The Futility Infielder

Call it a weird day in the world of baseball journalism. Early Tuesday morning, Baseball Prospectus' Derek Zumsteg and Will Carroll published an article at B-Pro announcing that Pete Rose and Major League Baseball had "reached an agreement that would allow him to return to baseball in 2004, and includes no admission of wrongdoing by Rose..."

The article continues:

The agreement includes removal of Rose from baseball's permanently ineligible list. This would allow Rose to appear on ballots for baseball's Hall of Fame, which bars such banned players from consideration. The agreement allows Rose to be employed by a team in the 2004 season, as long as that position does not involve the day to day operations. That employment restriction would be removed after a year, allowing Rose to return to managing a team as early as the 2005 season if a position is offered to him.

B-Pro went forward with this scoop, but no news organization stepped forward to corroborate the story. Early in the afternoon, ESPN published a report in which Bob DuPuy, MLB's chief operating officer, refuted Zumsteg and Carroll's assertion. DuPuy told ESPN's Jayson Stark that there has been ""no decision, no agreement, no nothing" regarding the Rose reinstatement. In a press release, DuPuy called the Prospectus report "unsubstantiated and totally unfounded," and for good measure, threw in the terms "wholly inaccurate" and "journalistically irresponsible."

The Prospectus folks are sticking by their story. They told ESPN that the report "was compiled using reliable sources. We believe that, in the end, our report will be found to be accurate." In an interview with Salon.com's King Kaufman, Carroll said that the report was based on three sources: "I've got a source in Cincinnati, in the Reds organization, a source in the MLB offices and an independent outside-baseball source." Elaborating on the agreement, Carroll told Kaufman that a deal had been signed last November but wouldn't be announced until after this year's World Series.

Let us consider all of this for a moment. In the near corner, we have the 98-pound challenger, a stellar website when it comes to baseball analysis, with an in-house expert on the Rose case in Zumsteg and an injury guru who's well-connected with baseball insiders in Carroll. Neither, to the best of my knowledge, has any experience in hard news reporting. Baseball Prospectus is a lot of great things, but CNN they are not.

In the far corner, we have the 800-pound gorilla, an organization that has spent the past ten years trying to convince baseball fans that up is down, that the competitive balance of the game is out of whack thanks to the Yankees, that nearly every team in the game is hemorrhaging money at an alarming rate, and that the sky will fall unless the Players Association agrees to a salary cap. Nobody in that house has any credibility when it comes to the truth.

At stake is a story which, even if it's true, won't be corroborated until after the season. No one has stepped forward to back up B-Pro's version of the story, they're not backing down or revealing their sources, and MLB is about as likely to shoot straight on this one as they are to open a restaurant called Joe Stalin's House of Pancakes, Propaganda and Pop Flies. The unlikelihood that MLB will just let Rose off scot-free is topped only by the unlikelihood that somebody with a shred of credibility in the matter will step forward between now and then to offer a definitive statement on the topic.

My advice? Without considering for even a moment whether or not Rose's reinstatement to the game -- particularly into an active role, such as managing the Cincinnati Reds -- is a good thing, let us all take a deep breath and step away from the story before we start arguing -- again -- until we're blue in the face. We've been here before. We've got better things to talk about, pennant races, challenge trades, whiny ballplayers and the violated corpse of the [Second] Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived, for starters. Let's change the subject.

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New blog on the block: Clifford's Big Red Blog, which according to the banner, "is neither big, red nor a blog." He might have added that it's not about the Big Red Machine, either. Cliff's a Yankees fan who's been suffering through their latest bullpen meltdowns. Check him out.

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I've got a new outlet for my writing. I've become a contributing writer at a new website called Baseball Interactive, which has been signing up my blogging brethren left and right. BI is a slick-looking commercial site with scoreboards, standings, and a fair amount of content centered around team pages and commentary, and it now features such luminaries as Mike Carminati of Mike's Baseball Rants and Travis Nelson of Boy of Summer in featured roles. Basically, BI will be syndicating some of our pieces, providing us opportunity to reach more readers.

For those of you looking to break into the lucrative field of Internet baseball writing (average annual salary: $0.16), BI is offering opportunities for team beat reporters (including a Yankees correspondant) and other writers. Get a writing sample together and you're halfway there.

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The New York Times has a sweet piece (written by Alan Schwarz of Baseball America) on the Milwaukee Brewers' two-way wonder, Brook Kieschnick, who I wrote about last month. Schwarz sees Kieschnick as a throwback and notes that the player's determination to find a spot for himself in the big leagues has inspired fans:

Kieschnick hasn't played the field yet but probably will before the year is out. Meanwhile, he has attracted a legion of fans who delight in his becoming baseball's Renaissance man. He is the host of a show on Major League Baseball's Internet radio station, mlb.com. Letter writers relate how they have been inspired to expand their horizons or accept more responsibility at work. "They don't even send me cards to sign," Kieschnick laughs. "They just want to tell me about their lives."

He has yet to play the infield in the bis, but this guy has to be the early favorite for the coveted Futility Infielder of the Year Award: as a pitcher, Kieschnick's lowered his ERA to 4.77, and he's now hit 5 homers to go with his 998 OPS. If there's a fan club, count me in.