Group Seeks to Get Olbermann Dropped as MLB.com Writer for 'Hate Speech'

An online conservative radio group has started a petition site called Respect the Great Game to get Major League Baseball to drop Keith Olbermann as a contributor to its website.

The administrators of the Respect the Great Game site ask: "Why does Major League Baseball allow an individual who relishes hate speech to be associated with it?" They include a video compilation of some of  Olbermann's more colorful rants to illustrate their point.

Olbermann, a former sports broadcaster for ESPN, Fox, and NBC, is "a gifted speaker with a respectable grasp of the great game," according to the site, "but his nightly tirades on MSNBC are often aimed at the very people that fill the stands of baseball parks across our great land."

An update to the site's homepage claims that "Friends/Fans of Keith Olbermann have attacked our site in order to prevent us from expressing our opinion. Funny how that never happens to Olby, huh?"

I contacted the site's administrators to ask for more details. Paul Croteau, director of operations for FTR Radio, which started the Respect the Great Game site, told me in an email that "the site experienced some database related problems due to load, but based on the stats I saw yesterday the traffic we generated should not have caused this problem on its own. This makes me believe that it was an intentional database attack."

The evidence of an attack is not conclusive. Still, the folks at Respect the Great Game shouldn't be surprised to see themselves on Olbermann's "worst person" list some time soon.