Baseballhead:
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Michael Cox

Whassuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup? (You're right. It's not nearly as funny in print.) Welcome again to Baseballhead, coming to you from what appears to be the only city without a ballplayer who is introduced at the ballpark with "Crazy Train."

Those crickets chirping you heard this week was the sound of baseball writers wracking their brains for a new story idea now that "Are the Royals For Real?" won't fly. I would like to commend the fine staff here at Strikethree.com for not succumbing to the urge to leap on that particular rickety bandwagon.

It is with that spirit that I look forward to this week's flood of "Are the White Sox For Real?" stories.

In last week's Baseballhead, I went on at length regarding the media's disinterest in fact-checking, most recently in the Bobby Valentine "incident." What I found interesting is the fact that nobody apologized for running uncorroborated, unsubstantiated and outright fraudulent information as "news."

I can understand them not apologizing to Bobby V., mind you, considering the feud they seem to have with the Mets' manager. The problem is their failure to come clean to the readers they duped.

In fact, using some Bizarro-world logic, ESPN's new senior editor responded by blaming the entire fiasco on Valentine. After all, if Bobby wasn't all mean and evil like that, people wouldn't print this stuff about him. I don't care if he's Satan in doubleknits (or even Huey Lewis), if you can't be bothered to check your facts or even to care that you got them wrong, you should consider a new career in vinyl siding sales.

Not that there's anything wrong with some well-placed fiction. Heck, I make stuff up myself from time to time, but at least when I do it you know it's made up.

The result of all this is that the writer in question has now lost all credibility. Whenever he uses an unnamed source, you don't know if it was a team official or a fourteen-year-old posting to the Yankees newsgroup from WebTV. It's interesting to note that Strikethree.com has a better track record of knowing when to take a news report seriously than ESPN does, yet they have approximately 10,345 times the budget we do.

Then again, Disney still owes Jeffrey Katzenberg about 300 kazillion dollars in severance pay, so they may have some different priorities.

Honorable mention for avoiding the credibility issue goes to this AP story, which avoids any mention whatsoever that the original information was in any way incorrect. And we'll put the whole issue to bed with this thought: Even if Valentine had said what it turns out he didn't say, he would have been 100% correct...

Even with Brad32 unmasking himself this week, Bobby V. still held the media's attention, this time through what the press called a "feud" with Cubs manager Don Baylor. However, this was not so much a "feud" as it was Baylor performing his rendition of Dana Carvey's "grumpy old man" character from Saturday Night Live.

After the Cubs dropped the series to the Mets this weekend, it looks like Baylor is now feuding with his own team. After all, he yelled louder at them than he ever did at Valentine.

Fortunately, the media could stop making up feuds and statements late this week, because they finally got a good, old-fashioned bench-clearing scrum to talk about. In fact, it's a good thing TV cameras were present, because as opposed to the usual random shoving that usually goes on, the White Sox-Royals skirmishes included actual hand-to-hand combat.

Emerging from the first of Saturday's double-header of fisticuffs were Sox pitcher Keith Foulke, whose left eye was bloodied, and Detroit manager Phil Garner, who apparently had been choked out by an overzealous Chicago player. All that was missing were folding chairs and a steel cage.

Now, I've always been the first to call the normal ballfield brouhaha a relatively harmless activity, but now players are losing respect not only for each other, but for the consequences to their team.

Let's face it -- it takes a real punk to sucker-punch someone in a mob. However, with all those cameras around you aren't exactly anonymous. Penalties are sure to be stiffer for hockey-style thugs like Karim Garcia and Bobby Higginson, who both punched Foulke, and for Dean Palmer, who was ejected after the first fight but ran back onto the field for the second brawl.

"You going to sit there and watch it?" Palmer said. "My team's out there battling, I'm going to be there." Palmer also wasn't thinking about the fact that he won't be there for several games as he serves his suspension, which hurts his team more than being outnumbered 25- to-24 would have Saturday night.

And with the Tigers' record, they can ill afford to lose any of these players for any length of time. They can't even use the strategy of appealing the suspensions until the players can serve them during series against a weaker opponent, because every one of the Tigers' opponents are better than they are.

Finally, best wishes for a speedy recovery go out to Nolan Ryan, who is recuperating after double-bypass surgery. Around here we choose to call that the "David Letterman" surgery, after the patient who has improved his career the most after recovery. And for the future, perhaps Ryan might think of switching from Advil to aspirin?

I'd like to close by thanking those of you who have offered to personally kick our asses if our new partnership with Rivals.com causes us to go all corporate. That kind of love makes me all verklempt...

about the author

Michael Cox recently found himself with empty pockets, having spent all his money on those pesky commissions that go along with day trading, and as such he's looking for some extra cashflow. Suggest personalized ballpark hotdog buns (slogan: "Your name spelled out in sesame seeds!") to mc@strikethree.com.

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