When your average WFAN midday caller assails Selena Roberts’ use of anonymous sources in the recently released “A-Rod : The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez“, I tend to figure, hey, maybe those guys aren’t aware this is how journalism works sometimes. If relying on anonymous sources wasn’t an established practice, Richard Nixon might’ve served a full second term. Former New York Times columnist Murray Chass admits, “having used (anonymous sources) frequently in my decades as a reporter and columnist, I am aware of the problems they pose.” And yet, he has no qualms about trashing Roberts’ tome as “a journalistic abomination.”
Roberts and I were once colleagues at The New York Times, and she didn™t strike me as being a top-flight reporter. As a result, I don™t feel I can trust her book full of anonymous sources. Even if every single A-Rod transgression she reports is accurate, it™s too easy for her to write one former teammate said this and another player said that.
Had she written these same reports for the Times, very little would have made it into the paper. I™m not familiar with Sports Illustrated™s standards, but I hope they™re higher than the Roberts book offers. Actually, if you remove the quotes and other information that Roberts attributes to anonymous sources in the 246-page book, it might be left with 46 pages.
I should also disclose that after Roberts became a columnist for the Times I found her baseball columns to be shallow and superficial, and she demonstrates her lack of baseball knowledge in the book.
Roberts belies her understanding of baseball with an observation she makes in trying to offer an example of A-Rod on steroids. Citing the game in August 2002 in which he hit three home runs, she writes that his œperformance set off the steroid alarms, explaining, œIn the dog days of the season, when players are wilting, A-Rod had fresh legs and a fresher bat.
And she quotes an unnamed œRanger teammate as saying, œIt™s that stuff that makes you say no (bleeping) way.
No way? Both Roberts and the teammate should consult The Elias Book of Baseball Records, pages 359 through 362. The list of players who hit three or more home runs shows that 76 players other than Rodriguez hit three or more home runs in August.
And one of those players was probably Manny Ramirez.
Bang! Zoom!
Hey, now we know 76 other players who were juicin’ it up that year! Thanks, Elias! Thanks, Chass!
But seriously ladies and germs….while I think Selena is at best a very average reporter/writer, if Chass’s best argument is “I can be trusted using anonymous sources, she can’t,” then it’s no wonder his current job is blabbin’ on his blog. At least Harper paid her in actual American dollars for her work.
While I don’t trust Murray Backne’s word much myself, his last graf is dead-on. I don’t like A-Rod, but the Federal govt’s involvement in confiscating the MLB tests makes a lot of this unsettling. Roberts busting Rodriguez and her book deal are (possibly) linked to illegal govt confiscation of private medical info. Anonymous sources are necessary evils, but I’ll take A-rod’s lies over that kind of abuse any day. I mean, the illegal search and seizure aspect of getting the records, not govt employees as whistle blowers.
Ben
Chass is just the worst. I guess he was probably this curdled and nasty when he was at the Times, too, but he really has become a top-flight troll since taking to the blogging thing.
And Ben’s absolutely right, of course. The more everyone else cares about this stuff — the more loudly, the more exaggeratedly — the less I care. I mean, the issue matters somewhat to me, in an abstract sense. But the need to know everyone, the guessing game of who-is/who-isn’t… I can come up with a great many things I’d rather do than have that conversation. Let alone have it with a backne-gossiping Chass.
“backne-gossiping Chass.”
I’m stating the obvious, but the backne gossip would have been somewhat valuable before Jose Canseco was a published author. I still don’t get how the slobs who cover MLB whiffed on the steroid era, yet my old high school football pals and I could spot a steroid user years before Mike Piazza’s complexion was a matter of public interest. Olympic athletes were testing positive for doping as far back as 1968. I’m not sure when pro wrestlers transformed into rippling freak shows from large human beings, but I’m sure someone noticed. More importantly, I recall coaches giving the steroid speech (secondary to the smokeless tobacco speech) at jv level. I was involved at the lowest level of competition 10 years ago, and knew ‘roids shrink nuts.