Thursday, June 11, 2009

THE BASEMENT TAPES.

When we were watching the game last night, we noticed that JC Romero had something written in red on the underside of his cap. We started making jokes about it: was it lipstick? nail polish? did it say ‘I don’t suck’? I was going to Twitter some of the funnier ones, but then stopped, because I didn’t want someone to take it out of context and have it become a thing. (No, we didn’t seriously think that there was something on the underside of his hat that was influencing his pitches, but crabby fans of the opposing team sometimes might look for things to occupy their minds while their team gives up a perfectly good 4-run lead.)

Which brings me to Jerod Morris. A lot of you may not know who he is. He’s a blogger who wrote a long analysis of Raul Ibanez, which somehow got picked up by the mainstream media and turned into a crucible of condemnation, because Jerod was trying to prove that Ibanez’ numbers could be explained. At the end of it, he felt the need to mention that he could not definitively rule out PED’s.

I had written something about this last night, and then deleted it, because I thought it was getting silly, but then this morning Joe Posnanski wrote what is almost the definitive post on the subject. I say “almost” because I think Joe leaves one thing out.

If Jerod was just another guy sitting in his underwear in his mother’s basement, why did anyone give his blog post the time of day? That’s what I don’t understand.

Jerod didn’t just write a post that said “I think Raul Ibanez is using steroids!!1111!” and leave it at that. He did some fairly in-depth research and analysis. He may have been off the mark, but you learn about how to do research and analysis by doing it, not by reading about it and thinking about it. Joe, unlike most people writing about Jerod, actually takes the time to point out what he missed in that research and analysis. Joe, unlike most people writing about Jerod, also points out that plenty of people who get paid to write about baseball (and aren’t sitting in a basement anywhere) were whispering about Ibanez and PED’s amongst themselves. And Joe, unlike most people writing about Jerod, also points out that Jerod was trying to defend Ibanez, not excoriate him.

So, again: if Jerod ‘s logic and research was so far out of line as to be completely unfounded and specious, why did anyone write about it? Why did Ibanez respond to it? Why did the Phillies PR team allow him to respond to it? Why didn’t everyone in the mainstream sports media just plain old ignore Jerod’s article? If they had done that, it wouldn’t have gotten the time of day from anyone, except a few of Jerod’s friends, and a handful of Phillies Phans who have a Google News alert set up to email them about anything posted anywhere on the internets about their team.

I think that the only reason that didn’t happen is that people in the mainstream media had been thinking what Jerod was thinking - that one paragraph at the end of a long, thoughtful analysis - but they couldn’t say it because it would damage their relationship with the Phillies or MLB. So they point to a blogger and say, “Look what he said!!” and then sit back and watch.  Or they couldn’t come up with anything original to write about and decided to go find something incendiary to increase their page views. Either the information has veracity or it doesn’t. Either the writer has veracity or they don’t. If it’s sound, then you can’t fall behind the “guy in the basement” bullshit. If it isn’t, then why is anyone wasting their time?

The one thing we keep hearing in this whole kerfuffle is that bloggers have no credibility and no ethics and are, again, sitting in a basement scratching themselves. Well, then, why did you go out of your way to point to what that unwashed, unworthy blogger said? How does that make any sense?

I don’t think that any subject is off-limit to someone because they’re a “blogger” or they post on the internet or don’t get paid for what they do. I think that the quality of the information and the writing should dictate what happens to information. Good writing and good blogging will rise to the top, the rest will get ignored or quickly forgotten. That’s what should have happened here.

Then again, maybe it did.