It wouldn't be the first official working day of the new year without unsubstantiated rumors of trades. Thus I bring you the latest incarnation of the Atlanta Braves trying to trade for Baltimore Orioles outfielder Adam Jones:
We saw this a lot last year, with wild ideas of Martin Prado and Jair Jurrjens AND one of our top pitching prospects for just Jones. That kind of rumor was shot down by the Braves beat writers for the lame duck that it was. Yet still, the rumor kept coming up every couple of weeks, so maybe we shouldn't be surprised that it has surfaced again.
I've never heard of this Scott Swaim character, and it seems that Google hasn't really heard of him either, and he only has like 900 twitter followers. But then what happens is that someone like a real journalist, this Roch Kubatko who writes for MASN (and has an aptly douchey named blog "School of Roch"), picks up that tweet and puts it in his column, and he has like 5,000 twitter followers, so it's starting to get some traction. Then Buster Olney links to Roch's column saying that something is happening, and he has like 350,000 twitter followers. At the same time, Ken Rosenthal (he of the 171,000 twitter followers variety) puts up a column about the Orioles searching hard for starting pitching, and everyone in Braves Country ® thinks that lends credibility to the earlier rumor about interest in Jurrjens ... and here we are. And this rumor will get repeated over and over. Any truth to it? Maybe. That Swaim guy probably knows.
I should have called this post "Anatomy of a completely bull$hit trade rumor."