This column is dedicated to readers of The New York Times. It is designed to correct the mistakes in its baseball coverage that the Times refuses to correct and disabuse the readers of the false notions the once but no longer great newspaper creates with its baseball coverage.
The column will only further aggravate, perhaps enrage, Times editors, who are sensitive to and resent criticism. It’s okay for the newspaper to criticize owners, coaches, managers and players, but don’t dare criticize the critics.
Readers who are baseball fans feel the Times deserves criticism for the severe reduction in the quality and quantity of its baseball coverage – soccer, rugby and cricket seem to appeal to the editors more than baseball – but that’s for another column. This one will deal with the misleading mistakes the Times makes in its baseball coverage and the failure to correct those mistakes so its readers are not left with misimpressions.
I’ll start with a simple one. Tyler Kepner, the Times’ so-called national baseball writer, referred to Manny Machado as “a successor to Ripken as the Orioles’ shortstop.” Cal Ripken Jr. was the Baltimore Orioles’ shortstop earlier in his career, but at no time in Machado’s career has he been the Orioles’ shortstop.
In an e-mail I pointed out to Kepner that Machado was the Orioles’ third baseman, not shortstop, but he never corrected it, instead replying with a flippant crack about a typo in my e-mail.
Last Saturday David Waldstein demonstrated once again his lack of knowledge of the rules of free agency. This is the 40th year of free agency, and that should be enough time for the Times’ baseball writers and editors to have learned the basic rule of the free-agent process, beginning with the step in which eligible players can become free agents the day after the World Series ends.
Daniel Murphy, the Mets’ second baseman, was among 139 players who filed for free agency Nov. 2, the day after the World Series ended. These players, the union said in a news release that day, were free agents, “eligible to negotiate and sign with any club beginning at 12:01 a.m. ET on Saturday, Nov. 7.”
However, in the Nov. 7 Times, Waldstein wrote that the Mets had made Murphy a $15.8 million offer that qualified them to receive a draft choice as compensation if he were to “decide to become a free agent” by rejecting the offer and signing with another team.
The Times has made this same mistake before and has made it again because it didn’t correct it the first time. Here is another mistake Waldstein made on free agency that the Times didn’t correct.
When Curtis Granderson was a free agent two years ago, Waldstein wrote, “If Curtis Granderson accepts the Yankees qualifying offer of $14.1 million the Yankees outfield for next season would be set, unless they turn around and trade him in the off-season.”
Under the rules, though, a club that signs a free agent may not trade or sell the player “prior to the next June 16” unless he consents to the deal. The Times didn’t correct that error either.
The Times has contributed to other mistakes by not correcting errors. One of its columnists recently made a mistake, and it was repeated only days later because it didn’t correct it correctly the first time.
On Oct. 27 Michael Powell wrote in his Sports of the Times column on minority hiring, “Baseball does singularity well. It has a single black team C.E.O. …”
I pointed out that baseball had no black C.E.O. A Nov. 2 correction said there was no black C.E.O. but there was a black team president. I pointed out that was wrong, too. Major League Baseball has no black team president. The correction needed a correction. It has not been corrected.
When Billy Witz repeated the latter mistake in a subsequent article, I asked him who the black team president was. He replied Michael Hill of the Miami Marlins. I told him Hill was president of baseball operations which is very different from team president. David Samson, who is white, is the Marlins’ team president.
None of that apparently mattered to the Times. I wrote an e-mail to the sports editor and the baseball editor, but neither acknowledged it. Jason Stallman and Jay Schreiber never reply or respond to e-mail from me. No correction has been forthcoming on the black president mistake even though the Times has corrected other mistakes.
I have concluded that Stallman and Schreiber have placed my e-mail address on their spam lists. They apparently think I am playing a game of “gotcha,” but that would be their shortsighted view of reality. As a Times reporter and columnist for four decades, I put accuracy at the top of my list of what was important. It still is.
I have tried repeatedly to get editors to correct mistakes, sending e-mail to the editors in sports, the chief correction editor, even the public editor. My e-mail efforts have only earned me their enmity.
Just this week, I sent this e-mail to Stallman, the sports editor, and Schreiber, the baseball editor:
“Though you may think otherwise, my interest in having these mistakes corrected is so Times readers will get accurate information, especially in an area that is as sensitive and controversial as black hiring in baseball. I spent four decades trying to get it right for Times readers and when I got it wrong I readily acknowledged it and made it right.
I am writing a column on the Times’ inconsistency in correcting errors in baseball pieces that will be posted Thursday morning. I will be happy to include comment from you or Jay on the subject. Thank you.”
I received no reply, and no correction about the one black team president appeared on page 2 of the paper. This correction, on the other hand, did:
“An article in some editions on Sunday about Clemson’s 23-13 football victory over Florida State misstated the number of yards Florida State running back Dalvin Cook gained in the game. It was 194, not 198.”
I can understand the Times’ obsessive desire to get names correct, even if someone’s last name has two l’s and the paper makes it one. But why does the Times find it necessary to correct Dalvin Cook’s rushing yards from 198 to 194 but not one black president to no black presidents? Or why not correct both?
None of this should surprise me. The Times’ refusal to correct an error of historic importance in a baseball piece first caught my attention in July 2011, and the Times never did correct its error.
It was in a Richard Sandomir column about an HBO documentary about Curt Flood. Sandomir attributed the creation of baseball’s free agency to Flood’s failed lawsuit against Major League Baseball, Catfish Hunter’s breach of contract lawsuit against Oakland owner Charlie Finley and the Messersmith-McNally grievance against the clubs.
One-for-three might be a good average for a hitter but not for history. It took me more than two years to convince someone – it was the then new sports editor, Stallman – that the Flood and Hunter cases did not create free agency. He asked me to write a piece about the subject, but I couldn’t say it was meant to correct a Times article.
En route to that juncture, however, I encountered some of the dumbest thinking I have ever known at the Times. In the interest of not belaboring the point, I will cite only two examples of the Times’ thinking on refusing to run a correction.
This one was from Greg Brock, the head of the corrections desk, commenting on Sandomir’s linking the Hunter breach-of-contract grievance to free agency:
“If the Catfish Hunter case is one of these queries, you should go ahead and take that up with the public editor. I spent an enormous amount of time — too much — on that one. I talked to about 8 editors. We do not think that is correctable. That is the final decision and we’re not going to debate it and discuss it further. So there is no point in sending me back a lengthy rebuttal. Again, you can appeal to the public editor.”
The response stunned me. Eight or nine Times editors, who very likely didn’t have a clue what the Hunter case was about, decided that Sandomir’s version was right and did not have to be corrected.
But I took Brock’s suggestion and proceeded to the public editor, who at the time was Arthur Brisbane. He asked me if I could cite several books that treated the issue objectively. I gave him the titles and authors of four to six books, but I went one better.
After checking with Marvin Miller, the master of free agency, who said he would be delighted to talk to the editor, I gave Brisbane Miller’s phone number. I felt that was like putting someone who was writing about the Declaration of Independence in direct contact with Thomas Jefferson. That would certainly settle the matter, right?
Wrong. Brisbane never called Miller. Nor did he do anything about the Times’ revising baseball history.