Switch-pitcher Pat Venditte of the Oakland Athletics had a splash debut last week when he took the mound against Boston Red Sox batters, but it wasn't all for his ambidextrous abilities.
The East Oregonian published a story that was sweeping the nation, but used a headline that made Venditte sound, well, not human.
Favorite headline of week. He pitches righty, lefty — and evidently, also underwater. Faces Aquaman in next outing. pic.twitter.com/efxaQxFp8Z
— Neill Woelk (@NeillWoelk) June 8, 2015
"It was a word change, the wrong word was chosen in running the headline to fit in the space. And it's one of the things that happens occasionally," East Oregonian editor Daniel Wattenburger said in an interview with OPB's All Things Considered host, Kate Davidson.
Wattenburger said that while people like to think that newspapers are vetted by multiple people, the East Oregonian, like other papers across the nation, doesn't always have the manpower.
"We typically have two people on each page, but we were a little short staffed on Friday, so we only had one," said Wattenburger. "It's hard to catch your own mistake."
The newspaper acknowledged the viral typo in an editorial:
“Sure, we're a little red in the face. It's one thing to have a slip of the tongue, it's another to put a mistake into print, and it's still another to see that mistake splayed across the World Wide Web. And to think: Just a few weeks ago we were Internet heroes, showing the courage and temerity to publish a letter about farts. Now, we're lowly Internet zeros, publishing unconsciously about frogs.”
Wattenburger said the paper has received numerous comments and emails, acknowledging that mistakes like this have been made before, and that the newspaper staff will "live to print another day."