Knowing how this all went down, I felt myself that Pearlman’s piece was a bit disingenuous. Having spoken to both Andy and Matt they didn’t really apologize meekly as he claims, and Pearlman also fails to mention that he found them ranting by doing a namesearch on Twitter (not through replies to his handle) rather than direct contact.

Andy wrote up his side of the story today, which you can read here at his blog, Inside Mr Met’s Head.

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SI.com columnist Jeff Pearlman is receiving a lot of kudos from around the media today for a new piece he wrote for CNN.com.

Tracking down my online haters

Matthew is a college student from a small suburban town in Missouri. He loves the Kansas City Chiefs and spending Sundays in front of the TV watching football.

Recently, in response to something I wrote on my blog about Jeff Bagwell and the Baseball Hall of Fame, Matt tweeted me a couple of times.

The words were snarky and snide and rude. His final message, however, left an extra special impression: “I got caught up in the anonymity of the internet. I’m sorry and here is a legit post with my criticisms.” Upon opening the pasted link, I was greeted by a nasty pornographic image that would make Sasha Grey vomit into the nearest trash can.

The gist of the column is that Pearlman boldly confronted his online critics, shattering their veil of anonymity and showing them their place, before retreating into a self-congratulatory pat on the back and token call to ramp down the rhetoric. Of course those nerds sitting in their basement hurling insults in the dark would back down at the slightest hint of confrontation. This narrative of a wordsmith conquering internet mudslinging through the sheer civility and gumption could not possibly provide better catnip for journalists (writers who I respect a lot, like Keith Law and Rob Neyer, had favorable reactions). What actually happened to provoke the outbursts in question is a fair bit more complicated than Pearlman lets on.

This story goes back to late December, when Pearlman wrote a series of blog posts decrying Jeff Bagwell’s candidacy for the Baseball Hall of Fame. Here’s a sampling of how it all started off.

Joe blames some of us (and I’m among the us) for speculating that Jeff Bagwell cheating by using PED? Well, what the hell are we supposed to think? A. Have you seen the photographs of a young Jeff Bagwell, first as a prospect in the Boston system, then with the Astros as a pup? He looks, perhaps not coincidentally, like a young Jason Giambi; like a young Barry Bonds; like a young Sammy Sosa; like a young Bret Boone. I know … I know—people gain weight as they get older. And, hey, he lifted! And used natural, over-the-counter supplements! And … enough. I’ve heard enough. Seriously, look at the guy as an in-his-prime Astro. Dude looks like Randy (Macho Man) Savage. And while I can already hear the “Just because he had muscles atop muscles doesn’t mean anything” argument brewing, well, it does—in the context of a sport overrun by cheaters—mean something. In fact, it means a lot.

Pearlman’s argument boils down to the assertion that, in the absence of any direct evidence of Bagwell’s alleged PED usage, he will go ahead and assume Bagwell doped anyway because of circumstantial evidence. Fine writers and bloggers like Joe Posnanski have already done a wonderful job in addressing this argument, so there’s little point in rehashing and lifting their points here, but I think this reasoning is ridiculous to a fault. Not to the point where I would hurl insults, but if I regularly wrote about baseball I probably would have penned my own lengthy rebuttal.

After these posts started to garner a negative response, Jeff Pearlman started searching for his name on Twitter, which is how he first came in contact with one (distant) friend of mine quoted in the piece, who tweeted “jeff pearlman is a fucking retard” (a comment which was not directed at Pearlman’s account). While uncouth, I understand the impulse to take him to account, having ripped Selena Roberts earlier in the week for engaging in the same practice of hurling allegations without any thing resembling solid evidence.

Partial contrition or not, Jeff Pearlman comes out of this story looking worse for the wear, displaying far too thin a skin; especially when compared to the criticism that he regularly levels towards athletes in his work. His critics should not have crossed the line into incivility, and absolutely should not have tricked him into looking at a disgusting internet meme. However at the same time, it’s important to remember that Pearlman’s tormentors did not have a public forum until he gave them one.

They aren’t the professional journalists using media platforms for disparaging a player’s personal reputation. Before ripping these ne’re-do-wells too harshly, step back and consider which side is actually caused the most direct harm to concepts like civility or fairness. Jeff Pearlman is the real villain here, for helping to foster a poisonous discourse in the first place without regard for the same decency he now demands. If Pearlman really wants to strike a blow for intelligent discussion, then he should formally make his case and provide any solid evidence for his claims, or retract them and apologize to Bagwell.

For the sake of science I decided to try and not only get my cats to wear the ice cream helmets but to take pictures. Here are the results.

First off is Sonya who shoved herself in a dirty corner in the extra room to try and hide from me. She did not succeed and we managed to get a photo before she knocked the helmet off her head:

Sonya

Next up was the newest addition to our household, the chubby Miss Olive. She sat around for a while after the hat had been placed on her head before bucking it off, making her the easiest subject.

Olive

Last was Blue, who I did not manage to get the helmet on. He freaked out every time it got near his head, and this picture is the closest we got to him wearing the damn thing. We even tried distracting him with some cat treats and sneaking up on him while he was sleeping but neither worked.

Part of Blue, part of me, Chris' thumb or something and the helmet nowhere near Blue's head

I managed to not get maimed while doing this though Blue spazzing out did give me some minor scratches on my stomach and arms.

I’m working on distracting myself from being a crazy pessimist right now, so here’s a recap of the terribleness of these days both on and off the field.

Game 1 – June 1st vs Baltimore

I was supposed to attend this game with my mother, but I had to cancel at the last minute. Not because I had to stay late at work or because I wasn’t feeling well. No, I wish it was something only vaguely irritating like that  but sadly I had to put my cat who I loved more than just about anything and had since I was 9 to sleep two hours before I would have had to leave for the game. I didn’t exactly feel up to going and elected to mope around at home all night instead.

The Yankees did win this game 3-1 and Javier Vazquez allegedly pitched well (I didn’t watch) but it didn’t help me feel better.

Game 2 – August 18th vs Detroit

This game was never really in doubt thanks to Jeremy Bonderman being toast but with Dustin Moseley pitching it was an adventure. Miguel Cabrera hit two homeruns off him, which is not a shocking event but Moseley threw a curveball that hung for approximately three hours and Don Kelly smacked a homerun. Don Kelly hit a homerun!!!

I had to buy an overpriced stadium beer to recover mentally from that. What had I just seen? How was it possible?? I bought a beer for the friend I took to the game too because I felt it would have been irresponsible of me to allow him to attempt non-beer aided recovery.

Another more mild annoyance was the gentleman in the row in front of us wearing an astonishingly ugly Tigers hat. Here is a picture:

From Tigers vs Yankees 08-18-2010

Game 3 – September 23rd vs Tampa Bay

I woke up yesterday morning feeling like someone had hit me at least four times with a truck (and no, nosy people I was not hungover). I rolled out of bed, managed to call in sick to work and took some painkillers and drank a lot of nice relaxing tea. The painkillers didn’t work very well and the tea didn’t do its job either so at about 5pm I realized I would not be making the game in my state.

I was feeling so terrible, in fact, that my boyfriend went out and bought me a PS3. He is a very nice boyfriend and the PS3 was a nice distraction from watching CC Sabathia walk in runs or Joba Chamberlain give up a very hard hit ball to BJ Upton who has extreme problems doing that off of righthanded pitchers, especially ones as good as Joba.

I heard some rumors that Vazquez went all Daniel Cabrera on the Rays, but I haven’t actually checked. At least he had the decency to lose 5MPH or so off his fastball before plunking several batters in a row unlike DCab.

So yeah, 2010 was not a good year for me and $5 games but at least last night it was an act of mercy. Next time I would prefer to be stuck at work or something instead of feeling awful all day, though.

I don’t (usually) work crazy hours and I am (usually) not on call, but I do have a laptop that I often use to bring work back and forth between my office and my home. It’s not a work issued laptop, but it makes my life a lot easier. Working on one file instead of sending things all over the place and having several versions floating around is pretty helpful!

The Yankees, however, throw a wrench into my precious routine with their security guidelines that ban laptops. On days where I go to a game after work I have to make a decision whether to take my laptop to work and lock it in my desk or leave it at home.  Sure, there’s the bag check across the street but I am not comfortable leaving my laptop there and I am not willing to pay $10 to do so in any case. It’s a small, yet rather aggravating thing that bothers me enough times during the season that I feel the need to whine.

I know that it interferes with other people more than it does me, so I dedicate this whine to those of you out there who are glued to their laptops for work and sometimes like to take part of a night off for a game. May your laptops never be broken while behind the counter at a store on the other side of River Avenue.

Probably the worst thing about the ban beyond the impact it has on people is that nobody seems to have any real answers about why laptops are still on the Prohibited Items List. Even after loosening the formerly totally insane bag policy the team has not budged on laptops. In fact, they added iPads to The List for whatever mysterious reason (but the team didn’t actually make it known–someone found out when they were told they couldn’t bring it in and then another person verified it, etc).

There has been speculation that these bans are in place so that people don’t get distracted by any laptops or iPads in use. Frankly, this is stupid. There are a zillion things going on at a game at once. People standing up and sitting down, people yelling, roving vendors, video screens, aggravating people doing the wave, that random person a few rows away doing something weird and so on. I do not for a second believe that these two random items in use are any more distracting than the crazy loud HIP HIP!!! dudes 99% of the time.

And honestly if someone near you is doing something that is killing your enjoyment you can follow these simple steps (most of the time you can stop after Step 1 or 2):

1. Ask them, nicely, to cut it out.
2. Ask them, less nicely, to cut it out.
3. Nuclear option: Contact security.

Use your judgement, usually just repeating Step 1 a few times works.

The typical response to this seems to be:  ”Well you’re going to a baseball game, why do you even need your laptop?”

That’s just a sign that you’re not thinking about anything and just being an ignorant snob. Sorry if that sounded harsh, but if you take two seconds you can think it through pretty easily.

Here’s some reasons why people might bring their laptops to a baseball game that don’t involve using the laptop during a game:

• They have a job where they need to bring a laptop to and from work.
• Commuter student headed to a game after classes.
• They are going to a game after being somewhere where they had to bring their laptop.
• They are going to a game and afterwards have to go somewhere with their laptop.

Really, people, it’s not hard.

Plus, if someone wants to use a laptop at a game more power to them. There are legit baseball reasons like scoring apps to be using one, though I wouldn’t risk damaging mine by pulling it out at my seat. If they’re watching porn or something ridiculously violent then yeah that’s a problem, but it’s not a problem without a solution.

I’ve been told that you can actually get a laptop into Yankee Stadium these days because security doesn’t really spend a lot of time scrutinizing items. I’m not willing to risk this since I don’t want to check mine across the street in the event that I am busted. But if security isn’t even noticing them, it makes the ban that much goofier.

No other baseball park I’ve been to in the last four years has a laptop ban, what makes going to Yankee Stadium so different?

Well that’s interesting, why do the Yankees want Ted Lilly (again)?

Let me click on that link and find out:

Oh, I guess they don’t then.

There are two MLB teams in New York, please make sure that you are referencing the proper one in your link titles. You are professionals, after all.

The first was a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship. I wasn’t able to get a very good picture of it because of the glare:

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Cruise ships do not normally come this close to RCB, making it a rare sighting.

Next up was a huge cargo ship. These are the most common type of large ship, but as they are very big I always find them very fun.

Click for bigger.

The last ship came by much later in the game, and it was another cargo ship albeit a different kind.

Click for bigger.

Sometimes these ones have a huge number of crates stacked on the deck, making them much more impressive. Still, a big boat is a big boat. Or ship, I suppose, I don’t want to offend any of the serious maritime fans out there.

As a not boat related aside, Kelvin De Leon hit a homerun over these trees in Left Field.

Click for bigger.

A good night on ole Satan Island. I will not talk about the Yankees game, though.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Queens), who released a report a day after the Daily News’ broke the story, blasted Major League Baseball for its exorbitant tack-on fees at a news conference Saturday.

“There’s not a lot of rationality with these fees,” Weiner said.

“Major League Baseball is nickel-and-diming the public, and it adds up to big bucks.”

Once again the local NYC government is barking up the wrong tree which should be no shock to anyone who actually lives here.

We all hate the fees tacked onto ticket sales from vendors but if you’re going to complain and use your position of power as a way to get heard, you need to focus on the people charging those fees. That would be Ticketmaster, tickets.com, StubHub and all the other vendors out there.

And focusing it on baseball is also pretty ridiculous. These fees exist for all events, and they’re actually less worse for MLB than they are for some concerts. I bought tickets through TM/LiveNation for a show where the face price was $25, and then I was charged a $10+ “convenience fee” and then the processing fee on top of that.

It’s easy to go out and hold a press conference to get some attention like Anthony Weiner, and most people out there probably think that it is the Yankees and Mets and MLB or whoever setting the fees but if you ever want it to change, you have to point the fingers in the right direction. Just saying “Hey MLB don’t be mean with fees!” is a quick, populist move that doesn’t even make any sense if you sit back and think about how the system works for two seconds.

In addition to that, the entire article from the NYDN about this never once mentions that the large fees are imposed by the ticket vendors, choosing to go the easy route and go along with the political huffing and puffing rather than pointing out where the fees are coming from. For example, they mention that you get charged a fee to print out your ticket? Who charges that? That would be Ticketmaster and other vendors and not MLB, but readers are lead to believe otherwise. That’s just lazy, hazardous reporting  and writing that misinforms the general public. Shameful.

Francis deciding the fate of Yankee Stadium

who I had the pleasure of owning since he was born in my parents’ apartment. When I say owned, I mean that I took care of him and fed him and all that, you cannot really ever own a cat like you would a toy. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you or mean to their cat(s).

The reason I am bringing this up in a place where I ramble on about baseball is that for almost all of my baseball watching life, when I watched a game at home I watched it with him. When I sat down on the couch Tuesday night to watch Javier Vazquez take on the Orioles it was the first time in about ten years that I took in a game in my home without him sitting next to or near me. It was a little disconcerting and I reached over at least once to pet him only to remember that he wasn’t there.

In 1996 when the Yankees were making their World Series run, I was 15 and absolutely convinced that the only way the Yankees were going to win was if Francis was sitting on my lap at all times during the games (he didn’t mind, as my lap was his favorite place to sit). I had convinced myself this was the key to the Rangers’ Stanley Cup run in 1994 and logic be damned I was going to will the Yankees to a championship using the same means. We do silly things to make ourselves feel better when watching sports.

When watching games I would shield my eyes by stuffing my face into Franny’s fur during particularly tense moments. He would often get upset when I yelled at my TV and would give me one of those confused cat faces. When the Yankees lost I would pick him up and carry him around to feel better. He was an instrumental part of helping me keep my sanity over the course of the long season.

You could say I’m in a rebuilding stage right now. The long glorious run of Francis and Leo watching baseball together is over and I’m in an adjustment period. You can’t replace a Hall of Famer and I’ve got plenty of time to figure out what to do, but things are a little weird right now.

Goodbye Franny, you were a great baseball buddy for 20 years.

Francis making a devil face as he contemplates eating Yankee Stadium

I’m also not funny like the guys from Fire Joe Morgan so it doesn’t seem worth it to go for that type of post.

Today, however, the Post let Larry Brooks who is a long-time hockey writer for the paper pen a column about baseball. And it ends with the flat out dumbest conclusion paragraph I have ever seen about a team many games over .500 and I just wanted to share it with anyone who stops by.

Instead of going into these next seven games against the Red Sox, Rays and Mets as an all-powerful 25-12 behemoth able to leap tall buildings and all obstacles with a single bound, they’re a 24-13 second-place team that needs more help from its marquee players than its been getting.

That’s right, losing one game of a three game series is a total failure. The Yankees season is now doomed. They’ll never win another game.

Nevermind that the team would still be in second place if they had won yesterday. The Rays were already a game up on the Yankees and beat the Mariners but it doesn’t seem to matter to Larry Brooks. Maybe he doesn’t even know that it would be the case.

Stick to writing about hockey, Larry. You clearly have no idea what’s going on in this whacky baseball land.

This year I added inherited runners and inherited runners scored for relief pitchers because it always drives me crazy at how much I have to dig to find those numbers. Now they’ll be in an easy place for me (and anyone else interested) to find.

Relievers:

Starters:

I’ll try to keep them updated after every game, but it’ll probably wind up being something more like every two or three games.