I went home last night, mixed a Malo-tini, threw together a homemade pizza (zucchini, onion, sausage) for my ladies, and soaked for an hour in the tub after the night’s conversations were done. But I still felt slightly dirty; I couldn’t wash off the stink of bad rumor that we all rolled around in yesterday.
The Renteria and Furcal rumors weren’t the only spurious 411 coursing ‘round the Googlewebs. Scroll through the items on MLB Trade Rumors — yesterday was chock-a-block with backpedaling and refutation, from Peter Gammons on down.
¿Y qué? So what? It’s tempting to be highminded and say tsk tsk to the reporters and the bloggers who egg them on. But let’s get some perspective. These aren’t rumors spread by short-sellers of, oh, a major bank failing that could spur economic disaster. These are baseball machinations, man-child millionaires and their blustery, bullying agents, matching wits or lack thereof with scheming GMs. And everyone’s trying to play the desperate, scoop-starved press like cheap violins. They figure if they can convince a reporter or two to scratch out their tunes (hello, Sweeny Murti of WFAN!), who cares if the music’s off-key?
It’s not nice to fool Mother Fourth Estate, but I won’t get huffy about it. In fact, it introduces a fascinating meta-conversation for the long dark Hot Stove days. Assuming Sweeny and the other reporters are passing bad info, not making it up — and that’s a dangerous assumption —– what’s the source’s motivation? Whose caused was helped yesterday when Murti reported the Giants had inked Renteria? Certainly not the Giants. If they wanted to pressure Furcal and his agent with leaked info, they would leak a report of hot ‘n’ heavy talk, but not a done deal. Et cetera, et cetera. I could drive myself crazy parsing the game theory. I was never any good at chess or computer programming, anyway, so I’m not going to start now.
If you’ve got conspiracy theories or convoluted If-Then decision trees, now’s the time to float them. We promise to take them with a huge grain of salty goodness.
