The Cardinals’ Albert Pujols came off the 15-day DL on Tuesday following an injury to his left wrist that was originally thought could take up to six weeks to heal.
With that news came an article from Yahoo! Sports’ Jeff Passan, who implied that Pujols’ remarkable recovery wouldn’t have happened without the assistance of performance enhancing drugs.
“While there may be perfectly legitimate reasons Pujols returned so quickly – the break wasn’t bad to begin with, or he heals faster than most, or his pain tolerance far exceeds that of normal humans – he wants us to believe this is about a higher power. Nothing illegal. Nothing undetectable. Nothing nefarious. Good genes, hard work and faith.”
“I don’t know where it was or who it was, but I guarantee that when the news about Pujols’ return flashed across the screen, another player did one of those fake coughs to muffle the letters ‘HGH’.”
“Am I naïve? Am I stupid?”
Well, you know the old saying. Stupid is as stupid does, so that about sums up Passan’s piece.
But what I find more aggravating than Passan’s implication is the hypocrisy that exists in the mainstream media, specifically as it relates to a similar article written a few years ago by blogger Jerod Morris.
In June 2009, Morris wrote a blog post about the Phillies’ Raul Ibanez and the incredible season he was having, a season in which he was hitting home runs at a pace like he’d never done.
Morris conducted a thorough statistical analysis of Ibanez’ career numbers, including park factors and the home runs he hit against several pitchers whose ERA’s were in the stratosphere.
In the process of exploring the reasons why he believed Ibanez could be producing such eye-popping numbers, Morris wrote a summation that included the following paragraph:
“Thirdly, it’s time for me to begrudgingly acknowledge the elephant in the room: any aging hitter who puts up numbers this much better than his career averages is going to immediately generate suspicion that the numbers are not natural, that perhaps he is under the influence of some sort of performance enhancer. And since I was not able to draw any absolute parallels between his prodigiously improved HR rate and his new ballpark’s hitter-friendliness, it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that “other” performance enhancers could be part of the equation.”
That’s when all hell broke loose.
The suggestion that Ibanez could have been juicing brought about a swift reaction from the mainstream media, most notably Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports.
The ambushing of Morris escalated into all out assault when he, John Gonzalez of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Rosenthal appeared on ESPN’s Outside the Lines to discuss the Ibanez article.
Predictably, Morris was caught in the maelstrom as he took heavy criticism from the two “respected” members of the professional media, both of which chastised him for intimating Ibanez’ career season could be the result of using PED’s.
So when Passan’s piece about Pujols hit the Internet on Tuesday, I was waiting to see the response from Rosenthal and other members of the esteemed professional media.
I’m still waiting.
Two days after Passan hinted that Pujols’ rapid recovery from a fractured wrist might have been due to the Cards’ slugger taking HGH, not one member of the mainstream media called him out.
Of all the people who look like hypocrites today, the biggest hypocrite of all is Rosenthal, or whom I like to refer to as “that bow tie wearing bitch with the perpetual smirk on his face.”
After he spoke of “journalistic integrity” when calling out Morris, not one peep could be heard from Rosenthal calling out Passan for the very same thing he accused Morris of doing.
That my friends is hypocrisy at its finest.
It doesn’t come as a surprise though considering the hoard of elitist windbags that populate the mainstream media today, but this particular incident reeks not only of favoritism, but of journalist cowardice.
If you’re going into battle waving the flag of journalistic ethics, then those ethics apply to everyone.
The same standards that Rosenthal spoke of when deriding Morris somehow magically disappeared when one of his own was even more guilty of breaking the journalistic golden rules.
And yet the mainstream media often wonders why bloggers have such a low opinion of them. Probably because they’ve been engaged in the “do as I say, not as I do” thing for so long, many of them couldn’t locate their asses with a map.
It’s for these reasons I’d rather read an article written by Joe the mechanic from Piscataway, one that includes a few grammatical and punctuation errors as opposed to a driveling piece written by a fucking cowardly hypocrite like Ken Rosenthal.
At least Joe is going to tell you how things really are, unlike Rosenthal who clearly doesn’t have the requisite amount of balls to undertake such a task.
