By CHRIS RASMUSSEN
You really want to mess with Brett?
ESPN.com's Rob Neyer posted this piece on George Brett yesterday, attempting to link the former Royals star to coke (in order to read Neyer's writing, click here):
“In the early 1980s, many baseball players were using cocaine. Some of them got into trouble, and a few of Brett’s Kansas City teammates went to prison. Now, I’m not going to suggest that Brett was using cocaine, but I do know he was considered one of the hardest partiers in the Midwest at that time. Funny thing, though … Brett never got into any trouble. None that made the papers, anyway.”
Rob Neyer is Big Media, although he won't admit it. He is a published author and a frequent contributor to what is as close as we're going to come to a monopoly in sports journalism. He, like Bill James when he mused that Gaetti and Puckett might have used steroids, should give us all an explanation.
Look, I know that with a blog it is easy to publish un-vetted musings. That said, Neyer presumably has an editor and Neyer (with a column and a book or two under his belt) knows better.
He should explain himself, apologize and preferably both.
As a frequent reader of Neyer's blog, let me tell you what he meant by that: "George Brett is white, which is why he didn't get in trouble or go to jail like his black teammates did." He would tell you that it actually has nothing to do with Brett. He would say that he idolized Brett. The episode merely gave him an excuse to trot out a tired line that shows up in his columns every so often, even when there is absolutely no justification for it. Forget actual evidence, it's just out of place, as only 2 of his 32 commenters pointed out.
Good for you for writing about it, Chris, but he won't apologize. He doesn't think he's wrong, he knows exactly what he's saying, and I can't recall him ever even admitting that he was wrong about something, much less apologizing.
Posted at: July 25, 2008 2:39 PM