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I'll admit, I've never been much of a fan of the Winter Meetings. I kind of think that baseball should take a break until after the holidays (which, mind you, is totally different from me taking a break from it -- it would be a good time to catch up on some baseball history reading or something, for instance), and from the number of deals that actually get done during the meetings, one is left with the sense that the GMs feel the same way. But I guess they can be kind of fun, sometimes. There's all kinds of speculation, and things get leaked, and you can kind of stop for a minute and think, what if my team really did that? I can see the appeal.
Twitter has ruined them. As Jason points out, the rumors have just gotten out of control. If you were a reporter at the meetings ten years ago -- hell, if you were a blogger at the meetings three years ago -- there was at least a minimal kind of buffer between your ears and your audience. If you hear a rumor, you've got to go to the trouble of sitting down at a computer and typing up something coherent. Maybe an editor even has to see it. Then maybe to get a really wide audience, ESPN or Fox would have to get wind of it and decide whether it was credible enough to really blow it up. It was a process. If you, the end consumer, heard a rumor that X was in serious talks with Y or that the Lumberjacks were this close to pulling off a deal with the Sandpipers, there was at least a pretty good chance that there was something to that.
That buffer is gone. You're at the Winter Meetings, you hear something or think you hear something or see a funny look in somebody's eye or just have a funny feeling, and it's summarized in 140 characters or less and on the Web in seconds, in phrases and half-words and made-up words. And you don't have to subject yourself to Twitter to feel the effects, because within a few minutes after that, some enterprising blogger picks it up and people start linking to that and pretty soon it's everywhere. Sometimes, as was the case with a certain rumor yesterday, it continues spreading on the blogs despite having been almost immediately debunked on Twitter long before.
Nothing against any of these folks, whether they're at the meetings or passing rumors along on their blogs or whatever. Most of them are writers or bloggers I really admire. And I understand why it happens. It's a really unfortunate combination of two things: not only can you get any old thing you want out there immediately, but there's the pressure to be first -- to make a name for yourself or earn your paycheck or whatever -- so there's an actual incentive not to fact-check or think things through. I get why it happens, it just shouldn't happen. There's no responsibility, no accountability, and pretty soon everything everyone says just becomes suspect. And it's annoying as hell.
The only solution? Stop caring about the rumors. Realize that, as boring as the mid-week December sports world is (what are you gonna do, watch hockey? Psh.) and as hungry as you might be for info about your team or your favorite player or whatever, the fact that somebody says something, whether it's Peter Gammons or Will Carroll or Jimmy from www.awesomebaseballdudes.com, no longer makes it any more likely that what you're hearing is true. When the audience for the unsubstantiated rumors goes away, so does the pressure to be first with whatever crap you think you might have overheard, and maybe we'll start to get actual news again.
I know, that'll never happen. But that's what I'm going to do. I'm done with the meetings, where so little of any consequence ever happens anyway. Check this space Wednesday through Friday for some completely non-topical ramblings about bits of baseball history or the Hall of Fame. (Unless some really big deal happens, and is confirmed by direct quotes from the actual sources, and I have something to say about it.) We'll look forward to mid-late January, when things start actually happening and there are no reporters around to half-overhear them.
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