Tom Verducci PEDs column: Should SI be disclosing?

Tom Verducci is the lead baseball writer at Sports Illustrated, the venerable beacon of hard-hitting sports journalism. Through the years, as we all know, SI has broken countless stories that others would have never thought of looking into or, even if they had, touched. When George Dohrmann won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the University of Minnesota, Sports Illustrated went out and hired him, to its credit.

Tom Verducci is also an on-air contributor to MLB Network. Here is his bio:

http://mlb.mlb.com/network/personalities/?id=5521394

MLB Network is "primarily owned" by Major League Baseball. It should be noted that it is also partially owned by Time Warner, which also owns Sports Illustrated:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLB_Network

The point to all this:

In this week's Sports Illustrated, Tom Verducci wrote the lead Scorecard item, SI's answer to the New Yorker's Talk of the Town. It's a good piece. The primary purpose of the piece is comparing the PED testing systems in MLB and the National Football League. Baseball comes out the winner, and Verducci even quotes Roger Goodell acknowledging such. Like I said, it's a good piece.

The question: In a piece like this, in which Verducci is lifting up Major League Baseball at the expense of another professional league, is Sports Illustrated ethically obligated to acknowledge somewhere that Verducci is also an employee of MLB Network and, by extension, an employee of Major League Baseball? Because it does not.

Frankly, to me, it seems ludicrous that this isn't disclosed. Here is a Major League Baseball employee - who I don't believe should even be contributing to both entities in this capacity - taking out another major professional sports league on a very important issue. And nowhere does Sports Illustrated, long-time pride of the toy department, disclose his potential other interests in doing so.

Am I wrong? Am I right? I throw the question to the gallery.

 

Hard to take anything seriously that Verducci writes related to PED's after his preferred treatment of Clemens.

 

Yeah, this.

Verducci's little "Why I won't vote for PED users for the Hall of Fame!" snot bubble took him from my "must-read" list, to my "never again" list.

 

I figured he was lauding SI to soften the blow of the eventual criticism.

It's fair to say that there are disparate views of SI among this fair assemblage. I can barely stand SI now.

 

Who goes to mixers when you can stay home and read Kant?

 

The guy covers baseball for Sports Illustrated, so it seems reasonable to assume that he loves the sport and sees it through a certain prism. He's biased perhaps because of the sport he loves, and that affects his thinking and how he looks at stories. But that becomes a conflict of interest simply because he works for the MLB Network? That's a stretch, IMHO.

 

When his time comes, Verducci should be excluded from the writers' wing in Cooperstown because of how he glorified the cheaters.

 

It's the hypocrisy that bothers me.

Don't care who cheated (though Lance Armstrong getting disgraced was sweet music). It's clear it was rampant.

For Verducci to glorify some of the heavier cheaters, then never mea culpa, then proclaim he'll never vote for a cheater . . .he was a major part of the machine that allowed this to happen. He became a joke.

 

Yeah, why read someone who gets beat on Gene Banks?

 

He should not be writing a single word about Major League Baseball in other publications if he is working for a publication basically owned by Major League Baseball.

 

SI continues to parade Verducci out as the guy who was out front on the PED in baseball story. They must assume that no one ever read his Clemens stories.

 

This is what I expected Dick to want him to disclose.

But, yes, SI should also disclose his relationship with MLB and the MLB Network. It should be a standard mention in everything they publish by him on baseball.