McNamee Evidence May Be Weak

According to a New York Times report citing scientific experts, the physical evidence trainer Brian McNamee submitted to officials yesterday may be impossible to date. The Clemens defense team will also lambaste McNamee during a trial as the fact that the evidence was handled by his accuser does not work in the ex-trainer's favor. From the article:

The syringes, vials and gauze pads that Brian McNamee has turned over to federal investigators to back up his contention that he injected Roger Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone will be the subject of a strenuous attack if they enter the courtroom, according to medical and legal experts.

The syringes, vials and gauze pads are said to date from 2000 and 2001, part of a four-year period in which McNamee contends he gave Clemens drug injections. But even if the physical evidence tests positive for Clemens’s DNA and, say, steroids, Clemens’s lawyers could argue that McNamee added steroid traces to the original evidence in a bid to incriminate Clemens, experts say.

“You can test to figure out what the substance is, but you cannot figure out how old it is,” Dr. Don Catlin, the former director of the Olympic testing lab at U.C.L.A., said in a telephone interview.

There is no way to date blood either, Catlin said, which means there may not be a conclusive way to establish that the syringes, vials and pads were from 2000 and 2001.

The experts said that any syringes were particularly important because they could have come in contact with Clemens’s blood and a substance he might have been injected with.

This is where I get off. Legal mumbo-jumbo and scientific experts become a baseball blog's worst nightmare. Not that this story hasn't been intrusive and annoying from the jump.