Yesterday, FTVLive told you that The Firm’s Tampa station had eliminated the job of Ken Suarez.

We saw Ken’s post on social media that his job had been eliminated.

The post didn’t have much information, although we presume the cute pets are his.

After posting the story, a few people emailed us to say our information was wrong. We corrected it a short time later and decided to post this follow-up today on how we screwed up.

WFLA Reporter Jeff Patterson scolded us and said, “Take a look at the photo you posted of Ken. Does that man look 80 to you?”

How the hell do I know? Martha Stewart is on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and she sure as hell doesn’t look 81 years old. But she is.

Not only did we say that Ken was 80 years old, but we also said he played Major League Baseball before going into TV news.

So, where did that info come from?

After we saw Ken’s tweet, we went to Wikipedia for a bit more information about Ken Suarez and his career. Here’s the link.

In case it gets edited, here are a couple of screenshots of the Wiki page.

Here is a screenshot of the personal life section of the Wiki page:

You can see that it said he is the Polk County Reporter for Fox 13 in Tampa.

That’s where we got the information.

Patterson writes in his scolding email to us, “Mr. Suarez has been a long time competitor of mine and he would never personally complain about this to you.”

Ken might not complain but Jeff Patterson surely wants to.

Patterson goes onto say in his email: “Also, there is a Ken Suarez who played for the Cleveland Indians, but one look at the easily found photos on line and you can see they are two very different people.”

Here is the picture of Ken Suarez who played baseball, followed by a picture of Ken Suarez the Reporter.

I’m not good at this, but these two surely look like they could be the same guy, although years apart.

Patterson ends his email to FTVLive by saying this, “I believe you owe him an apology and an explanation to us all about how you misconstrued these basic facts. You frequently complain about a lack of transparency in the broadcast industry, this is is one case where you need to fess up.”

Just to be clear, I know this reads that Patterson said, “this is is” and that is how he sent it In the email. We would have corrected the typo, but we feared he might call us out for not quoting him accurately.

As for Ken Suarez, Mr. Patterson believes we owe you an apology, despite the fact that you yourself never asked for one.

But, we have said before (excuse the baseball analogy, since you didn’t play) we try to bat 1,000, but we do make mistakes from time to time. When we do, we try to correct the mistake as quickly as we can and we often call ourselves out for screwing up.

I’ve never claimed to be perfect, and I never will. I have found that Wikipedia is a valuable source, but as we can see, they are also wrong occasionally.

But the blame lies will me, and I screwed up. I want to apologize for the mistake, except for the part where I said you played baseball in the major leagues. I won’t say sorry for that because let’s be honest, we all would have loved to be a major leaguer at some point in our lives.

You got to live that dream for a few short hours before Jeff Patterson and others screwed it up.

As we said in the original story, we’re sorry that the station kicked out a longtime Reporter that did a great job to save some money.

That’s this business today, and it sucks.

Good luck and if I’m ever over on your side of the state, maybe you can sign a baseball for me for my office.