The Major League Baseball offseason has a number of euphemisms for the unsubstantiated crap it calls “news.”

“My contacts within the organization tell me…”

“There’s a feeling around baseball…”

“An un-named source familiar with the matter said…”

From those delicate turns of phrase we get a garden variety of misinformation, hearsay and total B.S.—mixed in with the occasional fact nugget.

At one time each of the above five scenarios felt like the latter, only to reveal themselves, in time, as shades of the former. They leave us with a winter full of broken beats and trails gone cold, mere headstones in the rumor mill graveyard.

Not that I want to wax too dramatic on all of this, or turn it into a moral debate on the state of journalistic integrity.

It is, after all, wild speculation that makes the MLB offseason such engrossing winter filler—the hypothetical exercise that bridges fall’s thrills and spring’s eternal hope.

Wild speculation is the fun stuff, and these were the wildest of them all.

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