Polar Bear Scam (PBS)

This is not one of those columns where I start with an annoying baseball analogy, then slide deftly—OK, jarringly— into something about nuclear war, as I did recently. No, this is about baseball, mostly. It’s also about journalism—bad journalism. In fact, it’s about fake news, to borrow a phrase that far too often emerges from the mouth of our fake president.

By the way, perhaps you can understand my fixation on baseball, if you remember this widely known fact about the Bible. Its very first sentence, as you know, begins with a phrase about baseball: “In the big inning….” In my family, no one has been able to avoid my frequent use of baseball terms, such as five-tool players. And they all know how superstitious I am. Once, I even blamed my wife Judy for causing the Mets to lose to the Yankees by calling home from a meeting at just the wrong moment. My Boston grandchildren had just arrived for a visit, and the first sound they heard was my loudly scatological outburst about that sudden, unexpected loss to the Evil Empire.

Anyway, on to the scam. The Winter Meetings are underway in Orlando, and the powers in baseball have gathered, looking to complete blockbuster trades and improve their teams for next year. Agents are pushing their clients to hold out for the last buck. Commentators and fans are trying to guess which free agents will end up where, and what surprising trades might happen. I’m one of those watching closely. We Mets fans are trying to figure out whether popular, power-hitting first baseman Pete Alonso, who is nicknamed the Polar Bear, will be staying with the Mets. Speculation on air focused last Thursday on this painful question: Would it hurt Mets fans worse if Alonso signs with the Yankees or the Phillies, the Mets’ division rival? Oy!

Then, late Thursday afternoon, in my hospital bed (pneumonia), I received a brief message from my friend, Jack O’Connell: “Alonso signs with the Braves!” Nooooooooooo!!!!! The only team I hate worse than the Braves is the Yankees. The Mets only play the Yankees a few times a year, but they play the Braves a lot, and the Braves always find ways to torment the Mets. Example: Chipper F. Jones of the Braves killed the Mets, always. He hit so well at Shea Stadium, the home of the Mets, that he actually named his son Shea. I hope Shea grows up to be an excellent ballplayer, signs with the Mets, and proceeds to kill the Braves for years. Anyway, that one arrogant act by Chipper is a perfect example of why I can’t stand the Braves. It’s so bad that it affects my choice of attire. Every year, when some team knocks the Yankees out of the playoffs, I buy that team’s hat to show my gratitude, and I wear it all winter, to remind Yankee fans that they don’t get to win the World Series every year. But the only cap I would NOT buy is a Braves cap. So, I hope the Yankees and the Braves never play each other in the World Series. In fact, I hope neither team ever plays in a World Series again.

But I digress. When I saw that message from Jack about Alonso signing with the Braves, I quickly passed on the horrible news to my Met fans pals, including my brother-in-law, Kenny, and his wife, Regina. But quickly, the doubts began to flow. My friend Ron suggested: “Maybe you just had a bad dream.” My answer: “I’m sick, but not sick enough to have had that dream.” Ron wondered: “Is Jack a practical joker or maybe a Yankee fan trying to rile you?” I told him Jack is a serious Met fan, adding:. “So I doubt he is wrong, or mean. If he is wrong, I will apologize for shortening your life span.”

Doubts were flowing in from others, as well. My nieces, Caitlin and Marli, were both taken aback, and their mother, Regina, texted me: “My girls want to know how you know? They can’t find anything about it.” Jack’s son, Ian, also wondered about the source. Then Ron texted that some bogus sports network was offering two headlines: “Alonso to Atlanta and Mets trade Soto to Dodgers. Sounds fishy.”

Indeed. Not too many minutes later, it became clear that the Alonso-to-the- Braves rumor was a total scam. Boy, did I feel like a jerk. I had rattled my family and friends by passing along a story that seemed so horrible that I had to spread the news fast, to avoid suffering alone. In my defense: I was in the hospital at the time, and it’s possible that my tricky lungs might have clouded my brain. Still, no excuse.

For more than four decades, I made my living by manufacturing paragraphs. To be ready for the inevitable, annoying list of copyediting questions, too often in the middle of the night, I had been in the habit of double-checking and triple-checking my stories in Newsday—and before that, at the Waterbury Republican, then at the Staten Island Advance. People might not always have liked the stories, but I can remember only a couple of slips that actually required a correction. I think my most embarrassing faux pas was in a 1987 magazine article that I wrote about the Dickens Fellowship in Manhattan.

The fellowship celebrated the birthday of Charles Dickens in February, and they also had a Dickens Christmas celebration. Having read all of his novels by the time I finished high school, I enjoyed that club. So I wrote the magazine piece, and I proudly distributed copies of it at the Dickens birthday event in 1987. In that process, I soon learned that I had misspelled the name of a woman I quoted, a woman now standing before me. I had assumed—assume makes an ass out of you and me—the spelling of a common name. But because I didn’t double-check, I didn’t find out that she spelled that common name uncommonly. The first paragraph of the first Dickens novel I read, Tale of Two Cities, began: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” With my misspelling, that meeting of the fellowship felt like the worst of times.

Out of a feeling of journalistic and baseball guilt, I wrote a text apologizing to my friends and relatives, acknowledging how wrong I had been to pass along the Polar Bear Scam (PBS). But I also took the occasion to poke a little fun at my friend Jack, who had provided me with the erroneous story in the first place. Jack is a great guy, who spent many years running the Health and Welfare Council of Long Island, helping poor people. In September, I sat at his table at the council’s gala, which honored him for lifetime achievement. Despite his admirable background, I joked in my apology text that Jack was now a former friend. But I quickly added: “Nah! He will always be my friend. But I am going to nudge him often and tell him he owes us something more than a verbal apology. He owes us something dramatic.”

In my apology text, I included Jack’s email address, in case any of my other Mets friends or family members wanted to contact him with a gentle Polar Bear-related comment. I told them: “If you get to speak to him, you’ll learn he has lived a noble and unselfish life, a lot like Jesus. But speaking of Jesus, WWJD, what would Jesus do? (You know, the question Trump never asks.) My bet, Jesus our great brother sure as hell wouldn’t be texting people that Pete Alonso has become a Brave!” I closed that apology with: “Sleep well, Mets fans, if you can.” Soon after that, Regina kindly wrote: “We’ll sleep better than you, Bob! Forgive yourself! We have forgiven you already! And actually it’s still a happy ending to the ‘story.’ It’s not true!!!”

In response to my mea culpa text that night, I got this text, from Judy at home to me in the hospital: “How is what Jack did different from what you did? He heard something and passed it on without checking.” Ouch. So true. The only difference, of course, is that Jack was not a journalist. I was. My training included a lot of double-checking. Later, Jack and I had a good laugh about it. We first met in high school in 1957, and we have been friends too long to allow one Polar Bear Scam get between us.

Let’s hope Alonso to the Braves never happens. But at the Winter Meetings, you never know. I hope that you will chalk up my journalistic failing in this case partly to the pneumonia, but mostly to my general Mets mania, which has caused me to do many loony things over the years (picketing the 1965 Beatles concert at Shea Stadium, for example). And I hope you’ll still continue to read Peace of Mind. For now, I’ll take a few weeks off for Christmas and come back in January with more columns—but with no scams. Meanwhile, when the Felon-in-Chief gripes about “fake news” in response to carefully edited and double-checked stories, remember that the real definition of fake news is not “any story that does not worship the world’s most dangerous narcissist.” The real fake news, as you have just read at excessive length, is a story about Pete Alonso signing with the Braves.