Howard Medgal writes the Mets blog for the Journal News and does a tremendous job.  He hits on the news both on the field and off the field.  He also recently published Wilpon’s Folly: The Story of a Man, His Fortune, and the New York Mets and that, it seems, has changed the way the Mets are thinking and treating Megdal. It seems that the Mets media relations guru, Jay Horowitz, called Megdal’s boss at The Journal News and told him the team would not credential Megdal any longer. See, most daily papers sports writers are also members of the American Baseball Writers Association. To join, you have to cover a team on daily basis for one news outlet. You have to be a full-time employee. Megdal freelances, writing about sports for many different outlets. He doesn’t qualify, and so his access is at the discretion of the team. And the Mets have decided suddenly to use that discretion to keep Megdal out of the way. Megdal tells his story in the Lohud blog.

But this is a problem for all of us “freelancers.” We have to walk that line of telling the truth and making the team look good. Its not good that the Mets so clearly and so blatantly used their power to censor a member of the media. They haven’t seemed to learn anything over the years about communicating outwardly, and that is a shame. From their standpoint, they need to learn to be grateful for anyone writing about the Mets these days. They need to make it easier on the writers, not more difficult. They need to help people tell their story, unless of course they are hiding. And it seems by their censorship that they are hiding.

Major League Baseball’s policies leave a lot to the discretion of the club. But banning Howard Medgal because he wrote a book isn’t in the best interests of the game. MLB should step in here, and it should work to develop a better, clearer credentialing policy that allows for those of us who write about baseball daily to have the access when needed consistently without the threat that we will be censored in the future. In the interests of full disclosure, it has been a long time since the Mets credentialed me. New York always is a tough place to gain access because of the sheer number of media outlets. But picking and choosing and changing policies to keep people you once allowed in, out, is not a direction any team should be heading towards. The Mets need to be careful. Soon, no one will be left to write about them.