Why Oh Why Doesn't the New Yorker Have Fact-Checkers?

The New Yorker has a nice Talk of the Town piece by Rick Hertzberg about the battle for ownership of the Washington Nationals, and the shameless attempt by congressional Republicans to villainize one ownership group, which includes George Soros as a minor partner, in order to boost one that includes GOP fixer Fred Malek. Malek's resume includes helping George W. Bush acquire the appearance of a real job in his late 40s as a part owner of the Texas Rangers, but he will always be best known as the functionary who, when President Nixon became convinced that Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics were manipulating the unemployment figures, dutifully carried out a presidential order to go count the Jews.

Hertzberg gives a little history of the cellar-dwelling Washington Senators of old, and notes that in 1971, the Senators moved to the hyphen in Dallas-Fort Worth and became the Texas Rangers. But there's a significant error of omission, unusual in a magazine famous for its fact-checking: that wasn't the original Senators, but an expansion team created in 1961 that played in Washington for just ten years. The "real" Washington Senators had moved to Minnesota in 1960 and become the Twins.

[UPDATE: I originally said the team moved to Houston, which was an error. Where are my fact-checkers?]

There's a reason that's relevant: In 1978, Twins' owner Calvin Griffith told a Minnesota group why he moved the team there: "It was when we found out you only had 15,000 blacks here. ...We came here because you?ve got good, hardworking white people here."

So perhaps it is Malek, with his people-counting skills, who actually fits best in the ownership tradition of Washington baseball teams.