Under the law, a dead man cannot be defamed. The New York Post nevertheless defamed the late Barry Halper last week.

In a journalistically indefensible page one article, the Post accused Halper of swindling buyers of items from his vast memorabilia collection by passing off uniform shirts, baseballs, historical documents and other artifacts as authentic when they were really fakes.

What the Post didn’t tell its readers was the background of one of the two writers whose names appeared on the story. Peter Nash, a self-proclaimed collector himself.

Nash, a former rapper, has developed a notorious biography in recent years. In 2009, as the result of a lawsuit he filed against a memorabilia auction house, a New Jersey Superior Court judge ordered Nash to pay Robert Lifson and his auction house $760,000 “for the causes of action including but not limited to fraud as found by” the judge, Yolanda Ciccone.

In addition, the judge issued a warrant for Nash’s arrest “to enforce litigant’s rights” – that was Lifson.

But here is Nash accusing Halper of fraud when he himself was found to have defrauded a memorabilia dealer. Yet the Post ignored that fact, identifying Nash simply as a blogger who writes for haulsofshame.com and is working on a book titled “Hauls of Shame: The Cooperstown Conspiracy and the Madoff of Memorabilia.”

“My article wasn’t about me; it was about an article I wrote on my Web site,” Nash said in a telephone interview Saturday. The information about him, he said, has appeared in “numerous articles,” adding’ “I don’t have to write about my lawsuit in every article.”

That’s one of the problems I have with bloggers. They don’t understand the basic rules of journalism. But then the Post apparently doesn’t either. A newspaper has an obligation to its readers to tell them of any possible conflicts of interest or background of their writers that might be relevant to the article.

I believe that very few other newspapers, if any, would have run that story had they known Nash’s background filled with conflicts of interest. It’s the kind of situation that on rare occasion eludes the editors of The New York Times and then requires a huge editor’s note on page two of the paper.

Besides neglecting to mention Nash’s $760,000 penalty and arrest warrant stemming from the suit alleging memorabilia fraud, the Post ignored another significant element its readers might have found worth knowing.

When Halper decided to sell whatever memorabilia remained after a 1999 Sotheby’s auction of his collection, he hired Robert Edward Auctions to handle the sale. R.E.A. is the house owned by Robert Lifson, who demolished Nash in their lawsuit.

It would not take a great leap of suspicion to believe that Nash’s Post article about Halper was his revenge.

Asked about the possibility of people harboring that suspicion, Nash said, “People can have their opinion. I have no comment on that.”

I tried asking a Post editor about the absence of information about Nash with the article, but when I told him the reason for my call he quickly connected me to the extension of Brad Hamilton, a Post reporter who was Nash’s co-author. Hamilton, however, didn’t answer and didn’t return that call.

This was not a case of the Post’s not knowing Nash’s background. It ran an article last October in which the lawsuit was mentioned.

That the Post would not provide full and significant disclosure should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the tabloid. Before Rupert Murdoch bought the Post from Dorothy Schiff in 1976, it was not only a reputable newspaper but a good one with the best sports section in New York. Now neither the paper nor the sports section is worth its weight in newsprint.

The Halper article is the kind of story the Post thrives on. It fits the practice that a former Post sports writer articulated: never let the facts get in the way of a good story. And he made sure they didn’t. The Post, under Murdoch, has long followed the same practice.

That is not to say that nothing Nash (at left) wrote about Halper was correct. Even Halper’s son, Jason, a New Jersey lawyer, has acknowledged that his father’s collection might have included some inauthentic pieces among what he said were more than one million items.

“My father was not a forensic expert,” Jason Halper said in response to the Nash accusations, “and he never claimed to be an authenticator, and he certainly may have been gullible when he was presented with exciting finds.”

Furthermore, he said, “When certain items were said to be replicas and not originals, he either did not sell them or he expressly relabeled them as replicas without dispute. This includes the Ty Cobb, Pud Galvin, Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth uniforms referenced by Mr. Nash in his article. In fact, many of the items identified in Mr. Nash’s article, such as the Ty Cobb shotgun, were not sold at all by my father. Evidently, Mr. Nash did not want such facts to get in the way of his public smear campaign.”

Or to get in the way of a good story.

I am less interested in the debate over good memorabilia and bad memorabilia than I am about the issues the Post has created by ignoring Nash’s background. But I looked into one of Nash’s accusations, one concerning the Hall of Fame and the part of Halper’s collection that Major League Baseball bought and gave to the Hall.

Allegedly finding problems with various items, including a uniform shirt purported to have been worn by Shoeless Joe Jackson, Nash wrote, “Curators ultimately decided to not exhibit some items and returned them to Halper.”

Asked if the Hall had rejected items from Halper’s collection, Brad Horn, senior director of communications at the Hall, said in a telephone interview, “In one instance we have addressed an item from that collection. It was in the Fall of 2010. Joe Jackson’s jersey showed some inconsistency with the timing so we removed it from display.”

Nash mentioned the Jackson jersey, which had been previously written about, but he used the plural “items.” Has the Hall rejected other Halper items?

“Jackson is the only item we reviewed and made a conclusion,” Horn said.

Were any other items returned to Halper?

“Not that I have specific knowledge to,” he said. “I don’t think I have that information.” Would he know it if anything else had been returned? “I think I would have that information,” Horn said.

In my telephone conversation with Nash, he claimed to have evidence to support every one of his multitude of allegations of Halper’s fraud. He said it was too simplistic to say that Halper was naïve and gullible and was swindled himself in buying items that turned out to be fakes.

On the other hand, a man who knew Halper probably better than anyone said that might have been Halper’s problem precisely.

“Whether you want to call him gullible or too trusting of people, there was a certain naivete to Barry,” said Marvin Goldklang, also a limited partner in the Yankees and long-time friend who lived across the street from Halper in Livingston, N.J.

“That makes it possible that items in his collection were not authentic, but did he ever intend to defraud anyone? Absolutely not.”

I knew Halper, who died in 2005, from the time he became a limited partner of George Steinbrenner in the Yankees’ ownership. Ours was a professional relationship, and I found him to be a good and honest man.

He periodically invited me to see his collection, which he housed at his home in Livingston, N. J., but I never found the time for what I figured would likely turn into an all-day visit.

And anyway I wasn’t a fan of memorabilia. I have never collected and have never understood the mad desire to pay lots of money for old bats and balls.

All of that said, I would be surprised if Halper were the evil person Nash has portrayed him to have been. I doubt that Halper had a fraudulent bone in his body.

I don’t know Nash at all. Saturday was the first time I spoke with him. The Post story, he said, resulted from the paper’s contacting him after reading his blogs about Halper and asked him to write one for the Post. He said he had written probably 30 articles about Halper for his Web site. He sounds like a man obsessed. I haven’t written nearly that many columns about Marvin Miller.

Goldklang offered a few reasons why Halper was not out to con anyone, as Nash charged. For one thing, Goldklang said in a telephone interview, Halper was not in the memorabilia business to sell the items he collected.

“His plan was to create a museum,” Goldklang said, “not sell things. Most of the stuff he acquired wasn’t for the purpose of selling it.”

Goldklang’s best reason, I thought for Halper’s being legitimate with his memorabilia collection involved the Yankees.

Nash’s article began with a 1985 scene at Yankee Stadium in which Steinbrenner, manager Yogi Berra and several players were posing for a picture for The Sporting News wearing old uniforms from Halper’s collection. The uniforms were all fake, Nash wrote.

If they were fakes, did Halper know it? Not a chance, Goldklang said.

“Barry was afraid of George,” Goldklang said. “I know how important his relationship with the Yankees was to Barry and he never would have done anything to jeopardize that.”

As one who has long opposed the idea of instant replay in baseball, I have to admit the umpires are making a strong case for introducing replays on a game-wide basis. How can they be so bad?

Three weeks ago they couldn’t count to four, as in four balls. The other night an umpire couldn’t see a tag right in front of him. The tag was clear enough that it was seen by everyone watching on television and the fans who remained in the 19th inning at Turner Field in Atlanta.

The call by umpire Jerry Meals would have been bad in any circumstance, but the timing made it worse. It decided the outcome of the game between two playoff contenders, the Braves and the Pirates.

To digress for a moment, I can’t believe I just used the words Pirates and contender in the same sentence. How, after a major league-record 18 consecutive losing seasons, are the Pirates contending for the National League Central title?

They may not maintain that status for long, but they have a better chance of doing it if the umpires make the right calls. If Meals had called Julio Lugo out at the plate, the Pirates could conceivably have escaped the 19th with a 3-3 tie and a chance to pull out a win.

The Meals’ mess was not unique. Two other times earlier in July bad calls brought out the worst in umpiring …

In a game between the Mets and the Yankees July 1 Jerry Layne called Jose Reyes out at third base on what he said was a sweep tag by Alex Rodriguez. Replays said otherwise.

In a July 6 game in which the Red Sox edged the Blue Jays, 3-2, umpire Brian Knight called Edwin Encarnacion out at home for the final out of the game.

“We should still be playing,” John Farrell, the Toronto manager, told reporters after he saw a replay. “That play is right in front of Brian Knight. It was clear that Edwin did a good job sliding around the plant leg of Tek (Jason Varitek). His swipe tag missed him by no less than a foot.”

Swipe tags, which have become increasingly popular, even among catchers, have seemingly created problems for umpires because tags are less obvious and more difficult to discern. Some people think players have adopted the tag for reasons of style rather than effectiveness.

Whatever the reason, the swipe tag is here to stay, and umpires have to improve their views of them. If they don’t, baseball may be forced to expand the use of replay, which made its controversial entry into baseball a couple of years ago.

Until now, replays have been used for boundary calls, primarily for home runs. Commissioner Bud Selig has said repeatedly that the use of replay will not be expanded, but if his umpires continue to embarrass baseball, what choice will he have?

Several hours after the Meals call ended the 19-inning game, Frank Coonelly, the Pirates’ president, who formerly was a labor lawyer in the commissioner’s office, registered a protest with that office.

“The Pittsburgh Pirates organization is extremely disappointed by the way its 19-inning game against the Atlanta Braves ended earlier this morning,” Coonelly wrote in a letter released by the Pirates. “The game of baseball and this game in particular, filled with superlative performances by players on both clubs, deserved much better. We have filed a formal complaint with the Commissioner.

“While we cannot begin to understand how Umpire Jerry Meals did not see the tag made by Michael McKenry three feet in front of home plate, we do not question the integrity of Mr. Meals. Instead, we know that Mr. Meals’ intention was to get the call right. Jerry Meals has been umpiring Major League games for 14 years and has always done so with integrity and professionalism. He got this one wrong.

“For Pirates fans, we may have lost a game in the standings as a result of a missed call but this game, and the gutsy performances by so many of our players, will make us stronger, more unified and more determined as we continue the battle for the National League Central Division.”

Again, I have to ask the question whoever thought we would have heard the president of the Pirates talk about a battle for a division championship? It was almost worth Meals terrible call to hear that. Well, not really, but it was good to hear a realistic response from Major League Baseball.

In a subsequent statement, Joe Torre, executive vice president for baseball operations, did not try to cover up Meals’ mistake.

“Unfortunately,” said Torre, a former player and manager, “it appears that the call was missed, as Jerry Meals acknowledged after the game. Many swipe tags are not applied to the runner with solid contact, but the tag was applied and the game should have remained tied.

“I have spoken with Jerry, who is a hard-working, respected umpire, and no one feels worse than him. We know that this is not a product of a lack of effort.

“Having been the beneficiary of calls like this and having been on the other end in my experience as a player and as a manager, I have felt that this has always been a part of our game. As a member of the Commissioner’s Special Committee for On-Field Matters, I have heard many discussions on umpiring and technology over the past two years, including both the pros and the cons of expanding replay. However, most in the game recognize that the human element always will be part of baseball and instant replay can never replace all judgment calls by umpires. Obviously, a play like this is going to spark a lot of conversation, and we will continue to consider all viewpoints in our ongoing discussions regarding officiating in baseball.

“We expect the best from our umpires, and an umpire would tell you he expects the best of himself. We have to continue to strive for accuracy, consistency and professionalism day in and day out.”

I have opposed replays because they are intrusive and time-consuming; games are long enough without adding time for umpires to study replays. I also have believed that players and managers make mistakes so why not umpires? That’s part of the human element of the game.

These recent blown calls, however, indicate the umpiring is getting worse and open baseball to ridicule. Expanded replay is coming and will arrive if the umpires don’t stop messing up. Baseball lives on its integrity. If fans lose faith in its integrity, Selig, the owners and the players might as well take their millions and go home.

I offer one stop-gap measure before baseball is compelled to surrender to expanded replay. Give the manager the right to dispute calls and request, at least, that the four umpires discuss the play in question, even if it’s the play that ended the game.

Maybe in the Meals’ incident, one of the other umpires saw the tag and could have enabled the crew to get it right. In the present system, no umpire, unless asked, will tell another umpire he blew the call.

The commissioner could institute that step immediately and avoid at least some bad calls. The umpires say they want to get all of the calls right. Selig could give them a better chance to do that.

Two years ago, not long after the All-Star break, maybe the beginning of August, I declared that the Minnesota Twins would win the American League Central title. The Twins, at the time, were somewhere from four to six games behind Detroit and hadn’t posed a challenge to the Tigers all season.

The problem was I didn’t make my declaration to anyone but myself; I never wrote it anywhere so I couldn’t take credit when the Twins pulled even with the Tigers on the next-to-last day of the season, then beat them in a one-game playoff.

I’m not going to make that mistake again. I will say simply they’re back.

I will say also that I don’t feel as strong about these Twins as I did about the 2009 Twins, and I wouldn’t feel strong about them at all if I listened to the executive of an American League club who disagreed with me and pronounced them “a .500 club.” But he also acknowledged that the Twins have “had a lot of injuries” and they have “been impressive in what they have accomplished as far as coming back.”

The Twins have lagged behind three other teams in the division virtually the entire season and some days they were behind all four of the other Central teams.

“We dug ourselves a huge hole early in season,” general manager Bill Smith said, referring to the team’s 17-37 record in the first third of the season. “But our managers and coaches and players never quit.

We have got our work cut out for us, but we’re in contention.”

After games of June 1, the Twins were 16 ½ games from first. When I talked to Smith last Thursday, they had slashed that deficit to 5 games.

Since then, they lost twice to the first-place Tigers, showing how difficult their task is. Earlier in the week they lost a doubleheader to the first-place Indians but rebounded and won the final two games of the series. They also won the third game of the four-game Detroit series, putting themselves in position with a win Sunday to do to the Tigers what they did to the Indians.

Tigers, Indians, White Sox, Twins: it promises to be a good, down-to-the-end race, and probably any of those teams could win it.

Before the season, the White Sox were generally considered the division favorite and, in fact, the executive said, he ranked them second strongest in the league behind the Red Sox. But, he added, speaking of developments since the season began, “The White Sox have a lot of dysfunction.”

What the Twins have had is a lot of injuries, far more and far more significantly than their division rivals.

First baseman Justin Morneau and center fielder Denard Span are currently on the disabled list, Span since June 9, Morneau since a day later.

Last year Morneau missed the rest of the season after suffering a concussion July 7. When he was injured, Morneau was leading the league in on-base percentage and was third in batting average and slugging percentage. Before he was hurt this season, he was hitting .225 in 55 games.

“We’re looking to getting him healthy and getting him back,” Smith said. “He had a herniated disk in his neck and a wrist issue. We decided to take care of it all at once.”

Joe Mauer, the Twins’ most valued player, missed 57 games, slightly more than a third of a season, with leg problems. Since his return June 17, Mauer has raised his batting average 60 points to .295. He has also

played first base in a couple of games, but that’s not to be taken as a sign of things to come.

“Joe’s our catcher,” Smith said. “He’s an all-star, an impact player offensively and when he catches defensively. When he goes behind the plate that’s where we want him.”

Jason Kubel (with his better than .300 batting average) is back in right field after having missed all of June and three weeks of July with an ankle injury.

Tsuyoshi Nishioka, the Japanese import, is into his second month back at shortstop after he missed all but the first week of the first two and a half months of the season with a fractured leg.

Left fielder Delmon Young and designated hitter Jim Thome have visited the disabled list twice each, each with oblique and leg injuries. Thome missed most of May and June. Young sat out parts of each month of the season.

“That’s just position players,” Smith said. “We’ve had pitchers on the disabled list as well.”

Kevin Slowey, who won 23 games and lost 9 the past two seasons, has been on the disabled list twice, first with a shoulder ailment, then with an abdominal strain. He was activated last week but optioned to Triple A. He has been available to the Twins for three weeks and has started no games this season.

Other visitors to the disabled list have been starters Francisco Liriano and Scott Baker and relievers Joe Nathan, Glen Perkins and Jose Mijares.

Smith, however, is not looking to injuries to excuse the team’s poor play earlier in the season.

“Everybody goes through injuries,” he said. “No one is crying over our injuries. They have their own.”

That includes the teams ahead of the Twins in the division.

The Indians have led the division most of the season but in recent days have been supplanted by the Tigers. One of the reasons might be the presence of two-thirds of the Cleveland outfield on the disabled list.

Shin-Soo Choo has been on the list for a month with a wrist injury, and last week Grady Sizemore made the list for the third time this season, this time with a knee ailment.

In all, the Indians have had 15 placements on the disabled list. The Twins have had 17. The Tigers have had nine and the White Sox only seven.

Carlos Guillen, the Tigers’ second baseman, didn’t start his season until July 16 because of a knee injury. Magglio Ordonez, right fielder-designated hitter, missed a month with an ankle injury.

The most prominent members of the White Sox who have served time on the disabled list are two starting pitchers, John Danks and Jake Peavy. Danks missed a little more than three weeks with an oblique injury while Peavy has been on the list twice with pelvis and shoulder injuries.

Peavy has endured a succession of physical problems since he won the Cy Young award with San Diego in 2007, and the White Sox could have used a 2007-type performance from Peavy to help them produce the division title that had been forecast for them.

Much, of course, can happen in the next two months. For one thing, it is a forgiving division, as the Twins have learned. The Tigers, too. They fell 8 games out early in May and now lead the division.

“It’s obvious that it’s very closely bunched with four clubs,” Dave Dombrowski, the Detroit general manager, said. “We play the majority of games in our division and it will be settled in the division.”

With the majority games to be played, it’s not possible to forecast the outcome of the intra-division games. But through Saturday night, these were the won-lost records of the four contenders within the division:

• Detroit                21-11
• Minnesota         22-16
• Cleveland           15-15
• Chicago              12-19

Why do I like the Twins? For one thing, I like their resilience. As their general manager said, they dug themselves a really deep hole, but they’ve climbed most of the way out, and they’ve done it without some of their best players. If they have their ‘A’ team for the final six weeks, they will make life difficult for the other contenders.

For another thing, I like their history of winning, knowing it starts in the front office and goes to the players through the managers. Tom Kelly and Ron Gardenhire have been perfect for the Twins, and I look for Gardenhire to extend his run to three straight division titles.

REYNOLDS RISKING RECORD

Mark Reynolds needs to pick up his pace or face the end of his streak and his dominance of a batting category that should bear his name: The Mark Reynolds Strikeout Totals.

For the last three years Reynolds has led the major leagues in strikeouts, surpassing 200 each season. Two years ago he set the record with 223. Last year he became the first non-pitcher whose number of strikeouts (211) exceeded the numbers of his batting average (.198).

The Arizona Diamondbacks traded the 27-year-old third baseman because they were tired of his strikeouts. The Baltimore Orioles traded for Reynolds because they liked his offensive production (44 homers, 102 r.b.i. in 2009).

This season Reynolds has struck out 108 times (through Saturday night), tying him for third in the majors with Austin Jackson of Detroit and putting him behind Drew Stubbs of Cincinnati (130) and Adam Dunn of the Chicago White Sox (125).

Others who are just behind Reynolds are Ryan Howard of Philadelphia and Mike Stanton of Florida 107 each and Kelly Johnson of Arizona 105. Johnson obviously is bidding to become the Diamondbacks’ new Mark Reynolds.

By letting Stubbs and Dunn to get so far ahead of him, Reynolds risks losing not only the major league strikeout total but also the chance to gain a line alone in the Elias Book of Baseball Records. Right now Reynolds is tied with Hack Wilson, Mike Schmidt and Dunn for leading the majors in strikeouts for three consecutive seasons.

If Reynolds rallies and leads the majors again this season, he will knock Wilson, Schmidt and Dunn out of the record book.

MR. MILLER GOES TO COURT, NOT HALL

The Hall of Fame is inducting some new members this weekend, but to its everlasting shame none of the new members is named Marvin Miller.

Hall officials defend Miller’s absence by saying they have changed the format and the voting committee and what else can they do?

Well, I have a suggestion. Strip the voting committee of some of the club owners and other management executives and replace them with three new voters – Richard Moss, Donald Fehr and Michael Weiner, former and current union officials.

They have as legitimate a reason for being on the committee as any of the management people. The Hall’s board of directors, however, will not endorse such a change. The owners supply the Hall with operating funds, and they don’t want Miller in their Hall of Fame.

Miller, meanwhile, has been honored by other organizations and is in the process of receiving yet another honor. A law journal, the “Green Bag,” plans to distribute baseball cards with a portrait of Miller paired with a portrait of Arthur Goldberg, former justice of the United States Supreme Court.

It is part of a project that has produced cards of several justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, and has donated the original paintings to the Supreme Court for its permanent collection. Ross Davies, head of the project, is editor-in-chief of the law journal.