The first of the Clemens-McNamee tapes, portions unintelligible and others almost painfully illogical, delivered an evocatively grim audio demonstration of what dialogue between a sad pathetic sycophant and a wounded egomaniac sounds like.

Boffo.

Is there a Grammy for best new vocalist(s) in desperation skullduggery, like there is for everything else?

Because I've got your co-winners.

Additional conversations between Roger Clemens, the former future Hall of Famer, and Brian McNamee, the Rocket's newly famous training regimen and pharmaceuticals flunky, are now thought ready to explode on or before next month's round of Congressional hearings into the steroid evidence contained in The Mitchell Report.

"Roger," McNamee implores the Rocket at one point on the 17-minute tape Clemens played Monday, "I've got no money. I've got a car that doesn't work. ... Everything I have, I have because of you."

Brilliant.

Sounds so much like Greg Anderson that it's sickening. Anderson was Barry Bonds' McNamee, and just like McNamee, he was obviously undercompensated for his trouble. So here you have two of the game's era-defining superstars, making themselves bigger than the game by making themselves bigger than themselves, expecting the people who helped them get there to silently take the fall and simply go about their own miserable little existences outside of gated communities.

Unfortunately for Clemens, Anderson was a lot better at it than McNamee. Anderson went to jail multiple times rather than say out loud what anyone who knows anything about steroids would conclude about Bonds just by looking at him.

Is there a Flunky Hall of Fame?

Because I've got a first-ballot lock.

So yes, that's what players like Bonds and Clemens want. They want a bajillion dollars (plus meal money on the road), they want to play only when they want to, they want to compromise the game's integrity for the further inflation of their legends, they want someone to make sure it happens through whatever means necessary, and if they're stupid and arrogant enough to get caught (hey wait, they are!), they want someone to blame, someone helpless enough to absorb any remaining obstacle to their Hall of Fame inductions.

Well sorry.

Years ago, a National League executive who routinely participated in salary arbitration hearings told me: "If you could sit in there and hear what these guys want, hear what they expect and what they think of themselves, you would never go to another game."

The next big game is Feb. 13 in Washington, where Clemens takes another sort of hill against Congress and McNamee over the contents of The Mitchell Report. McNamee told former Sen. George Mitchell and his investigators that he injected Clemens with the anabolic steroids Deca-Durabolin and Winstrol on multiple occasions in 1998, 2000 and 2001, and with human growth hormone as well, which, McNamee said, he also administered to Andy Pettitte.

Pettitte has admitted as much, claiming he only used HGH once to recover from an injury, as if that's some viable justification. What, Andy Pettitte is the only guy ever to get injured?

So I guess Clemens is going to try to convince Congress that McNamee, who clearly worships him, told Mitchell that Pettitte used HGH because it was the truth, but that he told Mitchell that Clemens used steroids and HGH even though it wasn't the truth. Just for the heck of it.

Give me a break.

For clarity's sake, everyone connected with the game is to some extent culpable in the steroids mess, including the fans and the media, but let's not pretend anyone but the players are primarily responsible for this disgrace.

It was the players who wanted to cheat, who enabled a significant percentage of their peers to cheat, and who fostered a married-to-the-mob atmosphere among non-cheaters through their common soulless players union.

"I sent a memorandum to every active player in Major League Baseball, encouraging each player to contact me or my staff if he had any relevant information," Mitchell wrote in his report. "The [union] sent out a companion memorandum that effectively discouraged players from cooperating. Not one player contacted me in response to my memorandum."

Not one player.

"I received allegations of the illegal possession or use of performance enhancing substances by a number of current players," Mitchell went on. "Through their representative, the Players Association, I asked each of them to meet with me so that I could provide them with information about the allegations and give them a chance to respond. Almost without exception they declined to meet or talk with me."

The Mitchell Report generally concludes that steroids have been in and around the game for about 20 years, to varying degrees, and that they are not quite the competition-curdling menace they were a few years ago, having been replaced substantially by human growth hormone.

You wanna cheat with this, or you wanna cheat with that?

In 1987, the late commissioner Bart Giamatti, the former president of Yale, likely without knowing where the game was headed in this regard, posited the following:

"If participants and spectators alike cannot assume integrity and fairness, and proceed from there, the contest cannot in its essence exist."

Twenty-one years later, we thus have this once unimaginable question:

Does baseball still essentially exist?