Pierogi fired for Facebook comments
by jseiner on Jun 19, 2010 10:32 AM EDT
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PrintPer the Post-Gazette:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10170/1066854-63.stm
That'll probably get a good laugh out of John Perrotto. I'm a big supporter of JC and NH, and I have faith that they're at least trying to operate this team in the correct way, but it's hard to not be bothered by the way things are done with the franchise. Stalking employees on Facebook for disparaging comments about the team? Just seems odd, and I don't think one status update is worthy of a firing. I don't know, there's just a very Communist Russia- or New England Patriots-like feel to this organization right now. I'll let you decide which metaphor is more attractive/fitting...
This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of the managing editor (Charlie) or SB Nation. FanPosts are written by Bucs Dugout readers.
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I have to admit...
with all of the talk of accountability and JR/NH getting fired, then extended…this is pretty funny!
Hmmm...
I wonder how the Post-Gazette would deal with an employee under probation making disparaging comments about the company in a public forum. I know what my company would do.
And it is funny how people think that the First Amendment gives them the right to trash their own employer without repercussions. That ain’t the way it works.
Damn.
I was gonna make that point, but you did it for me.
by IAPiratesFan on Jun 19, 2010 1:31 PM EDT up reply actions
Devil's advocate
Because I’m bored and like to stir trouble. As a fan of the team, you obviously have the right to say whatever you want online so long as it isn’t defamatory or anything. Certainly, saying “I don’t like the way ownership runs this team,” is a fine thing to say.
Does an employee of the team who works a part-time job forfeit that right as a fan when he takes on the job? Lost in all this is, to some extent, is that it’s a sports team. This isn’t a guy trashing a political candidate for whom he works for –– just a dude talking baseball.
I don’t have a real strong opinion –– if anything, I think I’m to the point where I agree that the guy deserved to be fired. It is interesting to think that when you take on a job with an MLB team, even one as small as a racing potato treat, you forfeit that right to voice your opinion.
Does an employee of the team who works a part-time job forfeit that right as a fan when he takes on the job?
No. But he forfeits his right to bitch about the team in a public forum.
Not exactly
He retains the right to bitch about the team in a public forum, and the Pirates retain the right to not pay him to run around PNC Park in a pierogie costume.
He was talking baseball thought, he was talking about management...
that’s a big no-no when you are an employee. It would have been one of thinkg if he would have posted something like “man the Pirates are really stinking up Pittsburgh, looks like 18 in a row.” That’s talking baseball. He took the time to insult the people running the organization. That’s stupidity.
Exactly
He specifically said that if his boss wasn’t fired, the Pirates would continue to lose.
Let’s say a Microsoft employee posted on facebook that if Balmer wasn’t fired the company would continue to lose market share and be horrible.
What if even someone working at the Apple store posted that Steve Jobs was a controlling idiot.
Those people would likely be fired if this was discovered.
by MarkInDallas on Jun 19, 2010 3:28 PM EDT up reply actions
That’s true about Balmer and Jobs though.
by thecheeseisblue on Jun 19, 2010 3:59 PM EDT up reply actions
i hope
that you dont work for microsoft or apple and your real name isnt thecheeseisblue!
If that’s not the case and your boss reads this, you are in big trouble!
Damn, I knew I shouldn’t have used my real name when I signed up.
by thecheeseisblue on Jun 19, 2010 5:05 PM EDT up reply actions
Tons of companies have policies saying that you can be fired for making disparaging remarks about the company online. It seems like Facebook is a private place, but it’s not. It’s a public forum. It’s really no different than going on the news with your problems.
A guy got fired from the Eagles a few years ago for doing the same thing.
Honestly, if you’re too dumb to even use the privacy settings so your employer can’t SEE the disparaging remarks…
www.stealingfirstbase.com
Yep, this seems like natural selection to me...
Let’s all cry for the moron who insults the people that sign his paycheck! Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!
This isn't newsworthy...
if I talked openly in a public forum about my bosses being a bunch of losers and said that the company I worked for sucked for not firing them, I’d be terminated too. The Pirates media is going a long way to try and portray NH and FC as the new DL.
by Slick1 on Jun 19, 2010 1:12 PM EDT reply actions 1 recs
The Pirates media is going a long way to try and portray NH and FC as the new DL.
As I recall, while they weren’t easy on him, they were never this hard on DL. Until maybe the very end with the Moskos/Matt Morris stuff, but even that stuff was mostly blamed on Nutting. But I’ve never been accused of remembering things well
A thought on corporations and the First Amendment
I’ve heard a few people complain about The Pirates violating First Amendment rights, but that isn’t true. As of now, the guy is not protected under first amendment right because the constitution has been determined to not apply to corporations. I do have to wonder if that will change after the recent Superme Court ruling on corporate campaign spending being protected by the First Amendment. I’m not a legal expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I would think that if a corporation is now considered to be protected by the First Amendment, then people like this guy would have some form of protection from being fired for a quip like that. That isn’t meant to question the firing of the guy, it’s just to say there are some interesting new legal questions about cases like this,
And a brief comment on the article—the author managed to squeeze almost ten paragraphs between the mother’s quote and the team’s response? And there’s ten paragraphs of information to write about pierogy races?
by Kidspud on Jun 19, 2010 1:32 PM EDT via mobile reply actions
The Constitution only applies to the government (except for the 13th Amend.).
You are confusing the Supreme Court ruling about corps. The First Amend applies to them, but the issue was a law regarding advertising. Laws are gov’t actions, so they cannot infringe on Constitutional rights. The Supreme Court case did not apply Constitutional rights to corporate actions.
The only somewhat possible issue this guy could have, assuming he ever attempts to invoke his First Amendment right, is the fact that taxpayer money funded PNC Park. Since the Pirates play at PNC Park, their could be a possible argument that the gov’t is so intertwined with the Pirates that the Constitution applies to them. But thats probably loser.
Further, even the Gov’t can fire employees for speech under certain circumstnaces, and I’m pretty sure this would be one of them.
The guy that got kicked out of Yankee Stadium for going to the bathroom during God Bless America filed his case on the “taxpayer stadium” ground and lost, so I doubt it would work here.
www.stealingfirstbase.com
Yeah, I figured that argument was bullshit.
From what I remember, the gov’s gotta be pretty intrusive on the private business to make the Cnst. applicable.
But then again . . .
I fire appeals up to our Superior Court on less, so you never know, haha.
Oh, good God.
Seriously?
A company fires an employee for disparaging remarks made towards the company’s ownership – and it’s literally front-page news? How I hate the Pittsburgh media.
Hey, an out is an out - unless you're Mario, in which case it's probably two outs. -UtesFan89
Hard work always beats talent if talent doesn't work hard.
What?
The front page? I guess it’s a slow news day, huh?
by IAPiratesFan on Jun 19, 2010 1:50 PM EDT up reply actions
Newspapers have spent years devoting space to things people don’t care about — city council meetings, school boards, international news etc. If they want to stay in business they should stick to sex, crime, diet tips and pierogis.
I'd tell you about some of the stuff
WE put on the front page, but you never know when the FO might be reading …
What an IDIOT.
Why would you ever think it’s a good idea to post something like that in public about your employer? That’s literally asking to be fired.
Oh God
This pussy’s mother called the media to complain about this.
this is really lame
Like, not a story at all. I work in the news biz so I know all about slow news days, but HELLO??? Don’t talk smack on your employer in a public forum like Facebook! It’s just idiotic. In fact, my boss sent out an e-mail just two weeks ago warning people not to make comments like “Ugh I have to go to stupid work” on FB…don’t slam your employer on Facebook or you will get fired.
For there to be this much uproar over a part-time mascot losing his job for telling the world he thinks his bosses are morons is ridiculous. -1 Post-Gazette.
In fact
If anything, the peg should be, “wow this kid’s an idiot! let’s tell all of Pittsburgh so that we can all point and laugh at him.”
And his mom should be ashamed for calling the news media. I’m sure her little junior never did anything wrong. She should be glad: now he has to go find a real job.
As a fellow media member...
I would like to note that I’ve had multiple people call/text/bring this up in conversation with me today, and all of them have said something to the effect of “You see the pierogi thing from the Post Gazette?”
Complain all you want about how “This isn’t news,” but the fact is people are talking about it, and the website is probably drawing traffic from it. Something has to make money so the paper can pay the dude patrolling the police scanner for a story nobody is probably going to read or care about, but will gladly complain if it doesn’t show up in print the next day.
this is true
is this story important? not really. but it is good for starting conversation.
It’s only news because the local fish wrap put it above the fold on the front page.
by Adam Reynolds on Jun 19, 2010 5:14 PM EDT up reply actions
So
you’d recommend the PG bury the story and miss out on the $$ they’ll make from all the traffic?
To all the people saying that the kid’s firing was an acceptable business move (not directing this so much at you, Slick), I’d love to hear you explain why it’s bad business for the PG to be putting this story on the front page…
I think it's a chicken or the egg thing...
PG knows they have a strong anti-management fan base coupled with some pissed off reporters over the contract situation. I think they are pandering (which will sell papers) but I’m starting to think they have a bigger agenda. Next we’ll be reading an article about NH forgetting to call his father on Father’s Day.
At what point
has DK ever shown an anti-FO agenda? He spends most of his Q&As explaining to short-sited morons why the Pirates can’t sign Joe Free-Agent to a $30M contract, and I really can’t remember reading one thing from him that suggests he has any real biases. He tends to be very, very balanced in his observations, and certainly never talks about the Pirates as openly as, say, John Perrotto, who has been tearing the FO apart since he went full-time at BP.
Also, it’s not like the FO robbed Dan Majors (PG writer who did the story) of a story by withholding the contract stuff. That’d be DK’s story to write. If Majors does have an agenda, I’d like to know where it’s coming from, and why he (or anybody) thinks that an anti-team agenda would ever be a good idea. When the home-town teams win, people buy more papers to read the stories.
I didn't necessarily mean DK...
DK didn’t write that article (as you pointed out). The editors decided to make it a cover story and they have had a couple of very anti Nutting/front office editorials. And I like DK a lot as a beat writer but he can say he is unbiased all he wants but there are times when his “opinions” creep into his work. As an example, he is the one who implied Zach Duke was pulled from his gem of a game last year so the Pirates could keep his arbitration value down…which was absolute nonsense. That’s one example that comes to mind so it does happen, thankfully not often. Frankly, I think DK is awesome at his job and he is the only reason I purchased PG plus.
Fair enough
I will say that the PG posting that story on the front page is the right move to make for the paper financially, so I don’t buy that as evidence of a bias.
Regarding the editorials, I’m not so sure it takes a bias to write that the performance of the Pirates is less than satisfactory, and that success does begin in the front office. Combine that with the fact that most of the PG office doesn’t follow baseball as closely as some here (and are thus more likely to say dumb things like “We just need to spend money!!!!”), and I’m not sure the negative edits are really evidence of an agenda either. It’s just people with an opinion.
Of course, I understand how you might view those things differently, and that’s your right.
I guess agenda is overstating it...
I do think when they get an opportunity to embarass the front office and Nutting they take it. It seems as though the front office has done a nice job of giving them those opportunities recently!
The article is getting buzz
because is it so stupid. Just because people are talking about it doesn’t mean it was the right thing to print—think more long-term. If they posted that the Bucs replaced all the light bulbs in the clubhouse yesterday, we would have the same thread about how dumb the article was. If they printed one of those every week, I’d bet most people would stop reading.
And regarding the editorials, they really should get someone who follows baseball more closely to write them. They are actually notorious for being consistently bad…but I guess that sells papers…
"I’d love to hear you explain why it’s bad business for the PG to be putting this story on the front page…"
It’s bad business because they’re trading their credibility as a news organization (the most valuable coin they have) in exchange for a short-term bump in traffic.
If they want to pander to the lowest common denominator, they might as well just start putting tits on Page 3. I’m sure that’d generate a lot of traffic, too.
by Vlad on Jun 20, 2010 11:49 AM EDT via mobile up reply actions
I was going to say they should put Pamela Anderson above the fold on the front page every day, if they want to increase copies sold to male readership.
by Adam Reynolds on Jun 20, 2010 9:12 PM EDT up reply actions
the orioles lost again
like wtf, we are in the middle of a record losing streak, and we ve gained one game on them?
ONE game?
oh and i dont care much about the pierogi anyway!
I think people are missing some important distinctions
The typical scenario in which an employee gets fired for posting something negative about his or her employer involves a post about the workplace environment or the work itself, or otherwise says something that can be seen as coming from an insider and therefore damaging the employer’s reputation.
In this instance, the “employee” — a peroigi racer and petty entertainer who has nothing to do with the baseball side of the operations — chimed in on a subject that is (a) part of a very public debate among laypersons, (b) has nothing whatsoever to do with his actual job, and © can’t possibly damage the Pirates since the guy has no inside information (and does not appear to have any) and the opinion he voiced is completely bland and held by many or most fans already.
Talk of “rights,” “entitlements,” workplace policies, and trying to compare this scenario to one in which an actual Apple employee criticizes Steve Jobs is sort of beside the point, which is that the whole thing makes the Pirates appear to be very thin-skinned and petty. Anyway, the comparison to Steve Jobs misses the mark as well, since no actual business in a truly competitive market would be run like the Pirates are run in their cushy double-surplus environment.
We are just going to have to agree to disagree on this one...
He called out Neil Huntington basically saying the Pirates will never win with him as GM. He basically told people in a “public” forum that his boss sucks. There isn’t a business/business manager in the country who wouldn’t fire that employee (IMO). And I don’t think the Pirates are different because they are a baseball team…they are a business first. And I really don’t understand the point you are making in the last sentence. Are you saying that because the Pirates receive revenue sharing their employees have the right to criticize them in public settings? Do you thing any of the banks receiving government bail outs would look the other way if one of their employees tweeted that his/her boss was a cheating, lying thief?
I don't care if you are a greeter at Walmart.
If you publicly said that the company CEO was clueless about running the company you would be out of a job.
by MarkInDallas on Jun 19, 2010 6:24 PM EDT up reply actions
The situations still wouldn't be comparable
But let’s say that Walmart had managed to get a massive subsidy from a city and then completely failed to deliver on the promise to the city that gave it that subsidy ten years later, then the city’s newspaper and most of its citizens would view the action as evidence of a petty, arrogant, and inflexible company.
It is what it is. The current management team strikes most Pittsburghers as arrogant, primarily interested in asserting their supremacy over the organization and enforcing their inflexible rules, and completely uninterested in the dissatisfaction of their customers. There are lots of examples to support this view, and this is another, however trivial. (Keep in mind that the primary appeal of the story, past the headline, was to tell the inside story of the pierogi races, and, in that sense, was kind of a media mirror to the Pirates themselves, treating the sideshow as at least as interesting as the main attraction.)
Other fans, like many posters here (who are by and large very knowledgeable fans and very funny, too), like this management team because they can at least take pleasure in following a large quantity of fringe prospects in the low minors — at least some of whom are guaranteed to be in action on any given night in July — and they share this management team’s disdain for the common fan who only cares about the present and about major league wins and losses.
by RafaelBelliup on Jun 19, 2010 7:53 PM EDT up reply actions
I would say that Walmart is probably more widely vilified and with more justification than the PBC.
There are whole books dedicated to bashing Walmart and attributing to it the demise of small family businesses and the disintegration of small towns.
So, I’m not really getting why they aren’t comparable. They are both businesses and they both have a certain type of monopoly status. And, in fact, Walmarts do sometimes get special tax benefits to attract their stores, just like so many businesses do, and in the case of Walmart they then do all they can to put the other tax paying small stores out of business, which leads to the decline of other job opportunities in the community.
by MarkInDallas on Jun 19, 2010 8:41 PM EDT up reply actions
That was a very passive-aggressive, carefully written response.
Put that in your scrapbook. You sound like a community activisit with too much time. Shouldn’t you be fighting petty-thefts or something?
Fired? Bah.
Kid got off easy. The REAL issue here is how far the Pirates’ standards have slid. Back in MY day, the Pirates knew how to DEAL with footracing foodstuff, they knew how to put footracing foodstuff in their PLACE. They knew how to look at a footracing foodstuff and say, “Funny how? How am I funny? You mean I’m funny like a clown? Like I amuse you?” and then … BAM.
But now … now Nutting is even too cheap to hire Randall Simon as a hitman.
I’m through with this team.
You would have thought this guy would have learned after the whole Eagles-Brian Dawkins saga. Sadly not. And now, he’s out about $100 a month.
Pirates, Vikings, Hokies. I'm used to heartbreak. At least I have the Penguins....
"When I put on my uniform, I feel I am the proudest man on earth."
-The Great One
by blackjackfishtaco on Jun 19, 2010 7:57 PM EDT reply actions
The real moral of the story is that you really should mark your Facebook comments as friends-only and/or use custom comment privacy settings.
The franchise's questionable history with mascots continues
We’ve had a Parrot implicated in a drug trial, a Buccaneer arrested for skinny-dipping, and now this Pierogi affair.
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