Earlier this week six baseball writers – active or once active – gathered for a farewell salute to one of the writers who is moving to Florida after a recent marriage. As we sat on the patio recalling old writers and old times, an idea struck me. I thought of three questions to ask everyone:
How many of us had ever tweeted?
How many had texted?
How many had taken selfies?
“How can I take selfies if I don’t have a cell phone?” the group’s eldest member asked.
“You have a cell phone,” someone said.
“But I don’t use it,” he retorted.
Neither had he tweeted nor texted. None of us had tweeted. One retired writer acknowledged having received and retrieved two text messages, “but I’ve never sent one,” he quickly added.
Dinosaurs all, and all proud of it.
We covered baseball in a different era when being a reporter meant doing something other than tapping out a sentence or two on a cell phone.
This is the era of trades by Twitter. As one who reported baseball news the old-fashioned way, I am saddened that it has come to this. The new generation and generations to come will not experience the fun and satisfaction of being a reporter. Being first with a tweet just won’t do it.
They call and will call themselves reporters, but they are and will really be tweeters. I doubt that I could find half a dozen tweeters who could do the job that the half dozen guys sitting on that patio did. Reporting requires gathering pertinent information and using it to write a comprehensive story. It requires more than 140 characters.
The substance of the reports of today’s “reporters” has taken second place to speed. When I was a reporter for the Associated Press decades ago, speed counted, but we couldn’t just be fast; we had to be right.
In the Twitter era, it seems as though it doesn’t matter if you’re right. Being first with a trade or a free-agent signing is what counts. If a reporter is first to report a trade but has it wrong, he can always delete the tweet or send another tweet, saying “oops.”
The error of tweeters’ ways is what prompted this column. A couple of days before the non-waiver trading deadline last week, tweeters reported a trade between the New York Mets and the Milwaukee Brewers. Outfielder Carlos Gomez had been traded to the New York Mets, the tweeting reporters announced, for disabled pitcher Zack Wheeler and infielder Wilmer Flores.
The teams, though, had not announced the trade and never did. The Mets balked at taking Gomez, saying their doctors had found that he had a hip problem. No one else found that problem, not the Brewers, not his agent, Scott Boras, not the Houston Astros, who traded for him after the Mets passed.
The premature report affected Flores in an unusual way. Because of social media, the false news spread quickly and widely. Flores learned about it during the Mets’ game with San Diego and at one point stood on the field at his shortstop position noticeably crying at the thought of leaving the Mets.
By reporting the trade prematurely, the tweeting press corps, in such a hurry to get the news out and be No. 1 with it, ignored a basic part of the trade, the last part: the requirement of the traded players to pass the medical test.
In the off-season a free agent needs to pass a physical before the deal is official. During the season a traded player can’t take a physical exam, but the teams trade medical reports and have to be completely open and honest in doing it. There are penalties to be paid for omitting anything significant.
Writing about the off-track Twitter reports, Ken Rosenthal said on FOXSports.com, “Not all reports included a reference to ‘pending medicals.’ Even the ones that did left the impression that the deal was fait accompli. Many followers interpreted the deal as done, if only because such deals almost always get done.”
Rosenthal, who probably is baseball’s Twitter king, added, “Twitter provides the opportunity for journalists to give almost a minute-by-minute account of events as they transpire.”
I have long respected Rosenthal for his work, since before he began tweeting, but I disagree with him on two points. I wouldn’t call tweeters journalists, and there’s no need to provide minute-by-minute accounts because that’s when tweeters get in trouble. Trade talks and free-agent negotiations can change by the minute, and by the time a tweeter tweets a development he has learned, it can be three developments old.
It reminds me of Pete Rose’s free agency in 1978. In a matter of hours on the same day, from about late morning to late afternoon, Milton Richman of United Press International, a good baseball reporter, had Rose signing with three different teams, actually running three different stories on the UPI wire. The third was Philadelphia, which was the right one.
What a day that would have been had Twitter existed then. Richman would have had tweeters wearing out their thumbs.
An event 20 years later had an impact on the Gomez tweets and Mets’ failure to acquire him. In December 1998 the Baltimore Orioles signed a free agent pitcher, Xavier Hernandez, to a two-year, $2.5 million contract. Frank Wren, the Orioles’ general manager, did not require Hernandez to have a pre-signing physical.
Subsequent to the signing, Hernandez did have a physical and was found to have a partially torn rotator cuff. The belated discovery did not please Peter Angelos, the Orioles’ owner. He wanted to cancel the contract, but Hernandez filed a grievance, and they settled for $1.75 million. Hernandez never pitched for the Orioles or anyone else.
Wren wound up paying the price as Angelos used that incident and others to fire Wren at the end of the 1999 season with two years left on his contract.
The Hernandez experience created a mandatory new practice throughout baseball. A club could not sign a player without his taking a physical. In many instances, clubs don’t acknowledge an agreement without the completion of a physical. Sometimes a club will announce it has agreed to contract terms pending a physical.
In January 2006 the Orioles reached agreement with Jeromy Burnitz on a two-year, $12 million deal, but the outfielder’s agent, Howard Simon, balked at language about a physical in a letter of agreement the club sent him.
The language, Simon said, gave the Orioles too much latitude for killing the deal after other teams interested in Burnitz had signed other players.
When he couldn’t negotiate a change in the language and before Burnitz took the obligatory physical, Simon rejected the Orioles’ deal and went elsewhere, gaining a one-year, $6.7 million contract with Pittsburgh, which included a mutual option for a second year that would raise the value of the contract to the same $12 million Burnitz would have had with Baltimore.
In another episode about a year later the Orioles reached agreement with Aaron Sele on a three-year, $21 million contract. A physical preceded the announcement of the deal, and the Orioles’ doctors were concerned about the pitcher’s labrum. They said he had only 400 innings left in it, and Angelos wanted to reduce the contract to two years.
Was the concern legitimate, or was it Angelos’s way of reducing the value of the contract? Whatever the owner’s reason, Sele signed instead with Seattle for two years and $15 million. In those two years, he posted records of 17-10 in 212 innings and 15-5 in 215 innings.
In six more major league seasons Sele never pitched as well as he did in those two seasons in Seattle, but contrary to the prognosis of the Orioles’ doctors, according to Angelos, that is, Sele pitched an additional 1,113 innings.
In an interview at the time of the Burnitz episode, Wren told me, “That’s how Peter plays general manager. He uses medical reasons to kill or change a deal if he doesn’t like it.”
Angelos doesn’t like the title general manager either, but that’s another story.