Buster Olney battles "blogger rumor sites?"

[jaybird2001wi]

I was looking through MLBTradeRumors.com and there was a snippet about Buster Olney targetting blogging type websites about breaking trade news and faking the time stamps to show the blog sites "broke the news first."

 

Nerd alert: This is probably too inside baseball for many people to care, but we find it interesting. A reader sent in an interesting nugget from Buster Olney's column today:

The competition is part of what makes this fun, but this year, there have been times when a particular Web site will backdate its time stamp on the story to make it appear as if that site broke the news first. Happened again on Tuesday, in the aftermath of the Teixeira trade. Something to watch for.

Here's how we saw the Tex deal go down: Reader Cortes sent us an email saying that Will Carroll at Baseball Prospectus wrote something about Kotchman being yanked off the field in Boston, perhaps because he had been dealt. But we couldn't find this link on BP, so we punched in Tex's name into a google news search, and Ken Rosenthal at Fox Sports popped up with the first report of the trade, shortly before 6 p.m. (We quickly posted the link in the comments section.) Then, the 6 p.m. Sportscenter came on and ESPN opened with Keith Law reporting the deal.

To the best of our surfing, we couldn't find anywhere else reporting the trade. Anyone? The whole 'website' thing is throwing us off, though. Would he really refer to Fox Sports as a website, instead of a news outlet or a competitor? But if he's not talking about Fox Sports, then what website is he mentioning?

I am not sure how this works, but could someone please explain this to me in layman's terms or perhaps in plain English?

[dadofandrew]

Buster sounds like he's a bit insecure. You can fake times on many sites though.

[endaround]

Yes you can fake time stamps, but Buster "Rewrite the AP story" Olney has been out of the loop for basically everything this year.