December 19th, 2006 → 10:43 am @ Seth Mnookin
For the first time in a good long time, there’s a simmering issue involving the Red Sox that isn’t receiving the kind of national attention usually reserved for missile treaties: J.D. Drew’s still unsigned contract. The Red Sox, according to reports that still haven’t been confirmed (at least on the record), by the Sox, Drew, or Scott Boras, are worried about the results of a physical. (Specifically, they’re worried about Drew’s gimpy shoulder.) (Drew’s public comments on the issue — that the shoulder has, as recently as last year, hurt his power production — don’t seem to help any kind of union claim he might make should the deal actually fall apart.)
The road bumps here are receiving the kind of temperate discussion you might expect in, say, St. Louis. After all the speculation that the Sox gave Drew that supposedly above-market contract in order to smooth their way to signing Matsuzaka, there haven’t been any (or at least very few) conspiracy theorists claiming the Sox are convientently backing out of the deal now that they have Daisuke in the fold. There also hasn’t been any growing chorus of concern; after all, if Drew somehow doesn’t end up in Boston, the options in right involve either everyday use of the far-from polished Wily Mo or making an effort to sign the power-deficient Trot Nixon to a one-year deal.
Anyway. This’ll all probably be worked out in the next few days. In the meantime, if you haven’t read Gordon Edes’s piece on the Matsuzaka negotiations (which I alluded to in a throwaway line in yesterday’s Chass rant), check it out. Also worth perusing is the always excellent Rob Bradford’s piece in the (still criminally inept) Eagle Tribune.
Post Categories: 2006 Hot Stove Season & Daisuke Matsuzaka & Gordon Edes & J.D. Drew & Rob Bradford
December 19th, 2006 → 10:27 am @ Seth Mnookin
One of Feeding the Monster‘s faithful readers actually beat me to the punch, as noted in the comment (#8) he made on yesterday’s post.
To wit: this past weekend, Brian M. emailed Murray Chass and asked about the whole Drew/Dodgers tampering story. Brian says he got this reply in return:
“I will base my reputation of nearly 40 years at the Times against anything the LA Times reported. Ask anybody in the business, and he will tell you my reporting is always correct, whether I’m quoting people by name or not. You don’t have to believe what I have reported, but that’s your problem, not mine.”
Wow. “My reporting is always correct”? We’re dealing with a deity here, folks. Apparently, Chass is so omniscient that his reporting is correct even when the subjects themselves say it’s not, as was the case when Chass said people were whispering in his ear that “Colletti wasn’t returning Epstein’s telephone calls.” That was so correct that a Dodgers spokesman felt compelled to clarify that “they probably talked about 20 times last week,” just one of several “clarifications” that article prompted.
Well sure, Ned Colletti might say that…but has he checked with Murray and his 40 years in the business?
Post Categories: Murray Chass & New York Times
December 19th, 2006 → 10:14 am @ Seth Mnookin
Two weeks ago, and then again one week ago, I reminded everyone that there is no better gift for aunts and ex-lovers than a personalized, inscribed copy of Feeding the Monster; indeed, FTM has been known to rekindle old romances and brighten family reunions. And as I’ve said before, those personalized, inscribed copies (er, bookplates) are now available, free of cost.*
Last week’s Boston-area events only served to highlight just how wonderful these signed copies are. An impromptu signing at the Chestnut Hill B&N resulted in dozens of sales in a mere half hour, and the lunchtime event at the Pru brought out old friends from high school, college, and Newsweek! Good times.
If you’re worried about getting those bookplates in time to put them under your tree (or holiday present storage facility of choice), fret not: I hereby promise to get these suckers out the same day you all send your requests in. The U.S. Postal Service is average between 24-48 hours for deliveries in the northeast, but you should have time regardless of where you live in the country.
* You will need to buy the book itself, which is a mere 17 bucks on Amazon (cheap!).
Post Categories: One-stop holiday shopping
December 18th, 2006 → 12:02 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Yesterday, the Times‘s Murray Chass wrote about the internal debate supposedly taking place within the front office of the Los Angeles Dodgers for the first time since he “broke” the story on December 8 that the Dodgers were considering filing tampering charges against the Red Sox for their “signing” of J.D. Drew. “Maybe it’s the environment — laid-back Los Angeles,” Chass wrote. “Maybe he would have been tougher in a tougher environment — Boston. But Frank McCourt bought the Dodgers, not the Red Sox, and he is what he is. What he is not is a fighter. McCourt, who has been described as not being a troublemaker, chose not to pursue a tampering charge against the Red Sox over the recent signing of J. D. Drew despite the urging of officials from other clubs.”
It was an astounding item at the tail ends of an astounding week, even by Chass’s flimsy standards. (It’s also likely the first time ever that Frank McCourt has been described as a big softy.) In his original piece, Chass wrote that “many people” had “urged the Dodgers to file a tampering charge.” Chass went on to say that “[o]thers described Colletti as angry about the Drew development and said that relations between Colletti and Theo Epstein, Boston’s general manager, had become strained to the point where Colletti wasn’t returning Epstein’s telephone calls” and that “[a]n executive of one club said the Dodgers’ owner, Frank McCourt, was certain tampering had occurred.”
Within 24 hours, other news outlets began reporting on just how off-base Chass’s story was. On the 9th, the Globe quoted MLB CEO Bob DuPuy saying he “had not heard anything” about the topic. That on-the-record quote immediately put Chass’s the central premise of Chass’s anonymously sourced story — that the Red Sox “were a hot topic of conversation at the general managers’ meeting last month and at the winter meetings last week” — into doubt. (In the clubby world of Major League Baseball, DuPuy would have been among the first people to hear if tampering charges were seriously being discussed.) The Globe story also knocked down the patently ridiculous notion that Colletti wasn’t returning Epstein’s calls: “Through a Dodgers spokesman, Colletti also refuted Chass’s allegation that there was a rift between Colletti and Epstein, and that he refused to take Epstein’s phone calls in Orlando. ‘They probably talked about 20 times last week,’ said spokesman Josh Rawitch. Indeed, when Colletti arrived at the meetings late last Sunday night from the Dominican Republic, one of his first orders of business was to conduct an hourlong face-to-face meeting with Epstein on a possible deal for Manny Ramírez.” (A hot conversation at both meetings most definitely was the potential of a Dodgers-Sox trade involving Manny.)
Three days later, the Los Angeles Times went one step further, writing that “[t]he Dodgers hadn’t seriously considered asking Major League Baseball to investigate until a column last week in the New York Times suggested tampering had occurred.” (What’s more, Drew is still not signed, although in the scheme of things that’s a minor point.)
Chass’s creation of a story and his subsequent refusal to acknowledge his mistakes is nothing new for the Times‘s irascible sports columnist. (It’s also worth noting the likelihood that Chass is as agenda-driven as anyone on the paper; only a month ago, Chass asked — in all seriousness — if the Sox’s posting fee bid for Daisuke Matsuzaka was “evil.” He decided it was “[m]ind boggling perhaps, but not evil. Stunning perhaps, but not evil. Incredulous maybe, but not evil. Obscene, as an executive of another club said, but not evil.”) On September 19, he wrote that the likelihood that the Mets would clinch their division at home meant the team “sold more than 10,000 extra tickets for last night’s game.” The attendance for the game Chass was referring to was 46,729. As I pointed out at the time, in the entire second half of the season, the Mets’ home attendance had dipped below 45,000 only nine times, had been under 40,000 only three times, and under 35,000 only once.
A little more than a month before that, Chass wrote that the Red Sox should be embarrassed by the Yankees lead in the AL East because “the Yankees have played much of the season without a third of their starting lineup. … Bruised and bloodied, the Yankees have been winning with players named Melky and Bubba. With only a third of the season to go, they have won more than the Red Sox, who until catcher Jason Varitek had knee surgery last week, had not dealt with the extended absence of an everyday player.” That’s perilously close to an out-and-out lie: the Sox’s starting center fielder (Coco Crisp) and their starting right fielder (Trot Nixon) had both been on the DL; at the time Chass’s article ran, Nixon had already been out of commission for several weeks. What’s more, six members of the Sox’s pitching staff had been on the DL; David Wells had already been out on three separate occasions.
Chass’s stories seem to skirt many of the Times‘s codified ethics regulations. The paper’s failure to correct Chass’s errors also directly contradicts its stated policy on corrections: “As journalists we treat our readers, viewers, listeners and online users as fairly and openly as possible. Whatever the medium, we tell our audiences the complete, unvarnished truth as best we can learn it. We correct our errors explicitly as soon as we become aware of them. We do not wait for someone to request a correction. We publish corrections in a prominent and consistent location or broadcast time slot.” Let’s see: complete, unvarnished truth? Nope. None of the examples I’ve cited above have received corrections, and several of these have been pointed out to an editor or editors in the paper’s sports department (and not by me). Responding to a query about Chass’s piece about the MASH-unit Yankees, one editor explained in an email that since Coco was not still on the disabled list, he didn’t count. And Trot? Well, he’d only “recently been injured.” Finally, since “pitchers are not considered everyday players,” they didn’t count either. So not only did the Times fail to publish a correction on its own, it actively refused to run a correction after an error had been brought to an editors attention. I still haven’t heard any explanation of why there hasn’t been a correction on the contention that Ned Colletti wasn’t returning Theo’s calls, or why the fuzzy math used for the Mets attendance boost was never clarified, or why…well, there are lots and lots of examples, including such easily verifiable information as, say, a player’s age.
***
I don’t mean to pick on Murray. OK, fine, that’s not true; I most definitely mean to pick on Murray. (Before someone points out the irony of my having an axe to grind with the fact that Chass has an act to grind, let me point out — and not for the first time — that this is a blog. It’s entire reason for being is so I can put forth my take on things. I have no codified ethics policy, etc etc.) But I also want to raise a larger point: why is it that the ethical guidelines so scrupulously enforced in virtually every other part of daily newspapers are ignored when it comes to the sports section? In Feeding the Monster, I wrote how an article by Dan Shaughnessy that described the mood in the Red Sox’s baseball operations department on the day that Theo Epstein’s officially returned to the team was flat-out wrong; I knew that because I (unlike Shaughnessy) was physically there. There sure as hell hasn’t been a correction on that item. Reporters carry water for sources with some regularity. Information that’s known to be false is printed. There’s been lots of talk about how the media fell down on the job during the steroids era; that seems to be the least of the problems. There are, of course, daily examples of excellent journalism being committed by sportswriters. There’s also lots and lots of crap.
I understand that the sports section is not of the same import as national or international news. But arts sections and styles sections and food sections are all held to some standards. What makes sports so different?
Post Categories: Media ethics & Murray Chass & New York Times
December 16th, 2006 → 12:57 pm @ Seth Mnookin
It takes much more time to drive around suburban Boston to sign book stock than you might think. Which is why I ended up spending about nine hours in the car yesterday. (Having not been to Watertown’s Arsenal Mall since around 7th grade, I was saddened to see that I can no longer buy my checked shirts and skinny ties at Chess Kind. I can’t buy elaborate fark jokes at Spencer Gifts, either. Other than that, though, it felt very much the same.)
On the plus side, that gave me all day to listen to ‘EEI. (More on that later.) On the downside, that gave me all day to listen to ‘EEI. (More on that later too.)
Anyway, before I head out to Braintree, I wanted to answer some questions that have come up in your all’s comments. Without further ado…
“Seth: When you have a free moment after your whirwind tour of area bookstores, maybe you could weigh in on what Shaughnessy hinted at in his column today (maybe others have hinted at this, too); namely, that the JD Drew deal went down partly as a result of the Sox wanting to sweeten Boras up for the Dice-K deal. If so, does a spoonful of Dice-K make Drew more palatable, even to the doubters?”
— unsure_egoist
Certainly there’s been lots of speculation about this. As I’ve said before, I think the Drew signing was a good one (as do lots of other people, including SI‘s Tom Verducci, although I can’t find that item online). What’s more, signing one of Boras’s free agents with the expectation that that will help grease the way to signing another isn’t part of the Red Sox’s MO — making decisions regarding a player’s value and sticking to that* — and Boras certainly is not the type of agent who would give a team a break because of a deal he’d made with another one of his clients.
With that answer, I’ll anticipate a follow-up question: why the big contract when the Sox appeared to be bidding against themselves? The answer is I think that’s a simplistic way of looking at things: when you look at the type of free-agent contracts that have been handed out, take into consideration that there are basically no more impact bats available, and realize that there’s still more than three months until position players report for spring training, it seems like a team that makes a trade or two and begins to feel like they have a shot but also have some offensive holes will very likely want whomever they can get their hands on. (Who’s to say the Cubs won’t find another $100 million to throw around?) And, as I pointed out in a Dice-K post, that $14 mil contract actually ages pretty well…assuming Drew does, too.
* Two caveats: obviously there are incidents where part of the Red Sox’s thinking takes into consideration a player’s overall worth (and not just his on-field worth), resulting in a contract that might exceed what they think he’s worth in pure baseball terms. See: Varitek, Jason. Also, while I don’t think for a moment the Sox are overpaying some Boras clients to have a better shot at landing others, the Sox, despite it all, have been able to craft an ongoing working relationship with Boras.
***
Speaking of Boras and his relationship with the Sox’s front office…
“but i guess i’m a little confused as to why. why wouldn’t boras take the yanks offer [to Damon] back to the sox to see if they’d beat it? was it the time pressure? were the yanks johnny’s real first choice?”
— amos
There are a couple of theories I get into in varying levels of detail in the book. (And if you anticipated this, you guessed right: Signed copies available at a store near you! Personalized, inscribed bookplates too! Have I mentioned it makes a great holiday gift?) So briefly: there’s a chance Johnny, for whatever reason — the slammin’ nightlife, Michelle thinking she could be a celebrity on a bigger stage, whatever — actually wanted to go to New York. (It’s true: sometimes players want to leave Boston.) There’s also a chance — and I personally think this is more likely — that Boras wanted to prove he could take one of the most popular players on the most popular team in Red Sox history and have him jump ship to the Yankees; if he can get the two richest teams in baseball to bid against each other’s free agents, that’s only going to raise salaries.
***
shawn.orourke wants to know if there’s any chance Wily Mo will be used as trade bait. Sure, there’s a definite chance. The Sox need a closer, they have (a bit) of a surplus in the outfield, and WMP would, you’d imagine, get decent value in return. With the obvious exceptions of this year’s new signings, the only people who are really untouchable are Schilling, Papi, Papelbon, and Tek, so it’s possible that anyone could get traded. One of the reasons this front office has been so determined to be frugal about trading away their prospects/young players is so they have those players available if and when they have a hole that needs to be filled. It’s the same thing with the pitchers – MDC, Hansen, et al. — is so they have a surplus of young arms when there’s a need for that last puzzle piece. From a personal standpoint, I hope they don’t trade Wily Mo; he’s one of those players that’s simply fun to watch, and as Bill James once told me, that’s sometimes as good a reason to keep a player around as any. But I’d bet his name has come up in discussions. (Speaking of pitchers, yesterday’s bullpen pickups — Donnelley and Romero — mean it’s even more likely there’s more action on the way with the team’s pitching staff.)
***
Finally, michaelmc and dbvader are having a debate over whether J.D. Drew’s history shows he’s a chronic injury risk or a player who has gotten over the bulk of his physical problems. The answer, I think, is a little of both. If you go to the link for the graphic titled “Drew’s been hurtin’ for certain” in this Nick Cafardo piece, you’ll see a somewhat frightening run-down of Drew’s medical history. However, if you take a look at the last three years, pretty much every “injury” has been more along the times of a couple of days off for some normal wear and tear: with the exception of a broken wrist bone that resulted from getting nailed with a pitch, Drew’s time off since the start of the ’04 season has been limited to three games (stiff neck), five games (hamstring), three games (quad), and five games (knee). That doesn’t worry me too much; unlike, say, Nomar or Trot, those three years look pretty normal to me…
Post Categories: 2006 Playoffs & Dan Shaughnessy & J.D. Drew & Johnny Damon & Q&A time & Scott Boras & Wily Mo Pena
December 15th, 2006 → 1:04 am @ Seth Mnookin
You wanted to know who won that game of chicken? Anyone who saw Theo’s post-press conference live shot with Tina Cervasio knows damn well who won it: the Red Sox. Theo, et al., were driving to the tarmac and getting ready to fly back to Boston sans Matsuzakasan (you know: calling Boras’s bluff) when Boras rang and said, ‘Well, yeah, all right, I guess we will be on that plane after all.’
(Apparently, Buster Olney agrees.)
Post Categories: 2006 Hot Stove Season & Daisuke Matsuzaka & Red Sox front office & Scott Boras & Theo Epstein
December 15th, 2006 → 12:54 am @ Seth Mnookin
No scheduled in-store appearances today, but at some point during the day I promised I’d get to the following stores to sign all of their stock, which, in most cases, is at least a couple of dozen copies…so they should be okay. For a couple of days, anyway. (No, no, for longer than that. Just head over there. You’ll be fine.)
Barnes & Noble
Brookline
325 Harvard Street
B. Dalton
Watertown
The Arsenal
Barnes & Noble
Chestnut Hill
170 Boylston St.
Barnes & Noble
Braintree
150 Granite St.
B. Dalton
Braintree
South Shore Plaza (250 Granite St.)
Borders
Braintree
255 Grossman Drive
As sensitive and empathic as I am, I’m not able to actually predict to whom you’ll want me to sign these books, so…pick up an actual signed copy and then email and ask me for one of those cool little bookplate thingies. Then you’ll have both. And you’ll be so wicked loved.
Post Categories: Feeding the Monster signed copies
