I doubt that Myers did it with the intention of helping Hamels do better.

Yet it could very well result in helping Hamels do better.

That’s possible too. In my view, it all comes down to whether the “according to…” part of this quote refers to the entire paragraph or only to the last sentence:

Brett Myers and Cole Hamels are friends. They ride together to the ballpark nearly every day. And they did not have a confrontation last night, according to Myers and another team official who was present.

I interpreted it to refer only to the last sentence because Martino presumably has firsthand knowledge as to whether Myers and Hamels are friends. And if they are, that fact changes everything.

Heck, even if their confrontation turned out to be real, it would still change everything. I’ve had lots of confrontations with friends. You get over it.

Perhaps he was filming another commercial.

I should give an example. The best one is the one I quoted above from Martino’s blog post earlier today:

Brett Myers and Cole Hamels are friends. They ride together to the ballpark nearly every day. And they did not have a confrontation last night, according to Myers and another team official who was present.

That was the opening paragraph of his post.

A beat writer has two sets of incentives. One, he doesn’t want to piss off the players, because then he won’t be able to get any quotes. But two, he wants to break stories about the players because he’s in the best position to do so, and if he gets scooped, that’ll piss off his editor, which will be even worse for him.

In a situation where a player wants to say something self-serving via the press, the beat writer’s approach is to report it, but at the same time, make it crystal-clear with his tone and word choice that this is only what the player told him, not what actually happened. Otherwise, if the player’s word is disproved later, the writer will look like an idiot.

So if Myers had invented a friendship between himself and Hamels – a statement that Martino would have known to have been false, considering that he sees the players in their element 162 times a year – he would have written something like this:

According to Brett Myers, he and Cole Hamels are friends who ride to the ballpark every day. Myers, along with another team official, also said that Myers and Hamels did not have a confrontation last night.

But look at how different what Martino actually wrote was. He comes right out of the gate with a declarative sentence “Brett Myers and Cole Hamels are friends” – in his own voice, not attributed to Myers. It’s pretty clear that he actually thinks that Myers is telling the truth. If he thought Myers was spinning, he could have written his story a lot more passively (it’s not like Myers is a sophisticated reader who’d be able to tell the difference). Or he could have found the anonymous source who relayed the “catfight” version of the story to begin with, and gotten more detail, made it into a he-said/she-said. He didn’t do that either.