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Mariotti is upset because Tribune columnist Rick Morrissey called him on the carpet for not being there in person to hear Wood’s comments. Does anybody who reads Mariotti with any regularity really believe that if the shoe were on the other foot–if, say, a Tribune columnist had, in absentia, leapt to a similar interpretation of a player’s remarks that the player himself later dismissed as inaccurate (and that other sportswriters didn’t exactly support)–that Mariotti wouldn’t have jumped at the chance to malign that columnist’s credibility? Over the years, Mariotti has used his pen to criticize other writers for a variety of things (see Mariotti’s column in June 2000 about then-Tribune columnist Skip Bayless knowing how to “stay in corporate favor” by writing an anti-Sammy Sosa column while the slugger was undergoing contract negotiations; see Mariotti’s column that same month about the Tribune commissioning “its newspaper hacks to criticize the critics” so the writers can “get attaboys from their bosses,” etc). And Mariotti avoids the central issue when his strongest objections to Morrissey’s criticisms are that Morrissey labeled Mariotti a “jackal” and implied that Mariotti surfs the Internet for secondhand information for his columns. The fact is this: Mariotti never heard Wood’s comments firsthand, and yet went on to draw a nuance out of Wood’s tirade that was thinly supported at best by the other journalists who did hear those remarks.
No, Mariotti deserves no sympathy. The bottom line here is that for Mariotti–who himself recognizes that he is a “big enemy” at the Tribune–to dish out liberal doses of criticism toward the Chicago Tribune and toward the Tribune Co. the way he does, he needs to be able to take reciprocal criticism in stride, instead of whining to Miner about quibbles and about perceived unfair treatment. And his protestations notwithstanding, it doesn’t really matter why Mariotti wasn’t in the Cubs’ locker room. For Mariotti’s vaunted “powers of textual analysis,” as Miner calls them, to have any credibility at all in the future, he needs to actually be present when sports figures hold court.
