Twitter Ruins Trade Deadline

If you’re a baseball fan (and if you’re not, why are you reading this blog?!), then chances are you love trade rumors. It is fun to speculate on players your team may trade or acquire, and the week leading up to the trade deadline is always an exciting week. However Twitter is ruining it.

It used to be that sportswriters would hear rumors, make a bunch of phone calls to confirm the rumor, then write about it. However now, a sportswriter hears a rumor, then immediately tweets what he heard. No time to confirm — he’s got to beat the other guys. As it is with most rumors in life, they are not true. So we are bombarded with nonsense, and we can’t tell the real news from the crummy rumors.

Sunday for example, Ken Rosenthal of Fox News tweeted that the Rangers had traded for Heath Bell. Absolutely, positively. But of course he was wrong, as he usually is. He had to retract his tweet after learning that the Rangers acquired another Padres reliever, Mike Adams.

How many tweets did we read that the Giants would never, ever offer Zack Wheeler for Carlos Beltran, that San Francisco was out of it, that the Phillies or the Rangers were the frontrunners?

When a sportswriter pens a column, there are all sorts of rules he (I guess there are girl sportswriters now, too) must follow to make sure the information included is accurate. I guess there are no rules for tweeting, much to the detriment of readers.