Fungible Convictions

I just saw on SportsCenter that Mike Mussina is retiring. ESPN baseball “analyst” Tim Kurkjian made the argument that Mussina should go to the Hall of Fame thus:

Mussina has a career winning percentage of .638. All other pitchers combined, during Mussina’s career, only had a winning percentage of .501.

Considering every single baseball game has a winning pitcher and a losing pitcher, well. Thanks for your insight, Tim.

Though: where does he get that .001?

The Gawker empire’d sports blog Deadspin today announced its ESPN Accountability Record, a place to catalog all the corrections submitted by ESPN viewers and ESPN.com users. It comes as a welcome rebuke of ESPN’s own Corrections Page:

The site itself has been updated once in the last three weeks, and that’s just with one mistake, a slip that claimed Bradley University was in Peoria, Ind. rather than Peoria, Ill. And that’s it. We’re not saying ESPN is inherently prone to errors, but jeez, with all those stations, and all those Web pages, and all those radio stations … that’s the only one? Really? They do know Emmitt Smith still works there, right?

Anyway, we thought maybe we could help them out. Therefore, we heretofore introduce the ESPN Accountability Record, in which we invite all Deadspin readers to email us any error they find on any ESPN radio affiliate, network or Web page. We will run a complete list once a week and put together our own compilation.

Deadspin has done a remarkable job covering sports news since its launch in the fall of ’05. ESPN, over the same period, seems to be turning into the Howard Hughes of corporations: wildly successful and increasingly paranoid. Deadspin has shown that ESPN can’t provide straight answers to its viewers or its own employees on issues like the sexual misconduct of its broadcasting personalities or its trouble retaining minority employees. And then there’s the news that ESPN is cutting salaries and skimping on the perks that made Bristol a place young people wanted to work, and I’m left with the impression that ESPN’s only remaining bone fide—its “Worldwide Leader in Sports” status—could be whittled away too, by efforts like the Accountability Record.