At the end of December Fox News, like many other media outlets, ran a video segment to honor prominent figures who passed away in 2023. Their feature included the passing of former major-league baseball player Frank Thomas. Unfortunately, the accompanying video and birth-death dates were for the “Big Hurt” Frank Thomas, the Hall-of-Fame first baseman/DH and not for the “Big Donkey” Frank Thomas, the three-time All-Star with the Pittsburgh Pirates and original member of the 1962 New York Mets. 

This obviously was an honest mistake with no ill intent on the part of Fox News, and the Big Hurt quickly went on social media to let everyone know he was, in fact, still alive and well.

It is easy to see how news outlets could mistake one player for another since it is not that uncommon to see players with the same name. A quick search of Baseball Reference shows five Bob Johnsons and four Willie Smiths. Heck, there are two currently active Will Smiths. It puzzles me, however, that a high-end media outfit like Fox News let this mistake get out without someone catching it.

I run this blog on a computer in the bonus room of my house in the small town of Pleasant View, Tenn. My posts are linked to the “Player News” section of the Baseball Reference pages for any player I mention in a post. I had to get approval from Baseball Reference to link my posts to their site, and they have an app that writers must use to automatically link their posts to the players’ pages. Unfortunately, that app does not know, or care, which Bob Johnson, Willie Smith, or Frank Thomas I’m writing about in any given post. As best I can tell it picks the first player in its database for each particular name. That forces me to test each link before I publish to make sure the post is linked to the players I am writing about. I, perhaps like Fox News, learned this the hard way when I published a post and then found it in the “Player News” section of the wrong player.

If I draft a post and mention two-time National League batting champion, Tommy Davis, I have to make sure that the link hooks up with the Tommy Davis who played for 10 different teams from 1959-1976 rather than the Tommy Davis who played in five games with the Baltimore Orioles in 1999. If the link is for the wrong Tommy Davis, then I have to check the Baseball Reference page for the Tommy Davis I want and get the correct HTML reference.  Finally, I have to go into the HTML version of my blog, find the intended language, and replace it with the correct reference for the page to which I want my post to link. To keep this from happening again, I typed out a checklist of things to verify before posting, and linking my posts to the correct player pages is number one on that list.

I don’t mean to sound overly critical, but if I can take these pains with my piddly little blog, you would think a national news outlet could put forth a better effort to make sure they don’t identify the wrong person in a segment. A checklist would be a good place for them to start.

I’m sure it was frustrating to the “Big Hurt” Frank Thomas to find out that Fox News featured him in their end-of-year memorial, but in the grander scheme of things he came out much better than the “Big Donkey” Frank Thomas did.