This is why I think blogs have the opportunity to change the way we get news and information and how we deal with it. As time goes on, we will rely less and less on particular gatekeepers in the mainstream media. When my father was a kid, your only source for regular news was the local newspapers and maybe the radio and a newsreel before the double feature at the movie house.
“… [M]y faith in God that evening showed me things I’d never believed.”
Now we can get our information from a wide variety of global media purveyors or straight from the source. Case in point: The other night, during the Red Sox v. Baltimore game, the Orioles announcer, Gary Thorne, said that Sox catcher Doug Mirabelli told him that the famed “bloody sock” worn by Sox pitcher Curt Schilling in Game 6 of the 2004 American League Championship Series was a fake.
Schilling had required ankle surgery during the series, but insisted on pitching anyway (with his doctor’s permission.) The effort of his pitching caused the sutures to bleed leaving a bloody patch. A similar bloody sock from Game 2 of the 2004 World Series is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
In the past, we would have seen condensed statements of denial and even some sports reporters coming to Thorne’s defense and the magic of that special effort by Schilling in 2004 would have been tainted.
But this is 2007 and now Curt Schilling has his own blog on which he can set the record straight.
So for one of the first times this blog serves one of the purposes I’d hoped it would if the need arose. The media hacked and spewed their way to a day or two of stories that had zero basis in truth. A story fabricated by the media, for the media. The best part was that instead of having to sit through a litany of interviews to ‘defend’ myself, or my teammates, I got to do that here. As I said earlier, believe what you need to, whatever makes you sleep better at night is probably your best bet.
The saddest part in all of this is the following. Yesterday, as I was warming up for the game, I got to see a young kid, could not have been more than 20, who had served in Iraq. He was being honored by the Orioles and threw out the first pitch. He was a double amputee who’d lost the lower portion of both of his legs serving his country. He refused to use his cane and getting to see him do that was incredible.
Instead of finding this kid and writing a story that truly matters, something that would and could truly inspire people, the media chose to focus on a story that was over two years old and a completely fabricated lie. What a job.
Was Schilling’s faith a factor?
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