Brennaman update

A brief update to this morning's newsletter

I have a quick update to this morning’s newsletter and an additional thought about Thom Brennaman that I wanted to share. It was subscriber-only, but this update is to everyone.

First, in this morning’s newsletter, I directly quoted Thom Brennaman's use of the homophobic slur and I quote-tweeted Jeff Passan reporting it too. At the time my thinking was “accuracy matters — people should know what he said,” but a good conversation with a friend/subscriber and some personal reflection on my part makes me think that was the wrong move.

Yes, accuracy matters, of course, but (a) there is ample video evidence and reportage making it clear what word Brennaman used; and (b) one can get the point across without holding up a microphone to the bad actor and putting more instances of that hurtful word out into the world. Maybe it’d be different if all of the reporting on it whitewashed it and served to obscure what went down, but that’s not the case here.

Either way, I’m sorry I repeated that word, even in quoting Brennaman. I can't unsend the newsletter, but I have changed it as it reads on the site and I won’t be doing that again.

Second, after sending the newsletter I saw a good bit of Brennaman’s damage control efforts. Specifically, what he told C. Trent Rosecrans of The Athletic. Get this:

Brennaman was asked if he had anything specifically to say to LGBTQ people in particular.

“I have never in my life, not for one second of my life, have I been homophobic, have I been racist, have I been any of those words that are terrible, terrible words,” he told The Athletic. “And I would stand next to any LGBT person in the world, and lock arm-in-arm with them that they have all the same rights as every other person born on God’s green earth.”

This follows up on his “that’s not who I am” thing he said during his on-air effort at an apology last night.

I’m not going to get too deep into the weeds in judging Brennaman’s apologies because the dude was likely freaked out and, really, I don’t give a crap about the guy, but I’ll make two observations:

• People who say “that’s not who I am” are, 100% of the time, the person they are claiming not to be. People who don’t do or say awful things don’t have to spend a lot of time explaining how they acted so wildly out of character. “That’s not who I am” is as big a signpost of someone showing you exactly what they are as the words “quite frankly” signal that someone is about to lie to you; and

• The true test of a person's character is what they do when no one is watching. Or when they think no one is watching. So I'm pretty much not interested in anything Thom Brennaman has to say while he's in damage control mode, here or elsewhere. In addition to his words to The Athletic having been totally disproven a couple of hours before, they mean absolutely zero because they are calculated to save his butt.

We are what we do, not what we say we are, especially when there’s ample demonstrative evidence to the contrary. There is no simpler truth about human nature.