“When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” the headline admits, “and I was wrong about demise of Cleveland Indians.”
Hoynes engendered the ill-will of fans and the Indians players themselves when he put a fork in the team’s post-season hopes after the consecutive losses of starting pitchers Danny Salazar and Carlos Carrasco.
“When a contender loses its No.2 and No.3 starters in September, any plans for an extended stay in October are more fantasy than fact,” Hoynes wrote in his latest column.
This is no secret. This is not a fringe view. And yet, fans and players were outraged. How dare he, was the impression in aggregate. Trevor Bauer led the charge on the player side, calling Hoynes a “coward” for failing to show up at the ballpark the day after his column. Cleveland.com’s content VP Chris Quinn even defended Hoynes’ column in a column of his own, adding fuel to a raging fire by arguing that after 34 years of covering the team, Hoynes had earned the right to make fans furious.
The partisan babble blathers on, but now that Hoynes has apologized, fans are welcoming him back to the fold, treating him like a child who properly wiped his butt after a poo.
@hoynsie Class move. I hoped this was lesson learned. It's playoff baseball…anything can happen and often does. #RallyTogether
— #RallyTogether (@ItsMeDoublEE) October 11, 2016
@hoynsie not easy to admit fault, let alone write/publish it. Humbly written by you and appreciated by us. Welcome back. #RallyTogether
— Travis Margo (@Tmargs) October 11, 2016
But what was his “fault” that should be so difficult to “admit”? His prediction? Hoynes declared in strong words what he thought would happen based on statistics, history, and his own experience. This is what beat writers do. The fact that “in playoff baseball, anything can happen” should merely indicate that predictions will be right about half the time. It’s always good when writers own up to bad predictions, but this shouldn’t be — and should never have been — interpreted as a defect in Hoynsie’s character or as a compromising factor in his ability to effectively cover the team.
This article appears in Oct 5-11, 2016.
There used to be a time when sports team coverage had a clear delineation between the beat reporter and columnists. Heck, there was a time when the beat reporter actually covered every game. But what remains of sports journalism mostly centers on hot takes to generate online clicks and – hopefully – some brief chatter during the daily garbage that masquerades as sports-talk radio.
No writer has any reason to write what he wrote, the way he wrote it. What was his point??? What “information for the reader” could’ve been gained? He could’ve said, “it’s not boding well for them.” Or something like that. ESPN hates Cleveland, and I believe these reporters want to be invited to the cocktail parties, & rub elbows. So the low hanging fruit is to dog Cleveland… Sorry, but no forgiveness here. He could’ve said it a hundred other ways. It was plain nasty, in my opinion…