Baseball affidavit

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A front-page story today reported that former major league pitcher Jason Grimsley accused a number of baseball players of using steroids and performance-enhancing drugs, according to a federal affidavit that was unsealed Thursday. The Times article named the players in the affidavit, and went on to report that ‘the unsealed affidavit contradicts a story The Times published Oct. 1, 2006.’

A correction ran as well.

The correction said:

Baseball: A front-page article on Oct. 1, 2006 incorrectly reported that in a search warrant affidavit filed in May 2006 in federal court in Phoenix, an investigator alleged that pitcher Jason Grimsley named former teammates Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Brian Roberts and Jay Gibbons as players linked to performance-enhancing drugs. In the affidavit, which was unsealed Thursday, Grimsley did not name those players. The article also said Grimsley alleged that Miguel Tejada had used steroids. The only mention of Tejada in the affidavit was as part of a conversation with teammates about baseball’s ban of amphetamines. The Times regrets the error, and a clarifying story appears on the front page today.

What several readers asked after reading the story -- written by the same reporter who wrote the 2006 article -- was how, exactly, The Times got it wrong. Readers thought that today’s story should have addressed that.

For now, says Managing Editor John Arthur, it’s not clear how The Times named the wrong players in the 2006 story. Arthur says, ‘As we do with every significant error in the paper, we are looking into how this mistake happened.’