Pearlman -- newly updated, with 50% more reasonableness!

On May 18th, ESPN's Jeff Pearlman wrote a column calling for Joe Torre's head.

On May 20th, I wrote that Pearlman was really stupid for saying such a thing.

Yesterday, Pearlman said that he was really stupid for saying such a thing.

I didn't do well in math, but I think the transitive theory holds that I should now have Pearlman's job at ESPN.

It remains to be seen how long the "evil, evil, evil" Barry Bonds should wait by the phone for an apology from Pearlman, but the bar has now been set at just under three months.

UPDATE: Sometimes it's easy to forget how easy it is to simply be a dick on the internet. Example: the post above. I still think that Pearlman was wrong back in May, and I still have different thoughts about Barry Bonds than he does (to be explored in greater depth in a future post). But tone matters. The tone above is "ha, ha, you were wrong and I was right, you silly MSM sportswriter," and I regret putting it that way because, let's face it, that's really juvenile.

And yes, I freely admit that that regret did not enter my mind until Pearlman himself offered a comment to the post. There are real people out in the world who read stuff even the most lowly blogger like me writes, and they deserve the same sort of respect in the blogosphere as we would afford them in a face to face meeting. To do otherwise is cowardly, and today it took Jeff's exceedingly charitable and polite response -- he could have lambasted me for any number of wrongheaded things I have written recently but didn't -- to remind me of that.

Now that I'm thinking a little more reasonably about the world, I think that aside from noting Pearlman's misguided call for Torre's head back in May, it is worth noting that his most recent column represents something very rare and very refreshing: an example of a sports columnist admitting that he may have jumped the gun and actually changing his mind in an open and honest way. Would I prefer that they think twice before jumping the gun in the first place? Sure, but we takes what we can get.

Anyway, we can argue later about whether Pearlman owes Bonds an apology, but for now, I owe him one.