Breaking the News

When I started writing about the Blue Jays in 2010, I was simply a bored 13-year-old kid, looking for something to stimulate me during the long baseball games that I would watch every night. My brother-in-law had been quite successful in writing a blog about personal finance, so I decided to give blogging a try. I had no dreams about a career in sports journalism, and definitely no thoughts about ever breaking any news in the baseball world.

I don’t remember exactly why, several years later, I decided to start cold-calling, emailing, and messaging agents, but I am pretty sure it had something to do with the success of Chris Cotillo. I saw somebody who was just a year older than me break some serious news stories, and decided that if he could do it at 18, there was no reason I couldn’t do it at 17.

Cotillo was different, as his well-documented rise was always about landing a full-time journalism job. Yet we were both able to start from scratch as young teenagers, compile major-league sources, and break news stories before seasoned veteran reporters. The internet allowed me to do that. But over the course of my brief career as a breaker of big-league news, I discovered that maybe there was a reason that, for decades before this one, only real, adult reporters were doing it.

***

“Any info on the Johnson negotiations? I write about the Jays, and could use a nice scoop.” was the body of the first email I wrote to Josh Johnson’s agent in November of 2013. It had no subject line, and even if the agent wasn’t aware that I was emailing him as a 17-year-old with no professional experience, it probably wasn’t too hard for him to pick up on that from the email. Yet, despite having no reason to reply, he did. “None yet.” he wrote back less than two hours later.

And with that, I was hooked. I followed up with another email four days later, and this time, came away with a lot of previously unreported information, including the number of teams that had inquired about Johnson’s availability, the contract base he was looking for, and the fact that the Blue Jays had had no talks with him.

Being in direct contact with somebody so close to the game was an exhilarating rush. As a kid, baseball players, executives, and agents were like minor deities to me. I was mesmerized by these titans of the industry I had spent countless hours of my childhood focused on. Now, not only was I in contact with one of these figures, I was able to write an article with details of negotiations that nobody else had. The endorphins that were released in my body throughout that experience were not going away. I was addicted to the feeling of being an insider.

***

The problem with having a source who is a player agent is that he is only able to tell you information that you know to be true if it is regarding his client, and even then it must be taken with a grain of salt. Agents, by the very nature of their position, always have an agenda. And when it comes to other players, everything they know is second-hand and isn’t trustworthy. I was limited to information that agents knew about, so the Josh Johnson details were really the only pieces I was able to report. Regrettably, that same winter I also reported about the Blue Jays’ interest in Masahiro Tanaka, but the information from that came from agents and other league personnel, nobody with the Blue Jays. To this day, I still do not know whether what I reported was accurate or complete garbage, made up by Tanaka’s camp and spread around the rumor mill to strengthen Tanaka’s position. But I was young and desperate for more attention, so I reported it anyway.

***

Sometime in 2015 a Blue Jays employee — who we’ll be calling John Doe — started following me on Twitter. I reached out and began talking to him, and started to learn more about things that nobody in the public really knew anything about — things happening deep inside the Blue Jays’ front office. After building up a friendship, I asked him for some news on a few occasions, and he happily obliged.

In July 2015, I was the first to report two-thirds of the Tigers’ return when the Blue Jays acquired David Price. The next winter, I had Gavin Floyd signing with the Blue Jays more than 24 hours before Jon Heyman reported it and the Blue Jays subsequently made it official. I had the small contract details in the Jason Grilli contract in the spring of 2016, and that summer I reported Drew Hutchison was going to the Pirates as the return for Francisco Liriano. This friendship was bearing fruit for me beyond my wildest imagination.

I can’t say it was a two-way relationship. I didn’t offer anything to John in return for all the news he was helping me break. I’ve speculated over the years with family and friends, and the best we have come up with was that maybe he felt more important when he was able to do this. But he was already an employee of a major league baseball team, so I’m not sure how much more important this truly could have made him feel. Perhaps he was just a nice guy and wanted to help a young writer get a head start by making him seem important in the baseball world.

And important I did seem — at least on Twitter, as national writers began to follow me, joining the 3,500 others who decided to wade through all my other tweets in hoping to be there the next time I had something important to say.

***

In January 2017, Jose Bautista had yet to sign a contract with a team, despite everything he had done over the past half-decade. I was pestering Doe throughout the winter for details of negotiations, but nothing materialized. That all changed shortly after 11 a.m. on January 17. Everything I had reported since 2015 was either about inconsequential players or was further information about a large deal, but I was never the first to announce something about a star player. This was different. No other reporter had information about Jose Bautista re-signing with the Blue Jays, but I had it all.

After consulting with my colleagues at Baseball Prospectus Toronto for permission to tweet the news from the website account, I tweeted out the following:

SOURCE: #BlueJays and Jose Bautista in agreement on deal pending physical. Lots of incentives, a mutual option, and could go to 3 years.

— Zombie-P Toronto (@BProToronto) January 17, 2017

140 characters were never so beautiful. And yet, they were extremely terrifying at the same time: I had now put not only my reputation on the line, but also that of BP Toronto. If this news was wrong, we’d be ridiculed across the internet, our credibility would be shot, and nobody would ever value us ever again. It felt like the longest 37 minutes ever, but finally, Ken Rosenthal tweeted out the news as well, and everything was validated. I was now a reputable baseball reporter.

***

After the Bautista story, my reporting started to become the focus of most of my writing and became a lot more detailed. I wrote a piece outlining exactly the thinking of why the Blue Jays chose Ryan Goins for their opening day roster over B.J. Upton. At the beginning of July, I wrote what amounted to a summary of a conference call the Blue Jays had with their baseball ops staff detailing what their trade deadline plans were. After the deadline, I reported that the New York Yankees had claimed Marco Estrada on trade waivers, something nobody else in the industry had or has ever reported since. In September, I published an article about Shohei Ohtani, specifically detailing what was contained in the Blue Jays’ scouting reports on him.

It was the last information I would ever receive from my source with the club.

***

After the Ohtani article, I didn’t hear another word from Doe for more than two months. I began to worry that I did something wrong — that I might have cost him his job. Throughout our relationship, he told me many off-the-record things that I have still never published anywhere, so I knew that I never reported anything he told me not to. Still, I feared the worst. He had unfollowed both me and the BP Toronto account on Twitter, which could have meant only that this was over.

If the feeling of breaking details about a transaction led to a euphoric release of endorphins, the feeling of thinking I cost somebody his job was the complete opposite. The guilt was overwhelming, and as I was coming to terms with closing my writing career before I entered dental school, I couldn’t live with it. I needed to apologize and make sure everything was okay.

Luckily, I had been checking the Blue Jays front office page on their website every day, so I knew that Doe had yet to be terminated, and contacting him via email was easy. I composed my thoughts and apologized profusely, letting him know that I meant no harm, and if he got in any trouble whatsoever, I was so deeply sorry. I thanked him for all that he did for me, and explained that I was forever in his debt. 37 minutes passed, just like it did for the Jose Bautista news, and I had a response in my inbox.

***

The email started out as I imagined it would, with Doe telling me that he “decided to stop any and all conversation with reporters,” as he didn’t “see it as being beneficial on [his] end.” He told me that the Blue Jays had begun an internal investigation of social media and that my name “specifically was brought up during a conference call.” Apparently, when I reported that Marco Estrada was claimed on waivers by the Yankees, my attribution to a Blue Jays source had not gone over well with some parties. According to Doe, only a limited number of people had known of the waiver claim, which made the Blue Jays first begin to question who in their meetings was leaking all of this information, and then to keep details of transactions “much more guarded and on a need-to-know basis.”

The final nail in the coffin had been, as I suspected, the Ohtani article. The language in this one had been way too similar to the language in the Blue Jays actual reports on Ohtani, and the Blue Jays felt that they had “less of a chance signing [Ohtani and other players]” after it was released. The Nippon Ham Fighters, too, had seen the reporting and weren’t happy that yet another team was coveting their player publicly.

I felt terrible that I was partly responsible for all of this. Still, I also felt like I hadn’t really done anything wrong: I was never told not to publish the information or not to ascribe the info to a Blue Jays source. But who was right and who was wrong was, really, just semantics. The fact that I landed Doe in hot water with the organization was really all that mattered. What mattered was that my actions, careless or not, had a real, tangible effect on this employee and, apparently, even the Blue Jays’ international plans. Maybe the Blue Jays would have ended up signing Ohtani if it wasn’t for me. I doubt it, but for all we know, it’s possible. That is a thought that still goes through my head every time I see Ohtani play. He could have been doing it for Toronto.

Doe ended his response by saying he appreciated my apology and that he hoped I understood why he couldn’t share information anymore. I did.

***

Every time I messaged Doe on Twitter and he would reply with new information, it felt like the first time again. As humans, I think we all have some basic desire to be listened to and heard. I never became desensitized to the euphoric rush, the one that soared through my body from the moment I got the notification on my phone that Doe sent me something to hours after I hit publish and saw the retweets and comments pouring in. When I had this information and was able to write about it or tweet it before anybody else, people had to listen to me, and that made me feel important. Maybe importance is what I was seeking, because as a hobbyist and blogger, I knew that everybody who was doing this as a career was obviously going to be taken more seriously than me. I was an outsider turned into an insider, and that game was fun for me. I was winning it, against all odds, because some guy, who himself might just have wanted to be heard, decided to follow me on Twitter one day.

It wasn’t supposed to be this simple for laymen to do the job of a journalist. And, as it turns out, it wasn’t that simple. I thought I was winning the game because, as a “reporter,” I was doing my job, relaying the information I was given by a source. I was reporting important Blue Jays news, all told to me on the record. But I neglected to see the human side of what I was doing, the truth that lay beyond the likes and the retweets and that rush of excitement when I broke a story. Jobs and relationships were at stake with every article that was being written. That’s what professional reporters do, and as somebody who just started doing this as a hobby, maybe it took one real learning experience for me to understand.

I reached out to Doe last month, knowing that with the Blue Jays out of contention and with the trade deadline coming up, it was an important time for him. I wished him well and gave him my best as he went into this busy part of his schedule. It took him a little longer than 37 minutes, but throughout all of the work he puts in, he still found time to respond. Despite what I thought two years ago, this bridge wasn’t burned. I’ll just have to be more careful if I ever try to walk across it again.