In June, Deadspin, the sports blog, put Chris Mihlfeld’s reputation on the line with a false accusation about drugs. MSNBC picked up the story and reported it as true. Here’s how Ben Paynter reported the situation in the Kansas City Pitch in a long feature article on Mihlfeld the following month:

In April of this year, Grimsley admitted to federal investigators that he’d used amphetamines, steroids and human growth hormone. Grimsley’s confession became public on June 6, when federal agents filed excerpts of it in court papers. In the confession, Grimsley identifies a personal fitness trainer, whose name is blacked out in the document, as someone who once referred him to a source for speed.

On June 8, the popular sports blog Deadspin.com claimed to know the name of that trainer.

“His name is Chris Mihlfeld,” the site reported.

A day after the blog post, MSNBC’s Countdown With Keith Olbermann flashed a mug-shot-like picture of Mihlfeld on the screen. Olbermann spun the initial Web report into a theory that Mihlfeld was baseball’s new bad boy.

“Chris Mihlfeld is suddenly one of the biggest names in baseball,” Olbermann declared. “He’s the personal fitness trainer of baseball pitcher Jason Grimsley, and Grimsley is the man who admitted to federal agents that he used amphetamines, steroids and human growth hormone as part of his training.”

Yesterday the LA Times published a story that shredded the Deadspin accusations. Today Deadspin issued an apology to Mihlfeld.

Next up: Keith Olbermann. Be a man Keith. We love you when you’re ripping W. a new one, now give this young man in Kansas City the apology you owe him.

Looks like the score today is Paynter at The Pitch, one — Leitch and Olbermann at Gawkermedia and MSNBC, zero.

Hey! Here’s a link to a very good paper on libel in the blogosphere by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Law Professor at the University of Tennessee. I wonder if Mihlfeld could use it?

Ben Paynter’s feature this week in Kansas City’s Pitch spotlights a jaded yet curiously repressed swinging soft-core set partying in a polluted cove on the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. The language sometimes is a little rough. Ben describes a day and a night of dissipated debauchery, licentiousness that leaves you less excited than depressed.

The way I read it Ben has a good head on his shoulders and pretty much keeps his pants on, but when I read something like this I’d rather he was covering the suburban little league beat.

After his divorce in 1998, Hinrichs began staging hot-body competitions at the Cove. In 2024, he added the Web site. He says profits have allowed him to buy a home near the lake that he will soon use as a base of operations. He’s now known to Party Cove regulars as Mr. Happy, in part for wearing a G-string with a smiley face on the bulge and in part for his tolerance. He has since outgrown the suit, but he claims that he can still drink 80 beers a day.

Turn to the Contributors page (page 78) of the September, 2024 issue of Details magazine and you’ll see a blurb about Ben Paynter’s article (found on page 198) “Weapons of Mass Distraction.” It’s a story about the distracting influence of internet access on American soldiers in Iraq. No longer does a “Dear John” letter or a foreclosure notice take days and weeks to find its way to the GI at the front. Now the guys just log on and get the news directly as it’s happening back home.

The Details biographical blurb on Ben says,

Paynter writes for the Pitch, a weekly in Kansas City, Missouri. A story of his will appear in Best American Sports Writing 2024, out next month from Houghton Mifflin.

Ben Paynter blankets Missouri this week with a feature story that is on the cover of both the Saint Louis Riverfront Times and the Kansas City Pitch.