Under normal circumstances I’d prefer to fixate on Jose Guillen concluding KC’s weekend series in the Bronx by taking Mariano Rivera deep for a game-winner, but there’s nothing normal about the following item from NoMaas.org or the accusation contained within.

In one of his first draft blog entries, NoMaas minor league correspondent Lane Meyer received the following comment from a user named “Interested Reader”:

Interested reader Says:

June 4th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
No offense, œLane but you won™t even use your real first name on the information you provide. Yet you are presented as some sort of expert.

What credentials do you have?

It™s hard to trust anything on the internet, much less from somebody who™s pretending he™s a character in a cheesy movie. (Source)

And then a few entries later, Lane Meyer received another comment from “Interested Reader”:

Interested reader Says:

June 5th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Schooled by LoHud. Ha. (Source)

These comments sounded a little suspicious to us, so we decided to do a little bit of research. We cross-referenced the IP address used by “Interested Reader” with the IP addresses of posters on our message board (accounts are email address verified). And wouldn’t you know, our CSI:NoMaas team found a match. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the Journal News’ Peter Abraham.

We just find it highly amusing that a Yankees beat writer is fixated on a site run by a small group of fans with full-time jobs and who run NoMaas as a hobby. It’s also odd for Peter to critique our anonymity, but then post inflammatory comments under an alias.

Strangely, NoMaas hasn’t considered the possibility the comments they’ve credited to Abraham (above) were instead composed by someone else with access to the scribe’s computer. Or that the acclaimed Yankees beat writer might be a victim of that identity theft phenomena we’ve read so much about.

In any event, this is a watershed moment for NoMaas. Not only have they successfully smeared taken down a respected member of the mainstream media without granting him the courtesy of a reply, but said efforts are in stark contrast to recent news accounts of blogger burnout. Seriously, anyone who receives so few angry comments that they can take the time to cross-reference the individual I.P. addresses of such correspondents is living a pretty charmed life.

(UPDATE : Mr. Abraham writes, “As I informed NoMaas, it wasn’t me. It was somebody impersonating me. It’s happened on a few Yankees blogs. I think it’s somebody who was banned from my blog for posting assorted obscene words.”

As of noon central time Tuesday, No Maas has yet to post a retraction or an apology. Pete might well feel I should’ve quizzed him about this before running something, and that’s a fair gripe. He’s hardly inacessable. In this instance, however, I found No Maas’ efforts to “out” the Journal News writer as newsworthy if not more so than Abraham’s alleged anonymous comments.

I don’t know if a screen shot of the IP address in question would actually clear anything up — it’s not as though you can’t fake that, either. I can, however, say it is hardly unheard of someone to be impersonated in message board/comment land — it happened repeatedly on CSTB to one of this blog’s own contributors. Tracing the IP addresses, however, was useful in proving the blogger in question was being pranked).