Today's Manure Pile - Pile On!

Hey folks. It's you anonymous blogging pal, the Tao. How's it goin'? We're okay. Well, mostly.

You know what's on our mind, and we're not even going to pay homage to that excretory fake investigative piece over on the Worldwide Leader's site. Except to say what we've been tweeting all day:

That it's shoddy.

That it's incomplete.

That it's shameful.

That it should never have been allowed to run.

That it provides no context.

That it uses four anonymous sources as its cornerstone.

That it cherry picks stats without showing the league-wide context.

That is plays to cynicism about any sports achievement, even as it demonstrates a complete lack of commitment to verify its own claims.

Amy K. Nelson know with whom she spoke to get this story. Which means she could probably precisely deduce the games to which her sources were referring. And she could (this being the Worldwide Leader, after all) find the video and sit down for a couple of hours and see if she could find even the blurriest, smudgiest, most fleeting image of the man to whom they refer.

(Hey, Outside the Lines found a blurry shot of an NHL official grabbing the Stanley Cup winning puck from the net. This isn't unprecedented work.)

That picture would probably go a long way to making her story seem less like the unfiltered accusations of a few MLBers with an axe to grind and an overly developed competitive streak. Without anything further, you have precisely what she copped to in the final paragraph of the piece.

As we tweeted in our initial reaction to the piece: "If your investigative piece ends with: "The evidence is circumstantial", then you haven't finished your investigation."

Elsewhere:

There's few things in this world finer than Dustin Parkes in a lather. I owe you a tasty beverage, sir.

Also, Jays blogger James Fireman (who alerted me to the story first) has what will probably be an unpopular take for Jays fans, but I respect his setting his allegiances aside to examine it.