Game 106: Wasted Words

After the off day and the shift in the rotation, it will be Andy Pettitte on the mound for the Yankees tonight up in the Rogers Centre. Pettitte has a solid run over his past three starts, even though he's taken two no-decisions and a loss. He's thrown 20 innings, given up 16 hits, struck out 23 and walked only 3. His ERA over that span has been 2.70 and as the fine fellows at The Yankee Universe note, his FIP is only 1.86. They attribute some of Pettitte's success over that span to the fact that he's been throwing to Jose Molina, but that won't be the case tonight as Jorge Posada will be doing the catching.

This is the first time the Yanks have played the Blue Jays since the trade rumors about Roy Halladay started swirling. The two teams had just wrapped up a four game series which the Yankees won 3 of when Ken Rosenthal wrote that article on July 7th. One of those contests took place on the 4th of July, when the Yankees scored 5 runs off of Halladay and won in extra innings (in what might be the last game started by Chien Ming Wang as a Yankee, no less). Despite the successful outcome that day, I think most Yanks fans were either excited about the slim chance of acquiring Halladay or at least the possibility that he would be gone from the AL East.

Hundreds of blog posts and columns were devoted to the subject and it generated literally millions of pageviews for sites like MLBTradeRumors.com, but in the end we're right back where we started. Halladay was not "a goner" like Rosenthal assured us and the process did stop even though Lil' Ken claimed it was "nearly impossible" for it to. (Props to Craig from Shysterball who never bought it to begin with.)

Great job, Ken. Think of all the time, thought and writing that was wasted as a result of your breathless speculation. Next time a General Manager says he's "leaning more towards listening", why don't you try not blow blow it completely out of proportion? It would save us all some time.

You seem really sure 'bout something I don't know,
Take that load off, looks like chests about to go.
Your wasted words so absurd,

Are you really Satan, yes or no?

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%.