An ESPN announcer seems to be in hot water after apparently slandering a college baseball player.
Tennessee demanded an apology after analyst Troy Eklund said Volunteers star catcher Evan Russell missed a game on Friday because he had tested positive for performance-enhancers.
In fact, Russell was merely sick, and by Saturday morning he was cleared to return to the lineup, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel.
"It was pretty crazy, failed a drug test so Evan Russell is suspended for the rest of the season," Eklund said while doing color commentary Friday's Missouri State-Oklahoma State game. "So Tennessee is going to have the whole rest of the team tested tomorrow, or the NCAA is. So it's going to be interesting to see if that's just a one-player thing or throughout that is going through that whole entire program. Performance-enhancing drugs is what it was said."
Tennessee said it had spoken to ESPN and was expecting a correction.
"Evan Russell's absence last night had nothing to do with any violation of team, NCAA, or SEC rules," the school said in a statement.
Russell's father also denied the report in his own social media post on Friday night. Instead he cited a "health issue."
"Evan will an evaluation/physical with the Doctor this morning. He hasn't failed any type of test or anything. He had a health issue arise that kept from from playing Yesterday. This is standard testing to be done. Evan will most likely be available today. God bless."
Presumably Eklund was relaying information from a source he considered to be reliable. However, he seems to have gotten it spectacularly wrong on what is a pretty weighty accusation.
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