Disagreement, when it leads to discussion and discourse, is a good thing.  When it leads to name-calling and stone-throwing, it just sucks.

Capper, I have no problem with you disagreeing with CC’s work, or even not liking it.  But to bash him, the person, is low.

You don’t like his work, that’s perfectly OK.  Don’t read.  Feel free to debate intellegently but spare us the verbal attacks.

And yes, CC’s readers and friends, like me, will continue to defend his work and his abilities.

Jack—I agree with you that the dichotmy between blogger and pro writer is false, and believed that even back when I was getting 97 hits a say on Blogspot. If you’re going to say something, you have to be able to stand behind it no matter who you are.

I disagree with you, however, re: Morris’ post. I’m not terribly comfortable with such speculation myself, but I don’t see what he wrote as being terribly out of the mainstream.  Certainly not enough to justify the hypotheticals you you give.

Craig, my answer would be: Ask Ibanez how he feels about having his name put out on the web as a potential steroid-user, when all he’s done is have a great one-third of a year.

I agree that the post was not out of a mainstream that holds that David Ortiz is a suspected PED user because he’s in a slump and Dominican, or that Albert Pujols is a suspected user because he’s so damn good. But the mainstream of law enforcement used to assume any black man driving a nice car had drugs in it or had stolen the car. Mainstream isn’t inherently right, and if it’s mainstream to write an article “defending” a player of conduct when there is no evidence whatsoever that he engaged in it, then “mainstream” isn’t a sufficient justification. (In Iran, Holocaust denial is mainstream, as you know.)

“Arguing that an irresponsible post (and Morris’s was that) is fine because it promotes dialogue is Big Lie 101.”

But is anyone here really arguing this?

Capper—It’s something of an overstated cliche at this point to say that the way the public receives news is now changing, but even so it seems important and appropriate right now to analyze and clarify establishment criticism of the newer outlets.  How much of it is valid, demanding introspection and improvement by the community?  How much of it is hypocrisy or just raging against the dying of the light?

It’s perfectly valid for a reader to make the criticism that this material is probably of more interest to bloggers than it is to baseball fans, but perhaps a little tact would still go a long way.  This stuff is a little bit “meta”, and might not suit your taste, but that doesn’t per se make it lazy anti-establishment counter-criticism.  It has value.  In the end, discussions like these will improve baseball coverage for us all.

@Geoff - “Then, along comes Bavasi to run the 2004 Mariners. All of a sudden, a 90-plus win playoff contender from 2003 plummets to a 99-loss season. The offense drops off a cliff. Is there a connection between those drops and the stiffer drug testing?” 

How does this not cast suspicion on the whole team?  I’m not saying that it is necessarily wrong for all players to be under some degree of suspicion as the unfortunate consequence of MLB’s allowing drug use to flourish.  I’m just trying to figure out the difference between your reasoning and Morris’s. Both articles are pointing out a significant difference in performance and acknowledging that, due to generalized suspicion, we can’t help but wonder if PED use is a factor.  Would it have been different if you had listed the names of all the members of the 2003 and 2004 rosters in the article?

I was wondering how long before Baker showed up here - he can’t leave comments unanswered.

It was me who questioned the willingness of players to speak to you, Geoff. Of course you get “clubhouse access” - if you are eligible and approved for credentials, the team has to allow you in.

But the number and quality of Ichiro and Griffey quotes in LaRue’s piece far outstrips anything I’ve seen you get at least over the past year. And as dogged as you’ve been on the Ichiro-in-the-clubhouse front, I would expect that you would have scooped LaRue off the map with great quotes about the change of feeling.

In the end, what you’re being taken to task for is your sanctimonious demeanor in print. It went to ridiculous lengths on the Ibanez story - yes, he happens to be one of the ‘08 M’s who readily spoke with you - and didn’t stop when you were called on it, even given the lessons you SHOULD have learned from the “White Jays” debacle, i.e., everyone needs a bit of slack, at least until they prove undeserving.

The problem is, right now you’re running out of slack yourself.

You’re right, Michael, I’m not going to leave comments unanswered when they’re misinformed. Too much of that out there on the internet, so this is my attempt to set the record straight. We have written plenty of clubhouse stories since spring training if you care to look, so, why make that up? In fact, my very last newspaper story from this road trip began by talking about a team meeting prior to a game in Baltimore that quoted Griffey exclusively right off the top. So, again, you’re not accurate.

Plus, I don’t know anyone in this business who measures “scoops’’ on the quality of quotes you get about stuff. That’s the kind of stereotype some bloggers have cast on reporters inside the clubhouse—as if we care about quotes like they’re something golden. Maybe in radio or TV. N0t in print. It’s just not true, not for the people any good at this business. We deal in information—quoted or otherwise.

You may be upset that a fellow blogger got told he was wrong in public, but your argument doesn’t become any stronger when you make stuff up. So please, stop.

For Sara, it doesn’t cast specific suspicion on anybody. It casts as much, or as little, as you want to believe. Just like the Sosa revelations cast as much, or as little suspicion on the rest of MLB players as you want to let it.

That’s different from naming those players one-by-one next to the word steroids in a headline. As one of your fellow commenters keeps pointing out. Hope that helps.

Sarah K.,

You ask some very good questions. So, I will give you a detailed answer you deserve.

The biggest problem with what Morris did is he threw the steroids “issue” into the headline alongside Ibanez’s name. He writes his own headlines, so he is responsible for that. A headline is how you “frame” an issue. Trust me, I learned that the hard way with the “White Jays” thing that went atop my story six years ago. When you package something that way, people assume there’s meat to it, whether it’s what Morris intended or not.

Yes, Ibanez is part of some very general speculation about all players in particular. But when you raise the doubts about him as an individual as strongly as Morris did, it would be like taking any successful CEO—Bill Gates, Michael Eisner, whoever, in America today—and writing a headline with his name that reads: “Embezzlement talk perhaps unfair but…’’ just because we’re going through a fiscal crisis in this country brought on by corrupt business practices.

You can’t tar everyone with the same brush, no matter how angry the public mood. We’re not bullies. When you write for public consumption, which all bloggers, like it or not, are now doing, there’s a responsibility to defend rights against the mob mentality.

As someone on this blog pointed out, the “common consensus’’ used to be that being a black man in a nice car was reason enough to get stopped by police.

Well, that’s not good enough. I know the fans are sick of steroids revelations. I’m sick of them too. We’re all on the same side. But that’s still no excuse to go off half-cocked and start throwing names around as if they’re guilty until proven innocent.

My colleague, Larry Stone, recently wrote a column about Ken Griffey Jr. and, partway down, raised the steroids issue, because, as Morris rightly points out, it’s out there. But what Stone wrote was something along the lines that he’d never be so naive as to emphatically state that a guy is clean because he has no way of knowing.

But, he then added, there has never been any talk amongst baseball insiders, tests, or anything else to suggest that Griffey had ever done anything wrong and until he sees it, he’ll believe he’s clean and has no reason to doubt him.

Had Morris stated that about Ibanez, down in the body of his text, rather than in a headline, nobody would have batted an eyelash.

But he gave a voice to the “whisperers’’ in his headline. Whisperers who know nothing at all about whether Ibanez is taking PEDs. They are no closer to the truth than to knowing what the inside of a North Korean prison looks like. They may think they “know’’ but how could they? When you write that such talk is “perhaps unfair” the reverse implication by default is that it’s “perhaps not’’ unfair.

So, you can’t give a “voice” to just anyone.

Because if you do, then who knows when you, or someone you love, may become a target?

You can’t become part of a lynch mob of writers just because you write for a blog. You do have to adhere to “journalistic standards’‘. The law says so. And the same thing applies to public figures. You can criticize them, call Ibanez a buffoon of a left fielder, but you can’t imply—even unintentionally or indirectly—that he may have committed a criminal act of taking steroids.

What Morris did was sloppy and borne out of inexperience. And I guarantee you, it will become a case study.

And Sarah, I like bloggers and have worked with and gotten to know them well for two-plus years writing my Mariners Blog. We don’t always agree. And when we don’t, I say so. I don’t tell them what they want to hear just to be popular.

But with the added power bloggers are attaining comes added responsibility not to cross over the line. No newspaper would have written the headline that Morris did.

Rick Reilly really skirted the line with what he wrote on Adrian Beltre. I’ve already spoken out against Murray Chass for what he wrote about Mike Piazza and added, in the comments thread of my own blog, that Rick Reilly had better know something behind the scenes—other than pure guesswork.

With Reilly, it’s possible he knows something based on experience and contacts. With Morris, flat-out impossible. But if Reilly is guessing, he’s just as wrong.

And two wrongs don’t make a right.

Ballplayers, unpopular as they are on this, still have rights. And the biggest responsibility we all have is to protect people from unfairness when they’re most vulnerable.

Researching this steroids stuff takes years of legwork. Trust me, we all want to get there. I spent time in the Dominican and Venezuela researching lengthy steroid pieces in 2005 and 2006. It took time and money and I barely scratched the surface.

But throwing names out there blindly doesn’t speed up the process. It just undermines us all.

I think your example of the CEOs is a bit off the mark, since there isn’t an analogous pervading suspicion about all CEOs being embezzlers. What I am taking from your response is that the big issue with Morris’s article is the headline. I can see that, since there are probably a lot of people who scan headlines and don’t bother to read the article. Those people would have missed that the article itself is about the phenomenon of doubting the stories we most want to believe in, not an accusation of Ibanez per se.

Thanks for your time, Geoff.  I appreciate your willingness to debate the issue and to articulate your position in more detail.