Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

We didn't think we'd ever write about Jay Mariotti again because once you've seen a paramecium under a microscope, why look again? It wiggles, it eats, it dies. The guy will write anything to get a reaction out of people, then write the opposite the next day, and responding to him just feeds the organism. It's a formula, and it's boring. Also, he's the best example we've ever seen of the fact that being an asshole can give you heart disease. So feeding into the thing he does is just a contribution to a protracted suicide, and that's just a messy and disagreeable business. But Mariotti, who has all the moral authority of a leech, wrote a blog entry preaching that White Sox fans should grow up and back the Cubs, so we thought we'd chime in.

All we have to say is something Jay might read over in Roeper's column:

We sing the songs our fathers sang when they were growing up
Rebel songs of Erin's Isle in the South Side Irish Pubs
And when it comes to baseball, we have two favorite clubs
The G0-Go White Sox and — whoever plays the Cubs.

It's bigger and older than Jay Mariotti can even imagine. Even if that team and its private newspaper hadn't been spewing effuent in our direction for the last quarter century, telling us to grow up and back the Cubs is like telling us to grow up and back toe fungus. Unsightly, uncomfortable, and covering our city with an icky yellow crust. Not gonna happen. Unlike Mariotti, we have clarity.

Windows to the Soul

It is both a sign of the Tribune's decline and an explanation for it that Tribune writers seem incapable of admitting when they're wrong. Even the Tribune's public editor, whose job is to admit when the paper is wrong, almost never does so — and everyone knows that's not because the Tribune is always right.

A substantial portion of the Tribune's sports staff spent the winter blasting White Sox GM Ken Williams for his trades. At times they misrepresented their own arguments as fan sentiment, at other times they misrepresented the facts, until their work resembled propaganda more than reporting. It's early in the season, but so far Williams' trades have proven golden. One Chicago sportswriter has the nuggets to admit it, but of course, he doesn't work for the Tribune. Joe Cowley in today's Sun-Times:

Looking back on Williams' trades, he is 3-0-1, and even that tie is swaying heavily in his favor.

• Reserve Ross Gload for reliever Andrew Sisco: Gload entered Thursday as a spot starter hitting .250 for the Royals, while Sisco had a 2.25 ERA in four games, bolstering one of the top bullpens in the American League. Edge: Williams.

• Reliever Neal Cotts for reliever David Aardsma: Cotts wasn't scored on in his first two appearances with the Cubs, but Aardsma (1-0, 1.29 ERA) has been a beast for the Sox in clutch time. His nine strikeouts in just seven innings pitched leads the team. Edge: Williams.

• Starter Brandon McCarthy for reliever Nick Masset and starter John Danks: McCarthy is 1-1 with a 3.75 ERA for the Rangers, but his win came against Tampa Bay -- and that should not count. Masset won Game 3 against the Indians single-handedly, while Danks (0-1, 4.50 ERA) dominated the Twins, minus one mistake to AL MVP Justin Morneau. Edge: Williams.

• Starter Freddy Garcia in a package for starters Gio Gonzalez and Gavin Floyd: Garcia is on the 15-day disabled list, while Floyd (1.50 ERA after one start) is in Class AAA Charlotte and Gonzalez (2-0, 1.74 ERA) is in Class AA Birmingham. Edge: It's a tie.

Point is, these deals were to be measured in September, not in February. It's way too early to underestimate what Williams did.

That last sentence doesn't say anything that most Sox fans weren't saying back in February, and maybe it shouldn't be notable when a sportswriter finally states the obvious, but in a city where Tribune sets the media agenda, it's as notable as an earthquake. Tribune writer Phil Rogers admitted that the Sox maybe were right on one of these trades, but not without waffling on the bigger picture, and a week later he was back to his old dissembling self. Dave van Dyck and Mark Gonzalez, the wrongest of the aforementioned wrong on these trades, are still holding out and perhaps praying that circumstances eventually make them look prescient. van Dyck hasn't corrected a story that was factually incorrect.

Why can't they admit they're wrong? Generally, Tribune writers dismiss their paper's documented bias as a matter of "perception," they whitewash criticism in their own pages even when it makes news nationally, and they greet most criticism with an impenetrable wall of arrogance. No one behaves that way but the guilty.

A Tempest in a Tribune

Today Tribune beat-Sox reporter Mark Gonzales continues to babble like a lunatic about Ken Williams taking criticism for his off-season changes to the pitching staff. Gonzales really seems to want some kind of pitching controversy to be real, even writing that Williams would step into a "lion's den" at Sox Fest, but in fact there has been only modest criticism outside of Mark Gonzales' own rich fantasy life. Sure, some people don't like Kenny's moves, but here's what Sports Illustrated has to say about the 2007 Sox and their pitching staff:

The pieces are in place to win, so look for health and hunger to determine if the Sox retake the Central.... This is a stable group of starters, but everyone has something to prove, especially if they want to stick around.

Maybe to Gonzales that sounds highly critical. Anyway, today Gonzales claims that all Sox pitchers are "aware of the criticism." The guy's libidinal ache for fabricated controversy even surfaces in his verbs. What's weird about these sentences:

Haeger, who will be evaluated as a starter but can relieve, admitted the McCarthy trade was a surprise...

Williams admitted last month that the thin Arizona air makes it difficult to evaluate Haeger because his knuckleball doesn't move as well as it does in higher humidity.

Are those really admissions? Were Haeger and Williams tied to a chair under a hot bulb being beaten by a rubber hose when Haeger admitted he was surprised by a trade and Williams admitted that the air is drier in Tucson?

Time for a new beat-Sox reporter, maybe, Tribune? Lately the Tribune's baseball beat reporters have been embarrassingly incompetent in very public ways: manufacturing a controversy about Mark Buerhle, then using the same interpretive technique to make up a controversy about Carlos Zambrano. The Sun-Times, undoubtedly stung by its own blind complicity in the former case, finally stepped out of the Tribune's shadow and called the latter case "bogus reporting." No duh. It's been going on for years. And the Zambrano story was substantially less egregious than the false reporting on Buehrle.

Sun-Times Stirs From Long Slumber

The Chicago Sun-Times, which should have been doing what we do here for the last 25 years, just noticed Tribune ownership of the Cubs and decided to investigate:

"The people have suffered enough. That's why this case will be tried in these pages over the coming days and weeks. We will present the case for the prosecution and the case for the defense, and then the Court of Public Opinion will render a verdict."

If the Sun-Times really does wake up, will it wake up with or without a spine? That's what we want to know. Usually when the Sun-Times causes a stir, some self-important snot at the Tribune just calls the Sun-Times "the junior paper" or "the smaller paper," and the Sun-Times hides simpering under the bed again. Oh look, it's already begun. From the Tribune's Steve Rosenbloom: "Sounds like the smaller newspaper is pitching a fit over what the bigger newspaper wrote." Steve thinks he's pretty great, working for the "bigger" newspaper.

So the Sun-Times is going to prosecute the case in the court of public opinion, and then let the public decide. But it sounds like both parties have already made up their minds. The Sun-Times, in the same story that announced the "trial": "The Sun-Times wants the team sold -- immediately." And Public Opinion, expressed in a Sun-Times poll beside that story:

POLL RESULTS :: Do you think the Cubs need new ownership?
Yes 82% 2043 votes
No 17% 422 votes

So why do we need the trial? Just to lend legitimacy to the hanging? We'll be watching how well the Sun-Times prosecutes its case. The paper says it will examine how the Tribune-Cubs partnership hurt the Cubs, but will it also examine how the Tribune-Cubs partnership has hurt the White Sox, alienated Chicagoans from their media and from one another, and damaged journalism in Chicago? We suspect the Bright One, which has been quietly complicit for the last quarter century, might find that potato a little too hot.

How Tribune Manufactured Buehrle Controversy

When they're not fawning over new Cub Alfonso Soriano, Tribune sportswriters are busy making up controversies for the White Sox, and here, broken down, is the anatomy of a particularly pernicious one:

In a Jan. 11 story, Tribune reporter Dave van Dyck stated outright that the White Sox would not re-sign Mark Buehrle after the 2007 season. In van Dyck's words:

So it should not be surprising that Sox general manager Ken Williams will not try to re-sign the team's recognized pitching leader after giving him a chance for an extension last spring.
"With the market as it is, I don't anticipate making that overture again," Williams said recently.
In other words Buehrle's $9.5 million this year will be his last salary from the Sox, who should have younger (and cheaper) options by next season.

The problem with van Dyck's story was immediately evident to many of us -- that "in other words" sentence was not an accurate interpretation of Ken Williams' actual words. Anyone who follows Kenny's work knows he wouldn't say that. A lot of Sox fans, who maintain a better understanding of Kenny Williams and a healthy skepticism of the Tribune, noticed the problem with van Dyck's story right away. Cubune Watcher Brian Dykes started a thread at whitesoxinteractive.com, and Sox fans dissected the situation in detail. We now know they dissected it accurately. More accurately than Dave van Dyck or any of the local journalists who have since covered the story.

With van Dyck's inaccurate interpretation of Ken Williams still on the wind, Mark Buehrle comes to SoxFest and says, "Yeah, I saw the quote about him saying that I won't be in a White Sox uniform in 2008. That's part of the business. It's going to happen."

You see the problem: Kenny never said such a thing. A Tribune reporter said it. But now the Sun-Times and other local media, either oblivious or on bended knee to the Tribune, jump on the non-story, billing it as a fight between Ken Williams and Mark Buehrle. To quell the controversy, Williams apologizes to Buehrle. Now notice the precise wording of Kenny's apology, as quoted in the Tribune:

"I apologized because I should know better now than to answer direct questions with direct answers. I have to change the way that I'm doing this job.... In an effort to be truthful, honest, candid—it just doesn't work. On the surface, it would work if everything you said, every channel it went through after you said it, it would be interpreted the same way, in the same context. But that's not just the case. That's not just reality."

Kenny says he was misinterpreted, as Sox fans correctly surmised in their discussion of van Dyck's article. So he isn't apologizing for what he said, he's apologizing for trusting the people to whom he said it. He's realizing, again, that he has to be much more evasive with Chicago reporters, lest they pull a van Dyck and misinterpret and repackage a quote in a misleading way.

Here's what Buehrle had to say about it: "I told him there was no apology needed. It's something that some of the media people took differently and ran with it."

Now look at the cynical and insidious way the Tribune has played out a controversy that it created. First of all, the Williams-Buehrle story was the biggest story to come out of the first day of SoxFest, but the Tribune didn't cover it that day. Tribune reporter Mark Gonzales was too busy looking for evidence of another controversy that he tried, and failed, to manufacture. But how could the Tribune simply overlook this big Buehrle-Williams "battle," which made such a splash everywhere else? It was as if Tribune reporters knew, in their heart of hearts, that the story was false. What they needed was other media to pick up the story and give it currency. Thank you, Sun-Times, you're always on hand when the Tribune needs a gullible little brother to do its dirty work.

On Day Two the Tribune does start covering the controversy. Under the headline, "Who's Sorry Now? Williams," Gonzales pulls yet another "in other words" interpretation. Here it is, Gonzalez's convenient misinterpretation of Williams' apology:

In other words, Williams didn't back off what he had said—he was just sorry he had said it publicly.

Wrong again, Mark. He's sorry he said it to people like you. Gonzales somehow doesn't notice what Williams said about interpretation and context. Now Gonzales is running interference for van Dyck and the Tribune. Even though Dave van Dyck had explicitly written on Jan. 11 that this was Buehrle's last year, Gonzalez tries to trace the controversy to a Williams quote from Dec. 8: "It would be if we did nothing and got old and got too expensive and then had to go out scrounging for leftover talent and overpaying for mediocre talent."

Notice that Mark Buehrle's name appears nowhere in that statement. The quote is not nearly as explicit as van Dyck's story. Let's revise a little history, shall we, to whitewash the Tribune's culpability. In another story today, under the headline "Buehrle: no apology necessary" Gonzales tries to pin the inaccuracy of the media coverage on local radio.

We know better.