A lot of my professional work over the past 20 years has been around helping athletes and coaches at all levels—amateur and professional—understand their professional responsibilities, be aware of the needs and realities of the media, and communicate/navigate through media and public scrutiny with as much integrity and credibility as they possibly can.
Whether these individual clients meet with fans one-on-one, interact with the media daily or occasionally, or encounter more formal public speaking opportunities, the ability to communicate clearly and credibly is vital to their off-field and off-ice endeavors—and success—for a whole host of reasons.
This brings us to a recent situation involving Major League Baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays.
Revealing and/or formally reporting sports injuries is handled a little different from sport to sport.
As gambling is vital to the popularity of pro football in the United States, the NFL has long had a firm policy that teams must disclose all—even minor—injuries the week of the next scheduled game, and to declare the statistical likelihood of a particular athlete being available to play in that game.
Hockey, on the other hand, has a long history of coaches deliberately being vague about the severity of injuries; in recent years it has become a running joke about whether a player has an “upper-body” or “lower-body” injury. NHL players take great pride in playing through pain, but coaches don’t like the opposition to know what injured area they should be going after during a game.
Baseball is a little different. Some guys play with injuries, of course, but teams don’t generally make a point of hiding injury information. A hang-nail puts some guys on the 15-day DL in baseball, and Sammy Sosa missed 15 days a few years ago after he sneezed and pulled a muscle, so what’s to hide?
All this said, an ethicist or perhaps a linguist would no doubt have fun with the following story:
Toronto Blue Jays closer B.J. Ryan was placed on the disabled list earlier this season. Evidently the team had claimed the pitcher had back problems dating back to spring training. Last week, General Manager J.P. Ricciardi declared that it was actually the lefty’s elbow, not his back, that was the problem that ultimately landed the player on the 60-day DL.
As mentioned, this sort of thing (not being straightforward about injuries) happens in hockey all the time, though not in football.
Most fans could care less whether it was a player’s back or his elbow. They simply want to know if the guy is too hurt to play effectively.
In a recent Globe & Mail and Canadian Press story, Ricciardi is quoted as denying he ever “lied” about the nature of Ryan’s injury.
In the interview, Ricciardi is quoted as saying, “It was his elbow that was bothering him. So we said it was his back, so we could have a bit more time.”
More time for what, I’m not sure. But whatever his reason, the fact remains that Ricciardi and the Jays organization reported false information regarding the nature of Ryan’s injury.
Remembering again that masking the details of injury is not entirely uncommon, perhaps more troubling than the initial misinformation was Ricciardi’s explanation of his own behaviour. Ricciardi maintains that he did not lie about Ryan’s reason for being on the DL.
In a questionable twisting of words, Ricciardi reportedly made a point of telling the media, “It’s not lies if we know the truth.”
A lot of people have probably tried to understand that sentence, wondering if that is really what Ricciardi intended to say.
Assuming Ricciardi said what he meant to say, a question for him might be: If you do know the truth and don’t report the truth, and in fact report something else, is that not a lie? In fact, is that not the definition of a lie?
Regardless, it is fair to suggest that whatever equity this General Manager has tried to establish – and milk—with the media and fans over the past several years may be harmed more by the use of intentionally disingenuous language, than by a long losing streak.
Those two things together are an even worse cocktail when it comes to his believability and credibility with the media—and fans.
As I often remind my clients, it generally takes years to build your credibility, but only a few seconds to throw it away.
