Maybe I'm being too critical because I am biased against JJO, but the problem I have with his original story is his inclusion of Oswalt's hypothetical yes when the Astros brass gave Ortiz a concrete "no". IMO the only reason he left that in was to leave open the possibility that the front office might trade Oswalt anyway, despite their explicit denial. The Astros were as clear as they could be, but that didn't fit Ortiz's purposes. He wanted to be the go-to guy for trade deadline yammering, so it wasn't in his interests to shut down the Oswalt trade talk. His response today kinda proves that point--it's all about Jose.
I think the relationship that JdJO has with Oswalt (whether we like the idea or not, it's a true relationship) made it viable for him to ask. Did it have context? Yes. Has it been twisted to be "Oswalt wanting a trade..."? Yes, but not by the original questioner. The bigger picture to me here is how this is commonplace now for the media at large.
Lazy?
Somewhat, yes. Several years ago, Tracy Rigolsby (sp?), an admired baseball writer who deserves his props, could not begin to report the "Roger Clemens returning to the Astros in May" story correctly. Rigolsby instead had Clemens and McLane on the outs because of some bad blood he thought had happened when the Astros decided to pass on granting Clemens arbitration. What was the source of this whole story? Rigolsby would not say, but stood behind his reporting and told everyone possible that Clemens had no intentions of returning to the Astros for any amount of money, the damage was done by McLane (who he also accused of being the owner who ran Nolan Ryan out of town... ahum... that was John J. McMullen). Rigolsby had it on good authority that Clemens was going to return to the Boston Red Sox.
Some folks here wrote Rigolsby e-mails to try and correct at the very least his error on the Nolan Ryan factoid, which to my knowledge was never corrected in the column he wrote. I wrote Rigolsby to ask him where he got his information about hard feelings between McLane and Clemens, because my source told me the two were very close and that McLane would break the bank for Clemens in May and Roger knew that and had no hard feelings about the arbitration issue... because Clemens had no intentions of returning to play baseball until May any way. Rigolsby would not say, but said he had solid information on this story.
Well, he was wrong... not only wrong, but dead wrong, with capital "D" and capital "W" type of Dead Wrong! Not even close to being anywhere near right. He was eons away from capturing one item correct in his story of Clemens and McLane. That April, Clemens signed for 22 million dollars to return to the Houston Astros. Where could the information have come from to make Rigolsby go with the story? Could it have been the Hendricks brothers floating information to Rigolsby to make sure McLane would not be tight fisted with his money? I dunno, all I know was Rigolsby would not listen to what anyone else was telling him, including me via e-mail that he was going to look very bad on this story.
No one really cared afterwards, so I was wrong on that point. But Rigolsby lost a little with me after that and I rarely read him any more.
