Wallace Matthews Is a Big Fat Idiot

One of my "favorite" sportswriters is at it again.

Wallace Matthews wrote a column yesterday in Newsday defending Roger Clemens as a "victim" in the latest mess he's in with the country singer Mindy McCready. To read this unbelievable nonsense, go here.

You may remember Matthews as the gutless coward who attacked Tim Wakefield last year, with the wrongheaded notion that his games are the slowest in the American League. I wrote about that last May. Matthews seems to be the only human being with some kind of vendetta against Wake, who happens to be one of the classier players to step foot on a Major League baseball field.

But he's really gone overboard now in this defense of Clemens, as some kind of victim in this. He seems to imply that this whole thing was a setup by McCready (and Brian McNamee's lawyers) to jump start her failing singing career. (Yeah, I'm sure she's really enjoying being "the other woman," Wally.)

And he also thinks that this whole thing is a "non-story." Hey Wally, have you ever seen any of those "To Catch a Predator" shows on Dateline NBC, where they catch adult men trying to hookup with underage girls online? You could very easily put Clemens in the same league as those predators. There's nothing funny about a married, superstar pitcher going after an underage girl while projecting to the world that he's this family man and reincarnation of John Wayne. Defending this jackass, who could very well be a statutory rapist, as some kind of "victim" is so far beneath contempt.

And this statement by Matthews is just beyond belief: “The fact that she was 15 and he 28? Well, that one is a little tougher to get around, but these days, 15 is the new 30.” Matthews and his editor should be fired for writing that. And this is coming from a man with a young daughter. How would you feel if your underage daughter got involved with an older man, Wally?

I used to have some respect for Matthews. When he was with the NY Daily News, he used to write the boxing column, and they were generally pretty interesting (and I am not the biggest boxing fan in the world).

But since he's gone to Newsday, I think Matthews had flipped his lid. The hatchet job he did on Wakefield wasn't bad enough last year. He ought to be ashamed of what he wrote yesterday. Clemens is no victim, just an arrogant bully who thinks the entire world is out to get him. (And now it turns out that McCready wasn't the only woman Clemens was seeing behind his wife's back, as he flew other women around the country on his private jet, including a New York bartender he met a few years back. But McCready was the only underaged one.)

My thanks to Joy of Sox for alerting us to this idiotic of piece of trash from Matthews.