Earlier today, I posted a story about the great season Casey Crosby is having at West Michigan. Toward the end, I made a point about how with young pitchers you are always concerned about health and made reference to Crosby leaving his most recent start after the third inning to drive the point home.

Well, not long after the post went up, there was a comment from somebody posting as Casey's brother - his brother, I'm sure; I'm just playing it safe - stating that his early exit wasn't an injury concern. Rather, he has been working on a two-seam fastball lately and had split open his finger from throwing the new pitch.

I checked everywhere I could think of that traffics in Tiger minor league news and only saw mention of his leaving early. There were no details. Was this a scoop? Naturally, my first instinct once I got home was to highlight the news. However, since I didn't want to end up on the AP wire again, this time as the boob blogger who bought into a bogus tip, I figured I'd better do some digging.

My first step was to email the team to see if they could quickly give this story the thumbs up or thumbs down for veracity. I explained that since it was on my site, I wanted to be able to verify it one way or the other. Their first response stated that they didn't think the story was accurate because he was still scheduled for his next start.

Well, this didn't seem quite like a denial. After all, the comment didn't really imply this was something serious that would cost Crosby a start. So, my next turn was to Facebook. I friended Crosby a long time ago and figured, hey, I'll go right to the source. I still haven't heard back, but after I finished that message I emailed the Caps back. I told them the comment on my site didn't make it sound like the problem was serious, just that it was the reason for his early exit. In other words, the story and his still being in the rotation could both be true. The team, this time, came back with the quick note that he was fine and it was no big deal and nothing out of the ordinary.

This convinced me the story was probably true, so I replied to the comment on my own site, thanking who I assume is Casey's brother. Just to ease my mind, though, I went to Motownsports.com which is actually a very good source for hitting on this type of thing. A lot of their commenters talk to players regularly, and I wouldn't have been surprised if somebody had the scoop. Sure enough, a regular commenter there mentioned a Tweet from friend of T75N and Tigstown.com writer, Mark Anderson, stating the exact same reason for Crosby's leaving the game early.

My method of verification and threshold for taking the story as true probably wouldn't pass muster at the Washington Post, but it was fun nonetheless. I'm still checking with a friend of mine who used to be in the newspaper business whether they have Pulitzer Prizes for blog entries and how you go about submitting something for that process. That would remove the dark cloud that has hung over the blog ever since I was called out by a Minnesota columnist for my trade evaluation "skills".