The Drubbing

A fellow blogger over at Midwest Sports Fans has been taking some heat this week for a piece he wrote on Raul Ibanez. The article titled “The Curious Case of Raul Ibanez: Steroid Speculation Perhaps Unfair, but Great Start in 2009 Raising Eyebrows” is from my point of view, a pretty even-handed piece, that actually searched for reasons other than PED’s that could be attributed to Ibanez’ early-season success at the ripe age of 37, and didn’t actually come to any conclusions. As should be expected, he was subsequently blasted by baseball fans and sports writers around the globe.

It’s important to note that soon after this article came out, Raul Ibanez was understandably outraged and denied having ever used PED’s, which he has stated over and over again for years, without any evidence to the contrary leveled against him.

The first came from a piece on Philly.com that played both sides of the fence. At times the writer, John Gonzalez, blasted the author on MSF, Jerod Morris, calling his piece an “updated version of the ‘Hey, pal, have you stopped beating your wife yet?’ trick.” And then turned around and says things like “I’m no apologist for Major League Baseball or the players who chose a quick way to get better and forever tarnished their sport as a result.” Well which one is it John? I think the most telling statement is when Gonzalez takes less than respectful jabs at Morris by calling him a “previously undiscovered poet”.

Ineveitably, the next place for this discussion to go is main-stream. So Morris, Gonzalez and baseball writer Ken Rosenthal appeared together on ESPN’s Outside The Lines for a good ol’ fashioned back ally mugging of Jerod Morris.

After watching the interview I was all full of piss & vinegar after watching the old-school print media writers, Gonzalez and Rosenthal go after Morris. Print journalists have been hating on the online writers since the dawn of the internet age. They’ve never considered them or their work legitimate and this disdain spans the range of publications. But a thoughtful, researched open-ended piece was published by the seemingly anonymous Midwest Sports Fans website, the print journalist have no choice but to go out and fire back at the legitimacy of the writer, the site’s credibility, and how irresponsible his actions were.

Left to right: Blogger in basement, young whippersnapper trying to make a name for himself, old-school tightwad hating on everyone

Also interesting to note that Bill Simmons has already written this article. He’s already mentioned  players by name in the same sentence as PED’s. The only differences are that Simmons didn’t systematically and statistically try to disprove that the players he named belonged under suspicion. Simmons is also a big-time player in the sports media. Far bigger than Gonzalez or Rosenthal will probably ever be. Not surprisingly, those cowards went after the little blogger whose probably writing from his grandmother’s basement.

Gonzalez even comes out in his original article and claims that in fact he’s “I’m not a blog hater. I’m not an old-school newspaper guy who fears the Internet the way children fear what’s under their bed.” Ironically, he backs those statements up with nothing, and the fact that he feels the need to defend himself before being accused of anything makes him look awfully suspicious.

As much as he deserves the blasting he got for his conduct on Outside the Lines, I do have to give Rosenthal some credit though. From day one the criticism of Morris and MSF reeked of hypocrisy of the still ongoing Barry Bonds scandal. Where fans and writers have been able to shout whatever they want, whenever they want, accusing Bonds without a thread of evidence. Rosenthal hasn’t been a fan of this sort of thing for a while now. In an interview with The Biz of Baseball back in 2007 Rosenthal said,

…it astounds and troubles me that some journalists now speculate in print about potential users in a way that would have been frowned upon only a few years ago. I think it’s wrong. I’m bothered by the many leaks of confidential information – the BALCO grand-jury testimony, Bonds’ positive test for amphetamines. It reeks of McCarthyism. Of course, as journalists, Lance and Mark did exactly what they were supposed to do; leaking grand-jury testimony is against the law, printing the information is not.

To Ken and all of the other print writers and fans, here’s the difference. Morris didn’t speculate on anything. He simply wrote what every single baseball fan faced with Ibanez stats and age would be thinking. So stop trying to blame Morris for this horrible injustice. Start channeling your outrage to Major League Baseball, because they’re the people that have done this to the game you love. And they’re the people that still refuse to fix the problems and repair it’s reputation.

There’s a long line of other players whose numbers and age lends to this sort of speculation, but I don’t want to get unreasonably hated on because I mention them in name. But Ken, can we take your outrage to mean that you now consider bloggers like Morris to be legitimate “journalists”? On second thought, maybe I will name some speculative names. I could use the publicity.