Friday, September 26, 2008 – Whatever happened to newspapers, TV news, and web news sites reporting news, rather than trying to make their own news?
Unfortunately, ever since sports became “big business” (within the last twenty years or so) media outlets do their best to make news, manipulate news, be the news.
For example, whevever an athlete or team calls a press conference, that alone is never reported. Instead, the news media tells us what they expect the athlete or team… so much so that there seems little reason for the press conference to take place at all!
But the news media doesn’t just report news, they also report rumors, personal tragedies that have no business being news (such as when someone’s small child dies), and so on.
Knock out Ichiro So today, there was an article on a rival to SportsPundit, CBSportline, claiming that Mariners players were so irritated with Ichiro Suzuki this season that some of them actually wanted to ambush him and beat him up!
And at least one player …. apparently…. said he wanted to “knock Ichiro out.”
What good does it do to report this? The author of the article doesn’t name names, so what is Ichiro Suzuki supposed to do for the next few games of this season, and all the games next season… look at each of his teammates and wonder which one of them it is who hates him so much that he actually intends violence?
Frankly, I find it difficult to believe that any athlete, in this day and age when they know that every little thing they say, whether they call it ‘off the record’ or ‘on the record,’ will appear in print, would actually say something like that.
Well…Curt Schilling might say something like that, but he’s the only guy I can think of! And he’s on the Red Sox!
The Good News In good news tonight for Ichiro, he scored his hundredth run of the season today, tying him with the great Lou Gehrig for having 200 hits and 100 runs in eight seasons. Ichiro has done it consecutively, Gehrig did it in 11 seasons.
Ichiro has set the American league record for having eight consecutive seasons with 200 or more hits (overtaking Wade Boggs who had seven in the 1980s), and is tied with Willie Keeler of the National league for eight consecutive seasons - the last season being in 1901.
One record of Keeler’s that Ichiro won’t be able to touch: Keeler had an on-base percentage of greater than .400 for seven straight seasons.