I Don't Want To Speculate, But...

Tim Marchman, who's writing I truly enjoy, put up an... interesting post last night. Apparently there's another list of the supposed positive tests from 2003 floating around, and Tim, a respected mainstream journalist linked to it.

He goes out of his way to say that he's not "passing any judgment on whether the list is accurate or not" and adds parenthetically:

Maybe some time when I'm about to stick my head in an oven I'll cobble up a 2,000 word post on journalistic ethics and the 'it's out there' principle, but I think for now it's enough to say it's out there.

And by "out there", he means that it was proudly displayed on RotoInfo.com. Not exactly on Deadspin, you know?

I didn't go to journalism school, and I know it's just his blog, but when you link to something, you are giving it a new audience. And when you say things like...

A thorough but not comprehensive spot check reveals that these players all seem to have been in the majors in 2003, for instance, and if it's fake someone did some real work on it. I note, as an example, that in one of the multiple similar but not identical versions floating around one player is listed twice, in among two different teams he played for that year. That's detail. (Or really shoddy work, of course!) This also is not the fake list that got out the morning the Mitchell report was released, by the way—that's here and is entirely different.

...it sounds like you are trying to give it some credibility.

Marchman also wonders aloud:

Should this list or something reasonably close prove real—and there are some names on it that would genuinely shock and even disappoint me, which is saying something—it would be a good thing for baseball.

He spends the rest of the post, dare I say, speculating what it would mean for baseball if this list turned out to be accurate.

Here's what Marchman said about the whole Jerrod Morris/Raul Ibanez/John Gonzalez/Ken Rosenthal fiasco when it came up:

I should really add that as far as I can tell, 99.9999% of the time when you see professional journos talking about 'controversy' that's arisen because some random guy no one reads has said something, it's a backdoor way of bringing up something they don't think they're allowed to bring up but think is worth talking about.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this doesn't fall into the other .0001%.