A Case Of Shoddy Journalism?? Me Thinks Yes

I hopped online after "My Name Is Earl" to see if there were any breaking developments in the world of MLB. My home page is set to Yahoo. As soon as it popped up, a headline immediately caught my eye: A-Rod chooses to play for Dominican Republic instead of U.S. I click on the link and the title reads: A-Rod to play for Dominican in WBC. It's not quite the breaking development I was hoping for, but it'll do. It's something. And then I read the article.

In my opinion, the article is a classic POS. Gordon Edes, the author of the article, writes it as if it's fact, when in fact it's based on pure speculation. Edes draws the conclusion that A-Rod is playing for the DR because David Ortiz says he wants to. Edes writes, “He wants to play for the Dominican team,” Ortiz said by telephone Thursday. “We’ll talk about it now after he gets here, and he’ll probably announce it here.” (Alex is playing in a Ortiz'z charity golf tourney this weekend.)

The next paragraph of the article reads:

Ortiz said he has not spoken recently with Rodriguez about his intentions, but that as far back as the All-Star Game last July in New York, he said A-Rod had expressed a desire to play for the Dominican Republic

So A-Rod is playing for the DR because he mentioned to Ortiz that he wanted to back in July, and hasn't reaffirmed that intention with anyone since. Yeah, that definitely sounds like he's playing for the DR! Now I could really care less who Alex plays for in this year's WBC. If he wants to play for the DR and not the US, no problem with me. I won't feel shunned at all. It's not really that big a deal and it's not the point of this post. It's just annoying when sports writers pass gossip and speculation off as fact. Don't know why it annoys me so much, but it does. I'd be totally fine with it if the article and it's headlines were written differently. How hard would it have been to include the word "possibly" as in A-Rod might possibly play for the DR. Would that have been so hard?

If I were a betting man, I'd bet my hard-earned duckets that Alex does end up playing for the DR. I really hope though that he doesn't, just so Edes looks like the douche that I take him to be. This article strikes me more as a vehicle to start some Alex-bashing than anything else.

I'm curious to know if anyone out there thinks I'm the dope here that's totally misreading the article. Please feel free to weigh in with your thoughts.

J-Boogie