Clearly this post comes too late, but I wish to speak out on a topic to which I'm deeply sensitive. My name is "Mark Donohue." As it happens, both my family name and my given name have very common alternate spellings. This has been a source of frustration to me since I was old enough to read. Flipping through my parents' mail, seeing things addressed to the "Donahues" drove me halfway up the wall. That's not our name! During my tenure at UC Berkeley's student newspaper I spend a wildly disproportionate amount of office time tracking down the copy editors and layout guys who would repeatedly (and entirely innocently) change my byline from "Donohue" to "Donahue" and raging at them impotently. There was no kind of malicious plot against mine and my family's good name; it was just one of those things. In most desktop publishing software it's much more efficient to retype very short bits of text like bylines and photo captions than it is to cut and paste them from the text files sent down from editorial. Subconsciously guys would read "Donohue" as "Donahue." It's an easy mistake to make and it's not helped along much by the fact that the most famous Donahue in this country spells his name with the "a." (This is a terrible reason to secretly root for the malicious, freedom-hating Catholic League and its figurehead William Donohue, but maybe I'm not such a nice person.)

And don't even get me started on Marcus or Marc-with-a-"c." Those are not my name. I'm a little obsessed with my own identity and I can get irrationally protective about it sometimes. Also, spelling and grammar errors really bother me. There's such an overall lack of professionalism and personal pride in so much modern journalism that it sometimes makes me reconsider law school. At least then I'd be gettin' paid.

Anyway, I direct you to Athlon Sports' Baseball 2007 preview magazine, where on page 76 "Jason Hirsch...projects to be a front-of-the-rotation starter" and on page 77 opposite "Jason Hirsh went 2-1, 3.58 in his final six outings for Houston." Jason, I feel your pain, buddy. We're not going to allow this to stand, at least as far as Bad Altitude is concerned.

Definitively: There is no "c" in Jason Hirsh's surname. There may well be a Jason Hirsch in the United States, probably several; but none of them are rotation candidates for the '07 Rockies. That guy is Jason Hirsh. No "c." Get it right or pay the price, professional baseball writers.

(If anyone wants to write a screenplay about a "Carnivàle"-styled final battle between a protagonist loosely based on me and a satanic Randall Flagg-esque Marc R.T. Donahue character, be my guest. I would totally go see that movie. I feel somehow that Marc R.T. would be a Reds fan, but I can't pin down precisely why exactly.)