E:60 . . . every week there's some very good stories, and some fluff

It's well-known that some Latin American players lied about their age when they first signed. It's why no one takes the listed ages of players like El Duque, Livan Hernandez or Julio Franco as gospel. Showing that Tejada did this is no great "gotcha" moment. If anything, it makes E:60 look naive, as if they didn't know that this was a common practice. It's too bad Tejada gave them a good TV moment by walking out of the interview. He should have said, "Yeah, I'm 33 instead of 31. Congratulations, you got me. You wanna reveal my parking tickets, too?"

And if anybody thinks a multi-millionaire who can hire the best immigration lawyers in the country is going to lose his green card over this, they're nuts.

 

Agree 100 percent. I don't mind a good "gotcha" moment in TV journalism but this one was lame, exceeded in lameness only by the amount that ESPN relentlessly promoted the piece.

 

Derek Jeter, we analyzed your handwriting and we found that not all of the autographs you sent to kids who wrote you are actually yours.

Tiger Woods, we followed you for two weeks and found out you don't actually drive a Buick in your free time. You sir, drive a Porsche Boxter. What say you?

 

nobody would care about his age if the steroid thing were not hanging over him, but it is.
and the fact that he's being investigated for something serious means that he could be tripped up for something mundane. the way al capone was nailed for income tax.

agree that the 'gotcha' moment was awkward and semi-comedic. if E60 truly opened a window on its internal process - as it pretends to - it would reveal how it duped tejada into cooperating before it sprang the trap. now, that would be fascinating and refreshingly candid. and great tv.

 

See that's the part that killed me. They teased this report for a week and kept showing the part when Tejada walked out. I thought that was going to be the tip of the iceberg, not the biggest part of the story. Never good when you're reduced to showing your best stuff in the previews; it's like a comedy that shows all of the funny parts in the commercials.

 

Well if the government wanted to bust him on that info and maybe pressure him into giving up more by using that against him, that's understandable. It just seemed like ESPN is the one that exposed this (though they may just have wanted it to seem that way) and the reason they did it was so they could say 'Look at what we did, we exposed this.' If they wanted to a real, in depth story about Tejada try to investigate Tejada and steroids directly. It might not be as easy as getting a birth certificate faxed from the Dominican but it'd probably more interesting to watch. What are all of the investigative reporters that ESPN hired in the last year doing?

And again I really can't believe the Astros PR staff would allow Tejada to get ambushed like that. They didn't think anything was up that it was one of the reporters from E:60 doing the report?

And as for the meetings, the only thing I've learned is that Lisa Salters and Jeremy Schaap really don't seem to get along.

 

Anybody else think the "fight club" thing was sort of fetishy? I guess if you're a nerd and you can't get love, you fight.

 

Chances are that word "ESPN" was invoked instead of "E:60" when the call was made to set up the interview.

 

OK, so there's print journalism, and there's television journalism. Two different things. Few do both well.

Michael Smith is one of the worst TV sports journalists I've ever seen/heard. He can't even do a competent-sounding voiceover. And, furthermore, it wreaks of cynicism that he's sent to do the McFadden story.

 

Very true. Hell I like Simmons' column. Him on TV, doing narration with that voice and awkward interviews? Not as much.

 

Here's my (sure to be unpopular) take on what happened.

Farrey got the goods on Tejada's age and confronted him.

Tejada then had a "moment of conscience" and called the Houston Chronicle (or whomever). Those print folk slanted the story to make ESPN look like the bad guys.

Farrey is a hell of a reporter and a credit to journalism. He's aggressive enough to dive into some of the dirty work most sports journalists just can't stomach.

 

Not sure what the Houston Chronicle has to do with this. The objection is to the the way Farrey ambushed Tejada with the birth certificate on air. Discovering that he was one of god knows how many Latin players who lied about his age when he was a teenager is newsworthy info, but it was hardly worth that kind of grandstanding.