Just when it appeared the dust was settling (pending the resolution of the Tom Brady appeal) on #DeflateGate, former NFL official (and Alton Benes doppelgänger) Mark Baltz kicked up a storm of something other than rain when Baltz when on the record with strong suspicions and claims regarding now-reinstated Patriots employee Jim McNally.
So did Baltz make a complaint about McNally six or eight years ago? If so, did the NFL investigate? If so, what happened? The NFL isn’t saying.
The league has no comment on the situation, of any kind.
Plenty of other people have comments. For starters, Baltz claims he worked “10 or 15 games” in Foxboro from 1989 through 2013. And multiple readers have pointed out that, via Pro Football Reference, Baltz worked only five games at New England during the Bill Belichick/Tom Brady era, with only four coming when Brady was playing. (One of Baltz’s games at Gillette Stadium occurred in 2008, when Brady had a torn ACL and Matt Cassel played quarterback.)
So which game prompted Baltz to complain about McNally? The 52-7 win over Washington in 2007? The 2008 game against the Cardinals, when Brady wasn’t playing? The 2009 game against the Ravens? It’s not as if Baltz worked so many games there that he wouldn’t remember which one caused him to report McNally to the league office.
Meanwhile, former NFL official and supervisor of officials Jim Daopoulos has questioned Baltz’s “agenda,” while also calling McNally “one of the really good guys who worked in the locker rooms in . . . the league.”
Daopoulos said he never received any complaints about Baltz while working in the league office.
“There [were] questions [from Baltz] about [McNally] playing catch on the sideline with Tom Brady,” Daopoulos said, via Tom Curran of CSN New England. “Was that against the rules? No. . . . [McNally] had a sideline pass. He could go anywhere on the field.”
While Baltz’s name seemed at first like a new entry into the lengthy #DeflateGate cast of characters, he actually made an appearance in February, via an ESPN Outside The Lines feature that went nowhere. And since the Ted Wells report dredged up an incident regarding McNally’s involvement in a practice ball making its way into a game in 2004, it’s reasonable to assume that if Baltz or anyone else had any relevant information about irregularities involving McNally, it would have made its way into the 243-page dissection of the case.
It didn’t, and now it’s odd to say the least that Baltz is unloading with both barrels at this very late stage of the life cycle of #DeflateGate.
