing from Okajima’s normal usage was an unwise move that led, at least indirectly, to the run.

There is no way Tito should have brought Okajima in until it was bases loaded no outs. How could Oki have been expected to perform with only one man on base?


3. While many major league teams might be encouraging players to back off from spring training shenanigans in light of the Clemens Affair, the Red Sox have refused to change anything.

“The one thing we don’t want to do is lose the intimacy of spring training,” said Red Sox Chief Operating Officer Mike Dee.

While Dee’s comments were reported by Nick Cafardo to be in response to a question about moving the spring training home to Sarasota, Sarasota is believed to be baseball slang for “sex with aspiring country musicians” just as “stick” means “bat” and “shooting beaver” means being a peeping tom.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.