Police arrested the 18-year-old Ryan Leli Friday night at Shea just before the start of the New York Mets-Colorado Rockies game and charged him with impersonating a journalist, the Queens District Attorney announced Saturday.
Prosecutors say Leli told New York Mets management that he worked for NBC Universal and showed a fake NBC employee identification card so he could get press credentials.
Leli used the fake NBC identification again Friday to get another press pass for the Mets-Rockies game.
Mets management apparently became suspicious and contacted authorities.
My first reaction to this story was, “no way, Steve Cangialosi is way older than 18.”
Reaction number 2 : Clearly, this young man has not had the benefit of hearing Will Leitch explain for the 9th or 10th time this year that the press box is crammed with jaded, sports-hating creeps who have little or nothing to offer in the year 2006 (other than, y’know, providing bloggers, professional or otherwise, with a shitload of content).
(ADDENDUM : Does this ever happen in other cities?)
Yeah Will, beat writers don’t offer anything beyond what anyone who watched the game on TV could tell you, certainly nothing like this insightful gem:
http://deadspin.com/sports/mlb/this-is-rapidly-becoming-anticlimactic-195380.php
E –
I think we’re both probably in agreement that painting beat writers with the same brush is just plain lazy. There’s more than a handful who not only like their work and aren’t jerks 24-7, but come up with solid, newsworthy stuff that couldn’t possibly have been generated by some schmoe watching the game at home.
Some of them aren’t even members of your immediate family!
All of that said, it should be pointed out that the not-quite-mindblowing Deadspin entry you’ve linked to was not composed by Will Leitch.
My own impression is that while there are bloggers with little or nothing to say (and clearly, I’m working my way up from nothing to little) there are others whose choppity chops compare very favorably with many of their ink-stained rivals. Alex Belth and Jeff Kallman to name a pair.
But the print media hasn’t outlived it’s usefulness, either, and if Will encountered some grumpy guss Oscar Madison-types during his early days at the Springfield Shopper, I’m not surprised. Nobody likes to have their place of business stinking of Spicy Crunchwrap Supreme.