There has been a growing, rage-inducing trend this MLB offseason. Numerous teenage MLB “reporters” are seeping into the fabric of the baseball rumor mill, and making the lives of beat reporters, fans, and national writers very, very difficult. Essentially, what these teens are doing is…well, I can’t even rationalize it, really. They’re throwing rumors pulled out of thin air at the wall, hoping they stick, and trying to build a base of credibility by “reporting” every single “confirmed” MLB transaction by scouring the MLB.com transaction page. In short, it’s a chore, and it’s completely worthless.
A piece written by agent Joshua Kusnick on Baseball Prospectus help beat those issues home. In his article, Kusnick discusses no less than 100 teen “reporters” coming to him last year and asking him to be their source and feed them information. This alone is appalling to me – my thoughts on the subject are similar to Kusnick’s, namely that you never ask anyone to be your source. Inside information isn’t something you request from someone you’ve never talked to before – it’s generally gleaned from a personal relationship you have with someone. Someone becoming “a source” isn’t like them becoming an employee, or a client, or what have you – it’s all organic.
Grantland’s Ben Lindbergh also wrote a piece about the evolution of reporting, and how a couple of teens broke Billy Butler’s signing with the Athletics. And while I think the success of those two (Devan Fink and Robert Murray) is commendable, all it’s done is set the bar higher for teens who also think they can be the next Chris Cotillo (who isn’t perfect himself, but we’ll get to that later).
There was another teen reporter that has dove into the flames this month, and come out covered in burns without much to show for it. 14-year old Jake Wesley has taken the credit for “breaking” the signings of Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval to the Red Sox, but a slight bit of research has shown that the information was initially reported by others, and Wesley took the scoops for his own. He then completely whiffed on a Yoenis Cespedes “confirmed” trade, threw his source under the bus, hasn’t “broken” anything since, and is currently in the business of retweeting national writers and slapping together trade rumors like they’re mad libs. Wesley calls himself an “MLB insider” and has 12,000 Twitter followers.
But it’s not just the newbies that are coming under fire. SBNation’s Cotillo, who gained national prominence a year ago by breaking the Doug Fister trade, proceeded to chastise reporters who weren’t credible, an hour after tweeting about the Braves tendering contracts to pitchers Kris Medlen and Brandon Beachy. Naturally, Medlen and Beachy were nontendered, and Cotillo deleted his tweet shaking his finger at non-credible reporters.
Cotillo had this response to the missed report:
https://twitter.com/ChrisCotillo/status/539922625049272321
Gee, it’s almost like you’re spitballing too.
Anyway, here’s some advice out there to any teenager that is considering jumping into the reporting game – becoming a legitimate, nationally respected MLB reporter is not something that you can easily do overnight. The amount of information out there on Twitter and the internet is larger than ever, but so is the amount of misinformation. It’s not a great sign for the future of the MLB rumor mill when the tactics of these reporters are being compared to e-mail scams from Nigerian princes, as stated by Lindbergh:
On TV, Fink was fairly up front about his tactics, which one reporter I spoke to, who didn’t wish to be named in this story, called “carpet bombing.” Cold emailing for info can’t have a high hit rate, but it seems to work for aspiring sports reporters as well as it works for deposed Nigerian princes. There’s also a symbiotic aspect to all of this, since the cub reporters sometimes pass their scoops on to industry titans in exchange for confirmation and credibility.
For anyone with real ambitions, focus on your actual writing instead of trying to use the word “source” in every tweet. Focusing on breaking news when you can’t write columns and give fresh insights is like jumping behind the wheel of a tractor trailer before you’ve even taken a driver’s ed class (which is an appropriate comparison, given the age group we’re talking about here). With the amount of “reporting” flooding the space, it’s going to become tougher and tougher to actually stand out.
I’m not going to take you seriously, no matter how many rumors you throw out there or scoops you claim, if you can’t hit above .900 in your reporting. Very few people are going to remember who got the Max Scherzer signing first. But they are going to remember if you were the one that got it wrong.
