Pettitte Comes Clean

After the Mitchell Report named close to 90 former and current MLB players, some players have started to come clean about their drug-use. But so far, no one really vital to their teams or former teams had admitted to using steroids or HGH. But today, one of those players did.

Andy Pettitte, fresh off re-signing with the Yankees, admitted today that he took HGH in 2002. He took the performance enhancer after an early-season elbow injury put him on the DL. "I had heard that human growth hormone could promote faster healing for my elbow.'' So Pettitte asked the trainer he shared with Roger Clemens, Brian McNamee, to help him with HGH. McNamee recalled injecting Pettitte two to four times. Pettitte says that he only took HGH on 2 occasions.

''If what I did was an error in judgment on my part, I apologize,'' Pettitte said Saturday in a statement released by his agent. ''I accept responsibility for those two days. I felt an obligation to get back to my team as soon as possible. For this reason, and only this reason, for two days I tried human growth hormone. Though it was not against baseball rules, I was not comfortable with what I was doing, so I stopped. This is it - two days out of my life; two days out of my entire career, when I was injured and on the disabled list,'' he said. ''I wasn't looking for an edge. I was looking to heal.''

Even if Pettitte comes out of HGH problem this unscathed, he has just brought further evidence toward the great Roger Clemens' drug use. As it said earlier, Pettitte obtained the HGH from a trainer that he a Clemens shared at the time. Although Clemens and his attorney deny that he has ever taken performance-enhancing drugs, the evidence seems to piling up on him.