Category: Uncategorized

Saturday in the Bronx

The problem with doing this today is that I won’t be able to do it tomorrow. But I don’t want to take any chances — after all, the Sox could lose this afternoon. Anyway …

From the New York Post:

Could Torre, who is in the final year of his contract, really be fired before April is finished? Is Torre the reason the starting rotation has melted in the first month and put an alarming workload on the bullpen? Is it Torre’s fault the lineup, so potent through 19 games, has gone 20 innings without an extra-base hit? [Obvious answers: yes, no and no.]

If Steinbrenner and the voices he is listening to believe the answers are “yes,” and if the Yankees get swept this weekend by the Red Sox, it’s not out of the realm of the possibility that The Boss could make a change.

Next up, the Daily News:

So where is the fight in this team? They didn’t just lose last night, the Red Sox embarrassed them in their own Stadium, to the point where fans mocked them with cheers when they finally got three outs in the ninth inning….

Is this the year? Is this the year that, for all of the talent on the roster, the pieces never fall into place? Is this the year that age and injuries and bad karma send the Yankees tumbling down the mountain?

Oh, let’s hope.

Finally, from the New York Times:

The season is too young to be slipping away from the Yankees. But it has gotten ugly quickly, with the team on its longest losing streak since 2000. The voices in the organization that grumble about Manager Joe Torre, whose contract expires after the season, will grow louder if the losses keep mounting.

Torre left Yankee Stadium at 12:40am this morning, much later than usual. He was nearly fired after last season, and if the Yankees are swept this weekend, his job security would be very much at risk. It is doubtful that General Manager Brian Cashman could save Torre’s job again.

Great stuff, eh? And wouldn’t it be wonderful if Torre got fired? The man is a great manager and a class act. Maybe the Sox could hire him as a bench coach. The Yankees should love looking into the other dugout and seeing that.

A Red Sock comeback

Let the DNA testing begin!

The biggest loser in the controversy over whether that was blood or paint on Curt Schilling’s Hall of Fame sock may be Tim Wakefield. Why? Orioles broadcaster Gary Thorne says it was Doug Mirabelli who told him it was paint. Mirabelli vehemently denies it. But it strikes me as more likely that Mirabelli shot his mouth off and now is horrified by what he said than it is that Thorne simply made it up. Depending on how Thorne handles the aftermath of his on-the-air comments last night, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Wakefield’s personal catcher run out of town.

Schilling fans please note: I’m not saying it was paint. Given what we know — that Schilling underwent temporary surgery to hold the tendon in place in his badly damaged ankle so that he could pitch in the 2004 postseason — then the weight of the evidence would suggest that it was, indeed, blood. (If you’ve got a strong stomach, look at this.)

Gordon Edes has the details in today’s Globe, and Edes’ story is currently number one on Boston.com’s “Most Popular Stories” list. Unfortunately, the hometown Baltimore Sun sheds little light on the subject today (other than to remind us that one of its own then-columnists raised the same question in 2004), running a story that credits the Globe.

This is too big to go away. Thorne and Mirabelli are both going to have to account for themselves. And even if Thorne is telling the truth about Mirabelli, he can’t justify casually passing along such an explosive accusation without making any effort to verify it.

As Bruce Allen writes, “Based on the reaction within the story from Red Sox players and management, this bears watching, and Thorne will likely find himself at the center of attention today.”

More: Why did the great Jim Palmer just sit there and say nothing? Oh, sorry — he said, “Yeah.”

Still more: Thorne now says it was all a “misunderstanding,” according to the Sun. I doubt it. But if that’s what it takes to put an end to this, fine.

Lydon on the move?

When UMass Lowell announced last October that it would stop funding Christopher Lydon’s public radio program, “Open Source,” you had to wonder what the long-term effect would be. Though UMass wasn’t Lydon’s sole source of support, all indications were that the university was his major backer.

Still, “Open Source” kept chugging along, and nearly two months ago the program received a $250,000 MacArthur grant for its Internet component.

But now the Globe reports that Lydon is talking with Bloomberg Radio about a New York-based commercial show. Nothing on the “Open Source” Web site, but this bears watching.

Update: Mary McGrath, Lydon’s longtime producer, says not to worry. (Thanks to this alert but pseudonymous Media Nation reader.)

Thank God we’re a two-newspaper town*

The Globe knows what we need, but the Herald knows what we want. In today’s Globe, Barbara Matson reports that Boston College women’s hockey coach Tom Mutch has resigned over “allegations of inappropriate conduct with a student-athlete.” Oh, yes. We get the picture.

Well, actually, we didn’t — at least, we didn’t until we turned to the Herald, which makes the Mutch resignation the subject of its front-page splash: “SEX SCANDAL ICES COACH.” Inside, we learn this, from reporter Laurel Sweet:

Hockey East Coach of the Year Tom Mutch, 39, who’s married and whose wife just had a baby, abruptly stepped down hours after the Herald began making inquiries to authorities at the Heights.

Sexually graphic text messages that BC hockey star [name omitted by Media Nation], 19, allegedly wrote to Mutch were discovered on a cell phone [she] gave to a teammate, neglecting to delete them first, sources said.

One source familiar with the messages described them as “filthy. They were very sexual in nature.”

And, oh yeah, there’s this: “Sources stressed that BC’s probe had yet to find an actual sexual relationship between Mutch and [the student].”

I’m under no illusions about protecting the 19-year-old student’s identity — I’m withholding it as a protest, and a rather futile one at that. I like reading about sex-related scandals as much as anyone, and the fact that BC officials are taking this so seriously means that Mutch is definitely fair game.

But to blast this on the front, and to identify the young woman at the center of this, seems way out of line, especially since all the facts are not yet in. Sweet deserves credit for breaking this story, but her editors blew it way out of proportion.

Update: The Heights, Boston College’s student newspaper, is reporting the student’s name as well. So I’ll concede that I may be alone on this one.

*With apologies, as always, to Boston Magazine, which used to have great fun with this feature.

David Halberstam

David Halberstam died with his boots on. The 73-year-old legend was killed in a car accident near San Francisco yesterday while he on his way to interview former NFL star Y.A. Tittle for his next book.

May I make a confession? I’ve never read his best-known book, “The Best and the Brightest,” his exposé of the American policy failures that led to the quagmire in Vietnam.

I do, however, vividly recall plowing through “The Powers That Be,” his four-way biography of media giants Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine; Donald and Katharine Graham, publishers of the Washington Post; Otis Chandler, who inherited the Los Angeles Times and made it great; and William Paley, the CBS founder who made its news division a paragon of excellence but never quite seemed comfortable with it. I read it in the summer of 1979, right after I’d graduated from college. “The Powers That Be” was — and is — and astounding piece of reportage and historical research, and it made an indelible impression on the way I think about the media.

In November 2001 I interviewed Halberstam for a piece I was writing on liberalism after 9/11. I remember his being somewhat gruff and abrupt, especially when he realized I had not read his then-new book “War in a Time of Peace.” I think I broke into a sweat. The story I was reporting was not about Halberstam or his book; I was just looking for a few insights from someone I greatly admired. As I recall, he warmed up a bit, but I was relieved when the interview came to its rather uncomfortable end.

Somewhere in my house, unread, is a copy of Halberstam’s “The Teammates,” about Red Sox players Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr and Johnny Pesky. I will soon rectify that. It goes without saying that Halberstam will be misssed. But for him to be cut down in his prime — at an age when most people are retired — seems especially unfair, not just to him, but to us.

The Northeastern Globe

Congratulations to Michael Naughton and Hailey Heinz, two Northeastern journalism students whose investigative report on a dubious anti-gun initiative by Boston Mayor Tom Menino appears on the front page of today’s Boston Globe.The mayor has proposed suspending the driver’s licenses of gun offenders; but Naughton and Heinz found that few gun criminals even have licenses.

Naughton and Heinz did their work as part of an investigative-reporting class led by my NU colleague Walter Robinson, the Globe’s Pulitzer-winning retired Spotlight Team editor.

One way to get free content

BostonNOW, the new freebie commuter tab, has attracted a lot of attention for its goal of loading up on local blog content. Participating bloggers wouldn’t be paid right away, but might share in BostonNOW’s revenues somewhere down the line.

Well, guess what? Boing Boing caught BostonNOW running an item from the Bostonist without permission. BostonNOW provided credit and a link, but obviously that’s not good enough. It was especially stupid given that the Bostonist, unlike most Boston-area blogs, is a commercial, profit-seeking enterprise. BostonNOW editor John Wilpers has apologized and said it won’t happen again. Meanwhile, we await BostonNOW’s first authorized blog item.

You can read Wilpers’ apology here. (Via Universal Hub.)

More: We talked about BostonNOW’s prospects Friday on “Greater Boston.” The video should pop up here at some point. I also shared my thoughts on BostonNOW recently with Paul McMorrow of the Weekly Dig.

I’m with Fred

Jesse Noyes reports in the Boston Herald today that the folks at Facebook are upset with the media for using the social-network service to track down interview subjects in the Virginia Tech story. A Facebook spokeswoman is quoted as saying, “We see this as a violation of user privacy.” Really? Good thing Ma Bell didn’t try to take our phone books away back in the 1970s and ’80s because we were violating people’s privacy by, you know, calling them up.

I’m with Boston University journalism professor Fred Bayles, who tells Noyes that journalists are going to use any method they can to contact people. Indeed, I tell my students that it’s perfectly ethical to use Facebook, listservs and Usenet (most easily accessed through Google Groups) for exactly that purpose as long as they make it clear that they’re reporters working on a story.

I am more sympathetic to Facebook’s objection that the media shouldn’t reproduce text and images from people’s online profiles without permission — although, again, Facebook, MySpace and the like aren’t exactly private forums.