* Another county heard from

I’m surprised it’s taken this long for players who have written books to come out against Joe Torre.

David Wells — no stranger to controversy himself — evidently called his former manager a “punk” for breaking “the code” and dishing dirt.

The story, reported here by the New York Daily News, offers Wells’ thoughts: “When you break the code, you’re a punk,” Wells said on a Los Angeles sports radio talk show. “If he broke the code, he’s a punk, absolutely.”

Note the word “if,” which leads one to wonder if Wells has read the book — or any, judging by his self-proclaimed sloth in his own auto-bio, Perfect I’m Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches and Baseball, published just before the 2003 season.

And as an example of why some people hate blogs, USA Today‘s ” Game On” focuses on Well’s meaning of the word “punk.”

“David Wells calls Torre a male prostitute?” the headline reads, noting that “Webster’s New World dictionary has a few definitions of punk. Wells was either calling Torre a male prostitute, a smoldering piece of wood, being of poor quality or a young hoodlum.”

Obviously, you can rule out the wood business, but — and maybe it’s my age — what percentage of readers would jump immediately to male prostitute? Is that what the common usage is these days? The problem with the written word is that it often loses something in translation.

It’s just like these teaser headlines one constantly finds on their AOL or Comcast home page: “Grey’s Anatomy star caught in love triangle.” Except the “star” is some third-string actor who appeared on one episode. But they’ve piqued your interest and gotten you to make that all-important “click.”

Tagged as: David Wells, Joe Torre