As baseball Twitter continues to roast Jon Heyman for his Arson Judge blunder, fellow MLB Insider Jeff Passan is treating the situation with a little more compassion.
Tuesday evening, as Aaron Judge closed in on making his free agency decision, Heyman tweeted “Arson Judge appears headed to Giants.” Not only did he misspell Judge’s name, but the entire report turned out to be erroneous. Minutes later, Heyman deleted the tweet and retracted the report, claiming the San Francisco Giants had not heard from Judge. Hours later, Judge signed with the New York Yankees.
Passan joined The Pat McAfee Show Wednesday afternoon to discuss the Major League Baseball offseason as the hot stove finally heated up in recent days. And during Passan’s appearance, McAfee asked ESPN’s top baseball Insider about Heyman’s gaffe.
Take us behind the scenes of what happened with Arson Judge @JeffPassan…#PMSLive pic.twitter.com/wrOgkY5Hnl
— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) December 7, 2022
“I’m gonna take people behind the scenes here, because the biggest nightmare of any reporter is getting something big wrong. And you know what? I feel bad for Jon Heyman,” Passan told McAfee. “I feel bad for anyone who’s in a scenario like that. You trust people that you talk to and when they give you bad information, you get screwed by it and it was an unfortunate thing.”
Maybe Heyman was given bad information. But considering he misspelled Judge’s name and proceeded to quickly walked back his entire report, it reads as if the reporter rushed to Twitter without doing much reporting. If Heyman was given information that Judge was going to the Giants, shouldn’t he be a diligent reporter and check in with the team? And if Heyman checked in with the Giants, wouldn’t he have been told they haven’t heard from Judge as he reported minutes later?
In the world of reporting and breaking news on Twitter, there’s more emphasis on being first than right. Heyman may have had what he believed was a credible scoop, but he rushed to Twitter before confirming the information. I get why Passan might not want to pile on, in case he makes a similar mistake at some point in his career, but it’s hard to “feel bad.”
Heyman has been a respected baseball reporter for decades and he fumbled the biggest MLB free agency story of his career all because of the desire to be first.
