Reconsidering the rumor mill after Shohei Ohtani breaks own news

Shohei Ohtani's free agency saga, which ended with Ohtani announcing his own signing with the Dodgers after multiple BBWAA members swung and missed on his whereabouts and destination, drew the ire of Bob Nightengale, who led his Sunday notebook column with a scathing takedown of the way reporters cover the hot stove season.

A lot of the frenzy was specific to Ohtani, from the radio silence from all parties involved (save Dave Roberts) and the unprecedented size of the contract. But it apparently pushed Nightengale into Howard Beale territory.

We can accurately predict which reporters will be breaking which free agent signings the rest of the winter, judging by a reporter’s relationship with an agent or a reporter who’s represented by the same agency.

“It’s unbelievable as to how certain members of the media promote clients of certain agencies," one veteran agent said, “and more shameful is the fact there is little to no media accountability. No wonder why we have so many clubs and industry personnel being misled." 

Oh, you’re telling us there are 10 teams involved in the free agent bidding for your client? Sure, we’ll tweet it. It’s now down to two teams, but the offers keep getting bigger? Sure, we’ll go with it. 

The last paragraph stood out to me after watching Erick Fedde sign with the White Sox for two years and $15 million a day after this tweet from MLB.com's Mark Feinsand:

Earlier in the column, Nightengale spends a couple paragraphs saying that teams aren't allowed to leak on the same level as agents, and often have to sit idly by while supposed actions are being bandied about, and I can see a consistent through-line, at least from what we know of his White Sox coverage. He's one of the few reporters with regular access to Jerry Reinsdorf, and the Eduardo Escobar "trade" is the only time I can recall one of his strongly worded hunches or confirmed reports not materializing in recent years.

I understand how reporters who get by entirely on agent access cheapen the medium. I can also imagine Reinsdorf complaining to Nightengale about Scott Boras leaking details about Fedde's status, so I don't think there's a way to be completely agenda-less when it comes to ongoing negotiations between labor and management, because it's a zero-sum game until pen meets paper.

It's also a little quaint to see baseball writers chastising themselves over fevered and incorrect coverage, because any veterans of the college football coaching carousel would look at the Ohtani activity and say, "Is that all?" Coverage of an entertainment industry can easily become part of the entertainment.

For instance, before Jon Morosi issued a mea culpa on his incorrect reporting about Ohtani being on a flight to Toronto, he also issued these tweets:

Had Ohtani not triggered such a reckoning, these tweets wouldn't have merited reconsideration. In a true journalism sense, it's weird that a baseball reporter is idly matching a player to a specific team after talking to him, but strict journalism standards are already in jeopardy when the reporter works for the network owned by the league. That particular horse left the barn more than a decade ago.

But even setting aside who owns what outlets, the drip-drip-drip of information has always been a big part of the hot stove season, and sites like Sox Machine benefit from the discussion fodder. There's edification in running a rumor through your BS detector, then seeing how well your initial read holds up.

That said, the marketplace of gossip will get sloppier and sloppier as layers of editorial oversight are removed and the true rumor artisans are outnumbered by the drop-shippers. That's why there's value in people like Nightengale and Ken Rosenthal wondering whether this is what they really want to be doing. But doing something else will require a lot of habit-breaking, and the same kind of scrutiny about who is being served.

Lower in Nightengale's column, he references Reinsdorf's meeting with Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell, and dismisses the cynical speculation:

Chicago White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf created a stir, and plenty of wild rumors, when he had dinner with the Nashville mayor Freddie O’Connell. 

But no, the White Sox are not moving to Nashville. 

Yes, Nashville remains a contender for expansion franchise with an ownership group led by Dave Stewart, who is a friend of Reinsdorf’s. 

Of course, part of the reason the meeting created a stir is because Reinsdorf has a history of using another city for leverage in brokering a new stadium deal, and the White Sox offered no details about what the meeting was about. If Reinsdorf was just tagging along with Stewart and Tony La Russa on a Music City Baseball networking venture, there would've been no harm in saying so. There just would've been nothing to gain, either.