My favorite curmudgeon

So get this.  There is this former baseball journalist named Murray Chass.  He has his own website, a blog if you will (although he won't call it that), where he posts occasional articles about baseball.  He's not paid to do this, mind you.  It's something that he does on his own.  Kind of like a...web log of his thoughts on baseball.  If you want to find what his baseball site is about, he will tell you:

This is a site for baseball columns, not for baseball blogs. The proprietor of the site is not a fan of blogs. He made that abundantly clear on a radio show with Charley Steiner when Steiner asked him what he thought of blogs and he replied, “I hate blogs.” He later heartily applauded Buzz Bissinger when the best-selling author denounced bloggers on a Bob Costas HBO show.

Kind of cute.  Especially since he writes this on his...blog.  But you catch the drift.  He hates blogs and bloggers.  One of his main issues with bloggers in the past has been that there is no accountability for what they write.  No journalistic integrity, no fact-checking.  It's absolute anarchy, I tell ya!  But it really gets his goat when some blogger posts some "fact" from some "source" that turns out to be complete hogwash.  The blogger, he believes, doesn't care if it's true or not.  And the blogger is under no editorial thumb, so there is no need for a redaction when the truth does come out.

Case in point, on Tuesday a noted blogger wrote about the great shame on baseball for not voting Marvin Miller into the Hall of Fame this past week.  I'm not going to go into any depths about what Miller meant to the game, except that he definitely belongs in as an Executive of the game.  Just Google him if you are interested and you will see that just about everyone agrees on this point.  Except for certain member of the special committee that was formed, some of whom might have personal beefs with the man since they were on the other side of every labor battle.

But this noted blogger believes he knew who it was on the committee who hadn't voted "yes" for Miller's induction.  In fact, this came from Marvin Miller's mouth himself.  From people, as he says, that told him so either directly or from other sources.  One of those people who the noted blogger outed was the writer for Sports Illustrated, Tom Verducci.  I'm sure a quick call to Verducci could have confirmed this, but (as Chass notes) "bloggers can say anything that they want".  So no confirmation was needed, and the noted blogger posted his story, along with some personal attacks against Verducci's reporting abilities. 

Turns out it wasn't true.  Verducci did vote for Marvin Miller.  And Miller called Verducci to apologize because he was just repeating something he heard and he didn't think that the noted blogger was going to publish their conversation.  Goddamn bloggers!

Man, that must have really gotten Murray Chass' goat! 

Wait...whoa...except that the "noted blogger" in question IS Murray Chass.  Doing everything he claims that he hates about blogging, on his non-blog that really is a blog.  Maybe a bit more investigative reporting or editorial oversight might have helped you out on that one there, Murray.  Or just simply, ya know, dropping Verducci a quick line. 

I tell you...I love this story so much I want to take it to Bermuda and get it pregnant!  My favorite thing about it is that Verducci calls Chass a blogger about a dozen times in his story about this that I linked to up there.  That must REALLY drive Chass crazy.  Except that it probably doesn't.  Because he is always right and we are always wrong, and he probably won't even read Verducci's column.  He certainly won't take himself to task for something he is constantly railing at windmills about.

How's that glass house you're living in treating ya, Murray?