The biggest lesson from Wednesday night may be that some of the biggest trades — such as the Tigers dealing Prince Fielder — are the ones that come out of nowhere. The biggest lesson on Thursday? Don’t bother reading about trade speculation, just wait until the trade is done.
Otherwise, you might have thought that Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun was headed to the Mets.
On Wednesday, Metsblog founder and lead writer Matthew Cerrone speculated that the Mets could find a trading partner in Milwaukee for under-performing first baseman Ike Davis. Cerrone said that he spoke to at least one person “familiar with the team’s thinking,” who opined that “there’s a better chance that the Brewers trade Ryan Braun … than Norichika Aoki.”
This sentence apparently tripped up a large portion of Internet sports writers, because, all of a sudden the .
Minutes after being posted, the piece was picked up by RotoWorld, who gave it the headline, “?” and immediately struck it down with a dismissive “we’re skeptical of the reasoning in general.”
USA Today (giving it the catchy headline, “Report: Brewers could trade Ryan Braun to Mets”) but not a phone. The article is the third-most shared article on sports sub-site For The Win. They also went much further, suggesting a trade actually was on its way, noting, “The specifics will make the deal, of course… [It] looks like potentially a great way for the Mets to add the impact bat they covet.”
NBC Sports .
The backlash came immediately. “Absolutely nothing is true” about the rumors, said the Brewers’ general manager, . The Rosenthal reporting was included in an SB Nation post that essentially .
A Brewers blogger ”ԲԱ.”
Here’s the problem, though. Cerrone writes Thursday that he “never wrote the Brewers were shopping Braun, planning to trade him, or that he was on his way to the Mets. Yet, judging by the Internet’s reaction, I was telling people to buy their orange-and-blue Braun jerseys soon.”
If Cerrone is blaming everyone else for making erroneous assumptions about his writing, he has to accept some of the blame, too, as one of many online sports writers dealing in speculation free of real verification.
There’s a reasons that’s a problem: The liberal use of sources who may or may not be knowledgeable, writers creating content for content’s sake, the innate desire to be first with a scoop. These are warned against in every Journalism 101 class, but easily can be forgotten once a job comes along. Ask any reporter in a about mistakes being made by jumping the gun.
Cerrone waves away arguments about journalistic standards, claiming he’s “just a writer, just a fan.” Whether that reasoning holds water with his readers, or with those of similar blogs, remains to be seen.Cerrone, the digital operations director for the SportsNet New York network and lead writer for Metsblog, also makes himself known as a digital media guru. :
I’ve made 30,000 posts and 250,000,000 page views during my 10 years writing MetsBlog.com. Here, I talk about how to write a sports blog, what works, what doesn’t and what’s next.
Don’t hold your breath for the accuracy lesson.
