Boelter pleads guilty in lawmaker attacks, agrees to two life sentences

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

https://twitter.com/Ken_Rosenthal/status/659173200585207809

In the aftermath of last night's World Series game, a real mystery continues to swirl around the starter for the Kansas City Royals' starting pitcher. What did he know about the health of his father and when did he know it? And why did we know it first?

It's an incredible tale of drama which the TV broadcasters decided not to mention but felt compelled to report it on Twitter instead, while congratulating themselves for keeping it a secret.

Edinson Volquez took the mound to start the game, hours after his father died in his native Dominican Republic.

The best and the brightest in the news media still can't seem to get on the same page, however, on the question of whether he was informed of his dad's death before the game, or whether the decision was made not to tell him.

 said the Royals manager, Ned Yost,  declined to tell him about his father  until after he was finished pitching.

"We found out about an hour before, and we said, 'What do you want us to do?'" Yost said. "And the family said, 'We don't want you to tell him. We want him to pitch this game.'

That conflicts with what ESPN's own reporters are still saying, even in the face of evidence to the contrary: that the young man was informed just before starting the game.

"One player, however, told me he was '100 percent' sure that Volquez knew during the game, and other players suggested as much with their postgame comments," 

FoxSports' Ken Rosenthal insists in his column today

, however, says some other players were told -- notably another potential starting pitcher -- but not Volquez.

All of which brings up a distasteful, ethical question for broadcasters and journalists: whether to withhold a big part of a story from an audience?

Why did it matter? Because the same journalists who were keeping it a secret on TV were tweeting about it, which put the rest of us in an uncomfortable position of knowing a person's father had died before the son knew.

https://twitter.com/si_mlb/status/659158443312418817

“You see Eddy out there competing his butt off, and you keep thinking, ‘Well, what’s coming next?’ ” Yost said. “The news is coming next. It kind of put a damper on things for us.”

Well after he had pitched his six innings, the team told Volquez, and Fox later announced the man's death.

It's a family's decision, of course, when to tell a son his father is dead. We cannot judge anyone in such a difficult time. But if a family and team had made a decision in their best interest, sportswriters should have kept their mouths shut on Twitter.

Just as local sportswriters proved by keeping the condition of Flip Saunders a secret, the rest of us had no right to know.

That's a not-very-veiled slam against Twitter, I suppose, but it's worth pointing out that the person primarily responsible for the "irresponsibility" on Twitter was Rosenthal, who, incredibly, was not asked by the Post to explain why he felt it was OK to publicize the father's death on Twitter, but not on TV, particularly when most of the fans in the stadium have more access to Twitter than FoxSports on TV.

NewsCut

Bob Collins

Author

In the aftermath of last night's World Series game, a real mystery continues to swirl around the starter for the Kansas City Royals' starting pitcher. What did he know about the health of his father and when did he know it? And why did we know it first?


(Updated) Why we knew a Royals’ pitcher’s dad died before he knew

Go Deeper.

Like this?

News you can use in your inbox