The Unraveling of a Good Rumor

Friday night, it seemed like events were moving very quickly.  The Oakland A’s had already made one significant trade and were said to be talking seriously about additional deals.  It all started with Susan Slusser, an Oakland A’s beat writer woring for the San Francisco Chronicle.  Hardly a slouch:  she’s actually also a past president of the Baseball writer’s Association of America, so when she speaks, we oughta listen.

So on Friday evening, it started with this:

Over the next several minutes, she doubled- and tripled-down with two more confirming tweets, this the latter of those:

At that point, John Hickey chimed in – he being on the A’s beat via the Bay Area News Group (which includes several papers you’ve heard of from that area)

Ken Rosenthal kept the chatter going with this:

The MLB Trade Rumors site weighed in as well:

"FRIDAY, 11:39pm: After pulling off a blockbuster earlier tonight, the Athletics are perhaps unsurprisingly exploring more deals. The team is in conversations with the Braves regarding outfielder Justin Upton and catcher Evan Gattis, reports John Hickey of the Bay Area News Group (via Twitter)."

At that point, the A’s trade with the Blue Jays for Josh Donaldson (for Brett Lawrie, et al) had already been announced.  Based on everything above, this was now a full-blown rumor inferno… particularly since it involved at least one of the Braves’ best remaining hitters.

This was significant – and certainly could not be blown off as an idle rumor.

Saturday Morning, or ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’

8 Points, 9 Seconds

Come Saturday morning, I finally got around to putting

my thoughts on this “Imminent” trade

down for all to see.  The fact that we’d heard nothing more to that point wasn’t a concern.  Events from the previous night came very late – after midnight on the East Coast, so it wasn’t surprising at all that we saw no updates through the entire morning hours… especially from Oakland.

Furthermore, trades of the magnitude envisions could have involved some cash, and as such, there’s a rule:  any time that there is an exchange of something over $1 million in a trade, the Commissioner’s Office has to give their approval.  Doubtless, that would be slow in coming on the Saturday of a holiday weekend.

But then this cropped up at 12:43 EST Saturday:

"The White Sox and Athletics are discussing a deal that would bring starting pitcher Jeff Samardzija back to Chicago, Daryl Van Schouwen of the Chicago Sun-Times writes. “I believe serious talks are going on,” an AL source told Van Schouwen."

Okay, that’s not entirely surprising.  After all, we knew this  from Friday evening as well:

"Slusser, meanwhile, tweets that ten teams have expressed interest in Samardzija, including the Red Sox and White Sox, but that he does not appear to be in any deal nearing completion."

And We Waited…. and Waited…

Nothing was happening – from any team, any source.  Nothing.

Finally, late last evening (again), we get this… from one of the same sources that started this entire madness:

Well, okay – I was actually good with that… after all, I would rather that the Braves pursue pitchers that will be around for multiple years… not one-and-done free agents-to-be.  Besides, I do have this not-so-secret hope that Jon Lester might call up John Hart and say “Hey, John, let’s get something figured out.”

The Dagger

So John Hart was interviewed this morning on XM Radio’s MLB channel.  I admit it:  I do think that much of what I hear on the radio from General Managers is double-speak.  Frank wren was a master of this.  John Hart isn’t far behind.  But as part of the interview, he said this and shot holes all though my trial balloons:

…and further…

Sure, I can interpret that a couple of different ways, including the notion that he’ll happily accept incoming calls on those guys… hey, he’s probably got all the phone traffic he wants.  But, Hart also said that nothing is going on right now with either Justin or Gattis.

All in Good Faith

We certainly don’t set out with any attempt to mislead or deceive… heck, I was sucked in on this one – big time.  Given some of the flimsy things we’ve heard from time-to-time that have panned out, this rumor was probably close to “nuclear” on that scale.

But that’s the world we live in now:  we want to be in the know.  We all want to be that guy/gal who knows the scoop.  We want to be “in” on the smoky backroom deals… that’s one reason we had so much fun doing our Winter Meeting Simulation event over the past week+… it gave us a chance to be the “inside” player making those deals – and we got to relate to you some of the negotiations taking place.

But it still remains:  for any given rumor, there’s probably only about a 10% chance of it panning out.  Even the “hot” rumors – which this certainly was.

This is also why we cite and linked our sources so much:  so that you can see exactly what we saw that led us down whatever rabbit-hole-road we headed toward.  Overall, we aren’t doing this for hype or page views or … whatever nefarious purpose you might think.

It’s really because we’re fans – and we want to know, too… while also trying to figure out if the braves would help or hurt themselves with a trade of Player X for Player Y.

But…. this one didn’t happen.  Kind of a bummer, actually, for we do expect some sort of movement … at some point.  Despite statements to the contrary, it certainly appears that John Hart has some considerable work to do.

So unfortunately, that’s the end of that.

Rumor.  Dead.

Until the next one.