WARNING: This post may only of interest to folks who are into media criticism (which should be everybody, if you ask me, since we now live in the era of "fake news") or the Marlins' farm system, but as I'm dead center on that particular Venn diagram, I'm going to write it anyway.
This morning, a tweet floated across my feed from Kyle Glaser over at Baseball America, linking to Vince Lara-Cinisomo's story about how the Marlins' "Stone Garrett, fully recovered from the Josh Naylor stabbing, is excelling in winter ball."
Now, Garrett had a lot of helium heading into last season on prospect lists, and Josh Naylor was arguably the Marlins' top fantasy prospect prior to being swapped for Andrew Cashner in July, so anything that involves both of them is already inherently interesting. If you missed the original story the tweet references, though, things get way wackier.
Back in June, Garrett hit the minor league DL and wound up missing a large portion of the season after suffering a cut on his thumb. The cut was the result of what was described at the time as a "prank" by Naylor involving a knife. Naylor was suspended, Garrett got stitches, and the Marlins eventually dealt Naylor to the Padres.
It wasn't a huge story at the time unless you were a Marlins prospect hound, but it stuck with me for a couple of reasons. First, it reminded me of one of my all-time favorite celebrity quotes. In an interview back in the day, Angelina Jolie was asked about some scars on her neck. Her response? "You're young, you're drunk, you're in love, there's knives... [things] happen," which is pretty much the most Angelina Jolie line ever. Second, I've had a scar on the tip of my right index finger since I was about 10 that resulted from someone horsing around with a knife, so I can relate. (To Garrett's plight, at least, not Angelina's idea of foreplay.)
You'll note, however, that the tweet above doesn't say he was "cut" or "injured". It says "the Josh Naylor stabbing". I replied to Glaser about that on Twitter, and he pointed me towards a Yahoo article and a couple of blog posts from early June that used the same language, also describing the incident as a "stabbing".
Now, that's weird, because the Marlins certainly didn't describe it that way at the time. Their initial statements cast it as a "boys will be boys" kind of thing between roommates. Garrett's agent released a statement which walked back much of what Miami's front office had said, but still didn't go so far as to call it a stabbing and had some problems of its own (first calling the incident a prank, then saying it "...was not a result of horseplay of any kind". I get that you're trying to protect your client and make it clear he wasn't the instigator or a willing participant or anything, but "horseplay" and "prank" are basically synonyms.) The closest thing I'd ever seen to a real explanation for what happened came from the Greensboro News & Record, in which Marlins director of player development Marc Del Piano said Naylor had been trying to scare Garrett as a joke, and Garrett's reaction caused his hand to contact the knife. Since that's just about exactly how I got cut when I was a kid (a classmate was waving an X-acto knife around, and I very cleverly reached out to take it away from them before they hurt somebody...), it sounded entirely plausible to me.
So where did the word "stabbing" come from? It seems to have originated in the headline of the SB Nation blog post, which linked back to a South Florida Sun-Sentinel story which did not use that language. Yahoo then did the same thing, dropping the s-word in their headline but linking back to pieces which didn't, and suddenly it's established news. In fact, that's basically what happened today too. The story talks about "a much-publicized incident involving a knife and former teammate Josh Naylor", but the tweet calls it a stabbing, following the lead of Yahoo.
Does it really matter what word gets used? I think it does. "Stabbing" basically implies malice, and suggests that Naylor attacked Garrett. There's a world of difference in the minds of most readers between "the Josh Naylor stabbing incident" and "Josh Naylor's careless prank involving a knife". The fact that the Marlins traded him away two months later, even after he'd put on a good showing at the Futures Game, also reinforces the idea that they thought Naylor was a problem they needed to get rid of.
The kid hasn't even turned 20 yet, and he's now going to have it hanging over his head that he's the guy who stabbed a teammate in the minors, even though that might be an entirely unfair characterization of what happened.