In an ESPN story today, former Yankee strength trainer Brian McNamee says two things that are puzzling. First that one of the injectables he used on Clemens was lidocaine with B-12.

It’s easy to envision how he got the B-12, but not so much with the lidocaine. The later is a anesthetic that’s promarily used as a numbing agent to apply stiches or in dental work. In athletics its easy to see why a physician would choose to add lidocaine with any steroid. Its a technique the pysician uses to see if they “hit the spot” with their injection into a shoulder, knee or elbow. It would never be added to steroid injection into a large muscle like that of the buttocks. Nonetheless its worth questioning McNamee where he got the vile of lidocaine as this is considered to be a narcotic.

Second, McNamee says he injected Clemens at Yankee Stadium in the area which the hot tub was located. Was this area in a place where long time Yankee atheltic trainers Gene Monohan and Steve Donahue were working? If So, McNamee’s claim is questionable as there is no way on this earth that either Monohan or Donahue would have allowed a layman like McNamee to give a shot to an athlete. Nor would have Clemen’s chanced it if he felt that either of the two would have discovered them. If the hot tub at Yankee Stadium was clearly seperate from the training room does it make McNamee’s statement’s questionable.

At any rate the whole episode sheds light on the surge of “personal trainers’ whom baseball let in without vetting. Too may of them – like McNamee – had far too many links to the community of body building and traditional power lifting. Barry Bonds now notorious strength trainer, Greg Anderson is another. They saw major league players as willing dupes who could deliver the kind of access they could never obtain by going through the front door.

Still responsibility lies with players who felt they were untouchable and the suits whom run the game. It unltimately is about sceeding power and influence – something the game’s executive branch often sought to supress in their ATCs . Ultimately their lack of professional respect for ones like Monohan and Donohue helped fuel the disaster. ATC’s have long since earned the respect and appreciation by players and might have been one group if respectfully empowered by management might have been able to raise the alarm against charlatans like Anderson and McNamee.

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