December 16th, 2007 → 12:18 pm @ Seth Mnookin
The presence of Clemens and Pettitte–and, to a lesser extent, of the likes of Chuck Knoblauch and David Justice–has predictably caused some people to question the Yankees ’96-’00 dominance. I’ll add myself to one of the voices for the defense. No one will ever know what the Mitchell report would have looked like had there been a strength and conditioning coach in every clubhouse that talked, on the record, about what happened while they were with their respective teams…but it’s a safe bet that more teams would look like the Yankees, with more than a dozen players named, than like the Sox, who don’t have a single major player cited for actions during his time in Boston.
Post Categories: Roger Clemens & Steroids & The Mitchell Report & Yankees
December 13th, 2007 → 6:46 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Lots and lots and lots and lots of actual and virtual ink will be spilled on the Mitchell Report, which is going to make life hell for a whole mess of people. I’ll resist added too much of my drivel and will instead limit myself to some few quick points on issues such as…
Roger Clemens. Why, you might ask, would a sure-fire Hall of Famer risk his reputation and legacy over these last five or so years by taking PEDs? People asked me that question again and again during the pre-season frenzies of last season and 2006. I have no way of knowing; for some reason, Clemens won’t talk to me. But I do have an idea: because he has never, in his entire life, had to deal with the consequences of his actions. He can act like a teenage mutant ninja freak and throw broken bats across the field and it’s chalked up to competitive fire. He can demand ludicrous contract clauses like Hummers and private transportation and he’s indulged. Why, after years and years of this, would he suddenly think that the rules applied to him? (Clemens is far from alone in this regard; this is something that crops up again and again in ballplayers, who are constantly reminded that the normal rules of society–stay faithful to your spouse, clean up after yourself, don’t eat McDonald’s for breakfast–don’t apply to them.
I Love (the fact that I’m not playing in) New York. Plenty of teams’ fans are going to be crowing/letting out a huge sigh of relief…so long as those fans aren’t rooting for the Mets and the Yankees. A quick scan of what is destined to become known as the list shows current and former New Yorkers including Kevin Brown, Paul Lo Duca, Mo Vaughn, Todd Pratt, Ron Villone, David Justice, Chuck Knoblauch, Clemens, Andy Pettitte, and Lenny Dykstra. Does that mean that other teams–like, say, the Sox–are (or were) any cleaner? Hell no. It just means no-one else had a clubhouse attended that got popped.
The non-inclusion of any of the Idiots: Earlier today, what turned out to be a fake list was leaked; that one included names like Nomar, Johnny Damon, and Trot Nixon, along with other usual suspects like Pudge, Pujols, and Milton Bradley. (Later in the day, well-circulated rumor had Varitek also on the list.) Back in 2005, a member of the Sox’s front office physically shuddered at the thought of what would happen in Boston if news ever broke about someone on the ’04 team roiding up. It looks like that won’t happen…for now, anyway. That brings us to…
Eric Gagne. Gagne, as everyone now knows, was on the list, which can’t be a surprise to anyone. (Also included in the report is news that the Sox inquired about Gagne’s supposed doping before acquiring him at the deadline.) It turns out that the biggest favor Gagne may have done Boston is sucking ass for the second half of the season–now, at least, no one can point to him as one of the reason’s for the team’s success.
That’s all for now. I’ve written plenty about steroids in the past, including last August, when I wondered why no one was wondering about Roger, and way back in October ’06, when I mocked the press’s surprise that Clemens had been fingered in he Grimsley affidavit. I also tagged Jason Giambi a gutless punk, ripped into the Players Union for defending the players’ right to destroy their livers, lamented the fact that Jose Canseco seemed to be the only honest guy around, and talked about how Bill James compared steroids to going through a divorce. (Sort of, anyway.)
More later, I’m sure.
Post Categories: 2004 Playoffs & Eric Gagne & Jason Giambi & Jason Grimsley & Jason Varitek & Johnny Damon & Nomar Garciaparra & Roger Clemens & Steroids & The Mitchell Report & Trot Nixon
December 12th, 2007 → 12:51 pm @ Seth Mnookin
After getting roundly hammered for his asinine post yesterday, BU journalism professor Chris Daly apparently decided that he hadn’t sufficiently proved his lack of insight and threw up several hundred more words of absolute drivel. It’s hard to tease out the biggest laughlines, but here are a couple of start with:
“As a professor of journalism, I work with dozens of talented young people every year, and I know just how capable they are. I also know that they often need guidance, backgrounding, and careful editing. I regret leaving the impression that people in their 20s are somehow inherently unqualified to cover presidential politics or anything else.”
and
“Like many blogs, mine is a venue for criticism, analysis and commentary. It is not an outlet for reporting or research. I googled Mr. Bacon to begin to address the question, Could experience have been a factor?”
So, to summarize: Daly defends his own ignorance by writing that the young’uns out there need “backgrounding and careful editing”…and then goes on to say that he didn’t have any responsibility to provide any kind of background, context, or careful analysis because he declined to do any reporting and research before publishing online. (This last point is particularly ironic in light of a piece Daly has posted on his site titled “Are Bloggers Journalists?” in which he invokes the two Thomases: Paine and Jefferson.) As a j-school professor, Daly sure raises some interesting points, such as: Does a self-proclaimed professional journalist and educator have any responsibility to maintain any standards when writing for his blog, which heralds his profession (www.journalismprofessor.com) and his professional affiliation? What standards should blogs be held to if they want to be taken seriously? Etc, etc. Unfortunately (for his students, anyway), Daly raises these issues implicitly, and only by his own negative example.
This little bout of industry indignation also raises another interesting issue: the Romenesko echo chamber effect. Since the first link to his original post yesterday, Daly’s musing have been the subject of four more posts on Jim Romenesko’s “daily fix of media industry news,” including this one detailing initial reactions (including my own), an unintentionally ironic post from Washington Post executive editor Len Downie chastising Romenesko for linking to Daly’s piece in the first piece, a link to a letter from Time’s David Von Drehle, and this morning’s post detailing Daly’s semi-apologia. Numerous other people weighed in on Romenesko’s letters page, including the Times’ Adam Nagourney, the Boston Globe’s Erica Noonan, and Eric Alterman’s Eric Alterman. In an era of continual griping about newsroom cutbacks, why are so many highly-respected (and relatively high paid) journalists spending their precious time engaging a man who, according to his own resume, last did time as a working journalist in 1997? (I, for one, have a good excuse: I don’t have a job.)
I’ll venture one answer: journalists are self-obsessed, and, in a time when our public opinion ranking is somewhere below that of politicians, garbage collectors, and lawyers, Romenesko–a site that’s been labeled the industry’s water cooler so many times it’s practically part of the site’s name–is one area where we can remind each other we still matter. The lack of a volume control on Romenesko’s site, where a long Times feature about the future of the Wall Street Journal under Rupert Murdoch gets less attention that Chris Daly, makes it easy for us all to indulge in these self-important feeding frenzies. As a result, we give the Chris Daly’s of the world some weight, but that’s really secondary to our main, albeit unconscious, objective: reminding ourselves how much we matter.
Which isn’t to say that the first thing I’ll do when I post this is send a humble email to Romenesko himself. Because if there’s no link–and no reaction from my peers–how will I know that my voice on this burning issue is being heard?
Post Categories: Bloggers & Chris Daly & Media reporting & Navel Gazing & Romenesko
December 11th, 2007 → 12:14 pm @ Seth Mnookin
BU journalism professor Chris Daly has a blog post today in which he takes the Washington Post to task for assigning Perry Bacon, Jr. to write front-page political stories. “Who is Perry Bacon Jr.?” Daly asks. “I don’t really know, but in two minutes of Googling him, I learned that he graduated from Yale in 2002, so he is approximately 27 years old. Since when does the Post assign 27-year-olds to write Page 1 presidential campaign pieces?” Daly goes on to compare Bacon’s now-infamous story about the non-reality of the “Barack is a Muslim” rumor to a hypothetical piece saying that Bacon is not a child molester.
This appears to be a good example of the maxim, “Those who can’t do, teach.” Whether or not Perry Bacon should be writing page 1 political stories is a question I can’t answer; I do, however, know that his age has absolutely nothing to do with it. To give some points of comparison:
Age at which Bob Woodward was assigned to Watergate: 29.
Age at which Carl Bernstein was assigned to cover Watergate: 28.
Age at which Charlie Savage won a Pulitzer for his investigation into President Bush’s use of “signing statements” to bypass provisions of new laws: 32.
Age of Ryan Lizza, the campaign correspondent for The New Yorker: 32.
Age at which David Rohde won his Pulitzer Prize for his eyewitness reporting on the massacre of Bosnian Muslims: 28.*
I could go on and on; I just pulled these examples out of my ass. And comparing a story addressing the fact that, as Bacon’s story’s headline read, “Foes Use Obama’s Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him” to the hoary old example of making some deny some outrageous, and previously unraised, accusation is so silly it does nothing so much as make me thankful Daly isn’t actually doing work inside newsrooms.
(I may be particularly sensitive to these kind of stupid, ageist accusations; I was 31 when I started work on Hard News, my book about the New York Times, and there were more than a few people who whispered to critics that I had no right investigating such an august institution. Maybe the Washington Post tapped it as one of the year’s best books solely to justify their use of young whippersnappers to cover politics.)
*I’m guessing at Savage’s, Lizza’s, and Rohde’s ages – I know the years in which they were born, but not the dates, which means they could have been 31, 31, and 27, respectively.
Post Categories: Academia & Hard News & Media reporting & Political Reporting & Washington Post
December 4th, 2007 → 11:17 am @ Seth Mnookin
Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been strangely quiet as of late – and that silence has continued even after my return from a glorious, two-and-a-half-week trip to Southeast Asia. (I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: nothing says romance like reading a bio of Pol Pot on your honeymoon.) I’ve avoid my usual laundry list of excuses.
I will, however, say this: I’ve always been reticent about jawing off when I have no real idea what I’m talking about…and such is the case with all of the sundry Santana trade permutations. I don’t mean the specifics of a possible trade — no one knows those except for Theo, Bill Smith, and Brian Cashman. I mean that I don’t know enough (and what’s more, haven’t done the work) to be able to make any kind of responsible or intelligent observations about whether this or that scenario makes sense. I don’t have the drilled-down numbers on Jacoby; I haven’t run the projections on Santana; I sure as hell don’t have any sense of what the pool of pitching talent is like in next few amateur drafts; I don’t know where else the Sox (or the Yankees) would spend that $130 mil or so it’ll likely take to lock up Santana…well, you get the idea. And even if I did have all of this info and even if I had done all of this work, I still would be so many light years behind where the Sox front office is in terms of brainpower, man hours spent hunched over spreadsheets, cumulative knowledge, and on and on, that it would be silly for me to start soapboxing about why this or that scenario makes sense.
Which leaves me with…emotion. Emotionally, I don’t want to lose Jacoby, and this is even after the wife grew besotted with him after a recent lunch they shared together. Emotionally, I’m in love with homegrown teams. Emotionally, I want to go into battle with a roster that includes four homegrown players (Youk, DP, Jed Lowrie, and Ellsbury), two guys that the Sox should rightly get credit for growing (Tek and Papi), and a couple of hired guns (JDD and Manny). Emotionally, I want Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz and Papelbon and Manny DC and yes, even Craig Hansen to round out a rotation that’ll be anchored by Beckett and Dice-K for the next half-decade or so. Emotionally, I’m nervous about paying a premium for a pitcher’s post-30 years. And, dare I say it, emotionally I find something a little, well, gross, about the prospect of the Sox going out and buying the best left-handed pitcher in the game to augment what’s arguably already the best rotation in baseball.
But the Sox front office doesn’t get paid to traffic in emotion – and thank goodness for that. Emotion would have ended up with Nomar and Pedro still collecting paychecks from Yawkey Way and, in all likelihood, with a 90-year championship drought.
At the moment — at 10:02 am on December 4 — it sounds as if the Sox are actually close to a deal, one that would keep Ellsbury in Boston and send Lester, Lowrie, and Coco to Minnesota. (Sigh. Coco. I still love the guy.) If it happens, it could be a great deal. And if it happens, it’ll be worth paying attention to what happens to Lowrie down the line. Plenty of times, those third names that no one has ever heard of end up turning into pretty good players. It was Lester, after all, who was headed to Texas four years ago as part of the aborted Manny for A-Rod deal…
Anyway, if that deal does go down, the Sox will have to be the pre-season favorites…through, say, 2010. As an NL exec told Jayson Stark, a rotation that consisted of Beckett, Dice-K, and Santana, to say nothing of Schilling and Clay “Oh No-No You Don’t” Buchholz, “might just be the best team in the history of the frigging universe.” It would also complicate Tito’s job. Seriously: which of these guys do you sit down to tell he’s going to be a fifth starter?
Post Categories: 2007 Hot Stove Season & Coco Crisp & Jacoby Ellsbury & Johan Santana & Jon Lester
December 4th, 2007 → 10:46 am @ Seth Mnookin
“The National Baseball Hall of Fame has become a national joke.”
— Murray Chass, “Omitting Miller Not Surprising, but Still Embarrassing,” The New York Times, December 4, 2007
“Murray Chass, a reporter for The New York Times, was elected Sunday as the winner of the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, presented annually for contributions to baseball writing, and he will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., next summer.”
— “Chass to Enter Hall of Fame,” December 15, 2003
(Curiously, Chass’s official page on the Hall’s site is…blank.
Post Categories: J.D. Drew
November 27th, 2007 → 11:54 am @ Seth Mnookin
I’ve returned from Southeast Asia, where I explored the ruins of Angkor Wat, read of genocidal madmen, spent a day washing elephants, and watched four year olds shoot bottle rockets at each other. The region has a lot to rmend it…save, of course, for the lack of baseball and drinkable water.
As I slowly recover from jet lag I’ll wade back in here and get some thoughts and observations down about the departure of the Dentist, the return of Mike “Lunchpail” Lowell, and the A-Rod chronicles, part 814. For now, here’s my most recent piece, a profile of Doug Morris, the head of Universal Records. It focused on DRM – for those of you non-geeks out there, that’s digital rights management, otherwise known as the way record companies et al protect digital files. I have some more thoughts about the piece, and some thoughts on how it has been interpreted, but as they say, all in good time…
Post Categories: 2007 Hot Stove Season & Doug Morris & Oblique References to Eminem Lyrics & Wired
