This Reds Media Guy Really Wanted To Kick Someone's Ass After Today's Loss [UPDATE] [Media Meltdowns]

Jamie Ramsey is the Reds' assistant director of media relations, and he's very protective of his team, like any good p.r. person. However, Cincinnati has had kind of a rough week and was on its way to losing its fourth straight game. That's when Ramsey started getting into it on Twitter with some Reds fans. Eventually, things got a little out of hand. Let's take a look at how things unraveled over the course of a couple hours.

UPDATE (1:18 EDT): Jamie Ramsey has released a statement on his blog. It reads:

It is with a terrible sense of regret that I come to you tonight to apologize for my embarrssing inability to control my emotions on Twitter and more importantly, my failure to properly represent myself as an employee of the Cincinnati Reds.

As you may have saw (or read), I sent an inappropriate "direct message" to a person who tweeted some pretty nasty things to me. I shouldn't have done it and I'm sorry to those of you I've let down. I also want to apologize to the Reds who for years have trusted me with the keys to @Jamieblog and Better Off Red. They have every reason to feel betrayed tonight by my poor judgment. The Cincinnati Reds organization has worked so hard in developing a culture within the company called the "Reds Way." My actions today are a complete failure to that development.

To those of you who know me or have "followed" me for a while, you know that no one is more loyal to this team than me. "Expect good news" has always been the blog's mantra, more so to get through the rough patches than during a first-place division-title run. In the end, however, that loyalty and my failure to act like a civilized adult is basically what has me in this unfortunate predicament.

Moving forward, I'm terminating the @jamieblog Twitter account effective immediately.

I'm humiliated and I'm sorry.

Jamie

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Wait, Did John Feinstein Really Delay A Basketball Game Five Hours For His Book About Selfless Student Athletes? [Media Meltdowns]

Tuesday morning, we flagged an article in The Millions called "The Problem with Sportswriting." In it, the author, Sebastian Stockman, having dived 544 pages deep into John Feinstein's navel, resurfaces with a great head-slapper. Stockman writes:

Feinstein was researching his book The Last Amateurs, on The Patriot League, a scholarship-free, NCAA Division I athletic conference. Basically, he wanted to attend two games on a certain Saturday, one was at noon, one was at two p.m., and the venues were two-and-a-half hours apart. So, he asked the Holy Cross athletic director to change the time of its game with Lehigh. And, because Feinstein was by this time a perennial bestselling author whose book was sure to give the Patriot League and its schools unpurchasable publicity, the two teams acquiesced, and Feinstein — the reporter who was observing a typical season in the Patriot League — got his way.

Well, we couldn't resist: We dropped $15 on the e-book and can now give you the whole weird story, which is a sort of dickhead's parable about the observer effect. Feinstein, who moonlights as a Washington Post columnist when he's not farting out mediocre books, introduces the anecdote as if confessing to something for which—as you'll see—he feels not the least bit sorry: "Since eleven years have passed, I can now reveal that for all the complaining I've done throughout my adult life about game time being changed for TV, I was responsible for a game time being changed while I was researching The Last Amateurs." He goes on:

Each week I would sit down on Sunday night and plan my schedule for the next week. It would be based on who was playing whom, logistics (a day like the one where I could see two games back-to-back was an obvious choice), and whomever I hadn't seen in a while. I was driving everywhere, knew the hotels cold by midseason, and didn't even really need my credentials since everyone working in all seven buildings knew me by then.

Looking ahead to the last weekend of the season, I saw a problem. Army and Navy were closing out their regular season at Army at noon on Saturday. That was a game I needed to see because it was Army-Navy, because it was the last home game for the Army seniors, and because Navy needed to win to keep pace with Lafayette in the race to finish first. The highest-seeded team hosted the championship game and, given that each had beaten the other at home, that figured to be critical. Lafayette would be at Bucknell on Sunday to close out the season, so there was no problem getting there.

The problem was Chris Spitler.

Had it been early in the season, Lehigh at Holy Cross, scheduled for Saturday at two o'clock, would hardly look like a game I needed to attend. And at this point, both teams were in the bottom half of the league. But Spitler had become a central figure in the book and it was his last home game. Not only that but he was the only Holy Cross senior left and there was certainly something symbolic in that.

There was no way I could be at West Point for a noon game and then at Holy Cross—about two-and-a-half hours away—for a two o'clock game.

I called Mastrandrea. "I know this is crazy," I said, "but do you think there's any way you could play your game that day at seven instead of two?"

Frank thought for a minute. "Logistically, I don't see why not," he said. "There's no TV involved. We could easily get word to our season ticket holders [of whom there were at most three hundred at that point] and our students. As long as Ralph and Sal don't object, I don't see why not."

Neither Ralph nor Sal objected. In fact, they were glad to help me out. It would mean Lehigh would get home much later, but it was a Saturday, so the players could sleep in on Sunday. No one bothered to check with the league office because there would have been such paralysis in making a decision we might still be waiting for an answer right now.

So the game was changed to a seven o'clock tip. The only complaint I heard was from one of the women's assistant coaches at Lehigh. In those days the men and women played doubleheaders in the Patriot League, and the women's tipoff was moved from 12:00 to 4:30. When the women's coaches asked why—a reasonable question—they were told it was to accommodate me.

I guess they didn't like that and one of them decided to tell me so. "You should be ashamed of what you did," she said to me in the hallway of the Hart Center when I walked in at about five o'clock. The women's game was at halftime and Holy Cross, which back then had the best team in league, was winning easily. Apparently that was because of the time change.

I wasn't ashamed and it was well worth the effort.

This is all pretty amazing. (You have to wonder what his bosses at the Washington Post would think if Feinstein ever pulled shit like this for his column. Oh wait—no, you don't.) What's even more amazing is that Feinstein is telling this story himself, in his memoirs, as if it were something noble and brave, an honored veteran's old war story. "Apparently that was because of the time change," Feinstein quips, determined to get in the last word on a Lehigh assistant, unaware that his own memoir makes him out to be a total knob. Hey, at least it's accurate.

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British Newspaper Celebrating British Gold Accidentally Puts Dutch Team On Front Page [Media Meltdowns]

Aug 7, 2012 6:35 PM  

Another huge day for the Brits at the Olympics. They're up to 22 gold medals, their biggest haul since they hosted the games in 1908.

The Daily Express, the self-proclaimed "world's greatest newspaper" (actually a shitty tabloid), put a few of today's champions on tomorrow's front page. From left to right that's triathlete Alistair Brownlee, cyclist Laura Trott, and...hrm. The Netherlands dressage team, who took bronze. Look, here they are again, in a Dutch newspaper where they belong!

For our British readers, here's a lovely AP photo of your actual world champion dressage team, distinguishable by their actual gold medals. It must've been the silly hats that threw off the Express editors.

Via @SimonNRicketts

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This BBC Interview With Chad Le Clos's Father Is The Media Moment Of The Games So Far [Video]

Jul 31, 2012 4:20 PM  

Moments after South African Chad Le Clos denied Michael Phelps gold in the 200 butterfly, BBC sat down with an ecstatic Bert Le Clos to talk about the surprising victory. Funny, bizarre, and often unintelligible due to Bert's Afrikaanglish, it's a must-watch interview and the sort of thing you'd never see in the States because some NBC producer would freak out and cut away early. Enjoy.

For a handy master schedule of every Olympic event, click here.

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Cincinnati News Station Duped By Fake Barbecue-Lovin' Jonathan Broxton Twitter Account [Media Meltdowns]

Jul 31, 2012 5:15 PM  

Jonathan Broxton was just traded to the Cincinnati Reds, which is of course big news at WCPO.com, a local ABC affiliate in Cincinnati.

In the site's original story on the trade, Ian Preuth included a few quotes from the @Brox4AllStarz Twitter account, which he mistakenly believed was operated by the real Jonathan Broxton. The story has since been amended, but we saved a screenshot of the original version:

Fake Twitter accounts have fooled the best of us, yes. And Broxy's a good ol' boy's good ol' boy. But the newsmedia should have been tipped off nonetheless. Anyone who writes "SinseeTown is great" is obviously engaged in some kind of deception.

h/t Chris

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Denver Post Writer Says He Never Meant To Tweet About How "Horny" He Got While Covering The Olympics [Media Meltdowns]

Jul 31, 2012 6:05 PM  

So what prompted John Henderson of the Denver Post to tweet that on Sunday? Denver Westword noted that it appeared in Henderson's timeline not long after he had written separate blog items about a pair of teenage swimmers. Which is ... awkward.

The tweet remained posted for more than 24 hours, but it has since been taken down. So was Henderson guilty of leering in the press box? Well, sort of. He responded to Denver Westword to say it was all a big misunderstanding, see. Henderson had intended for the tweet to be a direct message to a woman with whom he had been, um, conversing. But, you know, he's a newspaper guy still getting acquainted with this whole Twitter thingamajingy concept, and—whoops!—the comment got shared with the entire world by mistake:

"Her comments made me horny. Not any athlete," he stresses, adding, "Good Lord, that came on the heels of a blog about a 16-year-old girl? I really hope nobody made that connection."

Oh, OK. That clears that up. Though now we can't help but picture Henderson sitting there along press row at the pool deck, just sex messaging away in between occasional glances at the 4 x 200 free relay. But at least he never tried to claim he was hacked.

[Denver Westword]

For a handy master schedule of every Olympic event, click here.

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