For as long as I can remember, I have been someone who is very leery about believing what I see on social media. I am also someone that, as the saying goes, until I hear something from the horse’s mouth, I don’t take any credence or stock in rumours.
But I, like everyone else over the weekend, fell into the trap that is rumour and innuendo, and believed that Shohei Ohtani was going to sign a contract with the Toronto Blue Jays.
Reporters with sources within talent agencies and teams claimed this was going to happen, and in the end, we were all duped.
Heck, we even tracked a plane from Los Angeles to Toronto with the believe that Shohei was on board. Turns it out it was some guy from Shark Tank…
On Saturday afternoon, once I read Shohei’s post on his official Instagram account that he was moving from Los Angeles (the Angels) to… Los Angeles (the Dodgers), as a sports fan I was filled with mixed emotions.
I was angered that the Jays were unable to land a generational talent.
I was upset at myself for believing what I read online.
Then as the stages of grief progressed, I was happy that he didn’t sign with Toronto. After all, at a reported $700 million over 10 years, the Jays would have been left with a massive bill to pay for the next decade. And as we all know, when a company’s expenses go up, it gets passed on to the consumer – in this case, a Jays fan.
Instead of paying hugely-inflated prices for hot dogs, beer and 500 Level seats this coming season, we can all pay slightly-inflated prices for hot dogs, beer and 500 Level seats, unless we are fortunate enough to come into some free tickets from a friend, employer or someone we do business with.
Disappointment aside – I’ll leave the “was not signing him the right move” arguments to the talking heads on TV and radio – there was one major takeaway I took from this whole debacle.
Sometimes it is better to be late on a story and right, than it is to be first and wrong.
This is something I have always believed in community journalism – I would rather be a few hours behind in reporting a story, but have 100 per cent correct information, than I would being the first to report something and have it blow up in my face.
As my colleagues in the newsroom will attest to, I have a massive dislike for printing corrections or clarifications, and it upsets me when I have to.
In the sports space, there is a difference between stating an opinion – just look at the banter surrounding a possible NHL trade on any hockey broadcast – and reporting something as fact.
If the reporters covering the Ohtani situation had presented their stories as opinion rather than fact, Canadian sports fans may be in a better mood this week.
There is a big different between saying, “Everyone I have spoken to believes Ohtani will sign in Toronto, although nothing has been announced by his camp officially” and “It’s a done deal, Ohtani is going to Toronto and is on a plane today to make it official.”
And it is one thing to be wrong and admit it – like Jon Morosi of MLB Network did – but it’s another to double down on your earlier claims.
Some talking heads in the United States, such as Jon Heyman of the New York Post and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, have written pieces saying that Ohtani “going to the Dodgers is the best thing for baseball.”
Heyman went as far to say, “Toronto is a beautiful city, too, but for non-hockey sports, there’s a small-time feel to the place.”
Mr. Heyman, I urge you to find photos of the Toronto Raptors’ NBA Championship parade in 2019, which saw millions attend and took nearly six hours to make its way from Princes’ Gates at Exhibition Place to Nathan Phillips Square – a 3.9 kilometre (about 2.5 miles for you American folks who don’t understand the metric system), or a 14-minute drive without traffic.
Sounds pretty small-time to me.
Or tell that to the 3,021,904 fans who attended Blue Jays games last season – the eighth most-attended team in all of Major League Baseball.
But I digress. This piece is not meant to crap on American talking heads trashing Canada, it was meant to encourage media literacy.
Find a news source you can trust; double check everything you read online, especially on social media (make sure the account is legit); and more often than not, being the first to report something is not best.
I learned my lesson on the weekend, and I hope others do too.
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Mike Wilson is the editor of Midwestern Newspapers. Comments and feedback are welcome at mwilson@midwesternnewspapers.com.
