I realize I’m late on this, but that’s because I feel like neither of these things are real stories. However, they’re what everyone is talking about right now, so I’ll add my two cents.
The Pierogi story:
If you haven’t heard it by now, a part-time employee who donned one of the racing pierogi suits was fired for disparaging comments he made about Pirates management on Facebook. Specifically, for saying:
Coonelly extended the contracts of Russell and Huntington through the 2011 season. That means a 19-straight losing streak. Way to go Pirates.
Predictably, the team’s management wasn’t a fan of this, and the employee was fired.
Frequently lost in this discussion is the fact that the employee was also serving suspension for a previous violation of policy.
I understand that many people see Facebook as something that’s “theirs,” but it’s a public forum. By posting his concerns about his employer in a public forum, the decision this guy made was really no different than if he had gone straight to the news media with his comments (aside from the fact that, had he not been fired, nobody in the news would have printed what he had to say.)
This is also an incident that isn’t isolated to just the Pirates. There are plenty of stories like this in all types of fields, to the extent that many companies hold seminars on what is and is not acceptable to put on social networking sites as an employee. Not only that, but just last year an Eagles employee was in the news after being fired for similar reasons.
Add in the fact that Facebook has plenty of privacy settings that would have prevented the employer from seeing the comment had they been implemented by the employee, as well as the fact that the employee cited the first amendment – a law which extends only to the government and not to the private sector – as a reason he shouldn’t be fired, and it’s clear he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.
Lies! Damned lies!:
As you know by my previous post, Neal Huntington and John Russell were both extended by the Pirates. In fact, they were both extended in the offseason.
What you may not have heard by now is that some people apparently feel that not telling the public about this constitutes a lie. Specifically, Bob Smizik, who is so interested in this story that he dug this up from an April 7th fan chat with Frank Coonelly:
`piratefan62: Any talk of contract extension for Neal Huntington and John Russell?”
“Coonelly: No, there has not been any talk of contract extensions, because we have a policy of not discussing such matters publicly. Both Neal and J.R. are keenly focused on turning around the Pittsburgh Pirates and not concerned with their contract status.”
Smizik then does his thing (read: makes a mountain out of a molehill) and calls the statement “a bold-face lie,” asks how we can trust management, dubs the incident “Liargate,” writes about how he’s the only one who’s still talking about it (which is not because it’s a brave frontier, it’s because nobody cares except him), and generally keeps being terrible at writing about baseball.
As I read that statement, it’s not a lie. Is it weird that the team didn’t tell the public that their GM and their manager had been extended? Yes. Is it kinda shady? Yes. Did Coonelly use questionable wording? Yes. But overall, the fan was met with Coonelly telling him that the team doesn’t discuss contractual matters publicly. That’s not a lie, it’s just not the type of answer that the fan wanted to hear.
Now that that’s out of the way, I’m going to get back to covering things about the Pirates that are actually relevant to anything.
