On Thursday, baseball writer Ryan Spaeder tweeted a thread of claims of cheating by a number of major league baseball teams. On Friday, Spaeder retracted the thread, tweeting "I deeply regret everything that I said -- it has turned my life upside down. It was a mistake, and I should not have reported on unfounded allegations."
In between these two sets of tweets, Astros Twitter made much of Spaeder's accusations, as thinly sourced as they were. Astros fans feel that their team has received a disproportionate share of vitriol from baseball fans--especially on social media--and took the accusations against other teams as evidence of what has long been suspected if not proven--that many other teams were using nefarious means to steal signs. What the Astros did in 2017 and 2018 may have broken the rules of baseball, but it was similar to, if not the same as, what many other teams did.
That last statement, like those of Speader in his initial thread, is an fine hypothesis, but is yet to be proven by evidence. The evidence shows that the Astros stole signs, but the evidence that others did is much speculation and rumor.
When I first read Speader's thread on Thursday, it was notable to me how little evidence there was to back up the claims that Spaeder made.
Speader began his thread by saying that "Everything that I am about to say was verified by more than one player." But that was it in thread for validation. Some set of players told him some things. What type of players? Those on the teams that committed the cheating? Or players on other teams who "heard" about the rumors of what other teams were doing? Speader didn't say.
How did these players have knowledge of these cheating systems? Again, no information. How was information relayed to batters? There is little information given (though apparently Adrian Beltre had a friend with binoculars in center field who would wave a t-shirt when an off-speed pitch was coming--and it's possible this friend was invisible since nobody noticed him).
Speader occasionally lists the home/road splits of several players as evidence of the benefits of sign stealing. But these splits run contrary to what we have learned from the data on the Astros sign stealing, which show that the benefit the Astros received was somewhere between modest to nonexistent. The Astros also hit better on the road than at home in 2017.
The information that Spaeder presented was long on accusation and short on proof. Many Astros fans embraced Spaeder's thread because they wanted to believe it. This instinct is strong in humans; academics give it the name confirmation bias. We are more likely to accept information as true about people/teams/things that we like and more likely to reject evidence about people/teams/things that we dislike. You can see this in the real world un a wide variety of settings--ranging from politics to celebrity gossip to your friend's new boyfriend/girlfriend (not good enough for him/her).
Reaction to the Speader thread shows one of the more frustrating realities of modern day media consumption--we are our own editors. One job of editors at reputable journalistic entities is to maintain their institution's reputation. As such, they determine what makes in in print/on air by determining whether that information meets their publication's journalistic standards.
I believe there is at least a kernel of truth in what Speader wrote. There were many stories and rumors of sign stealing bubbling up from major league baseball before the "banging scheme" story broke. There is probably something accurate in what he wrote. But there is little that is provable. There is, as noted, a distinct lack of evidence in what he wrote.
It would make sense to me that a number of reporters have "heard" the same rumors that Speader has, and have tried to report on them. That they have not published anything is an indication that they have not found enough evidence to get past their editors; heck, they probably haven't even shown their editors what they have because it's too weak. And based on Speader's experience, it appears the system at major publications is working.
But on social media, each of us is our own editor. Any individual with an smart phone can publish whatever they want, regardless of whether is it true or not. When we see that statement on social media, we are also in charge of determining for ourselves whether the information we are seeing is accurate and trustworthy. When you read a newspaper or a magazine, that decision is made in large part by the editors, whose standards tell them not to post inaccurate or thinly sourced information.
There are no such requirements on Twitter, Facebook, or whichever form of social media you prefer. Instead, we have to do this ourselves. And the format of social media means that each post you see looks basically the same as any other post. You cannot use the type of publication it is in or the formatting of that publication as context clues for the veracity of what you are reading. It all comes from the name of the poster.
Editing is a difficult job, but it is a paid job. Part of the frustrations of learning information on social media is that we have to do that job ourselves--and we don't get paid for it. It means we have to use reading comprehension, logic, and context skills that we usually only use when compelled by a school assignment or a boss. In short, we have to do extra work to read through social media, more than when we read a newspaper or watch a news program. This is not a lot of fun.
I unfortunately do not have a solution to offer on how to ease this burden. I guess the best is to trim your Facebook feed to friends who post pictures of either their children, their pets, or their lunches. But the reality of getting information off of social media is that it requires us as consumers to do more work to understand what we are seeing.
The lesson of the Ryan Speader debacle is a broader lesson for those of us parsing information in the modern world--we have to do more work to understand what we are seeing.
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