How to Start Your Own Offseason Baseball Rumor

Often times, when nothing needs to be said, people say nothing.  It is assumed this happens because the people in question are polite, or at least socially aware enough that they realize no one wants to hear their inane thoughts.

That is wrong.  Those people are totally, irreversibly wrong.  The real reason they aren’t talking?  Because they don’t have the balls.

That’s why we have the internet:  To say everything.  To fill the void left by social tact with endless yammering.  We’ve got theories, conspiracies, predictions, and analysis of events that in the end will probably never come to fruition, and we want people to hear them, even if we don’t care how little they want to hear them.  And nowhere is this concept more lovingly cultivated than offseason baseball news.

Blogging is hard.  Like, really hard.  Sometimes, you really have to force yourself to sit down, ignore the calls from your furious boss and children’s school to the house phone that you for some reason have in 2011, pretend the rest of the internet doesn’t exist, and just do some good old fashioned thought-provoking web logging.

“LEAVE ME ALONE,” you scream at your vibrating Blackberry, knowing that with every gyration of it’s casing, there lies a form of sinister distraction.

What makes the process worse are days when there is no news to report on.  Then, unlike doing the polite, rational thing and not writing at all, you are forced to materialize content, often from nowhere.  The best nowhere, I’ve discovered, is Twitter.

So let’s see what news we can dig up, based on the tweets of our heroes.

Let’s start with Verlander, a guy who may not be newsworthy at the moment, but boy, if you’d been around a few weeks ago, you would have had to hide your head under a pillow and scream to not hear about him.  This is our defending AL Cy Young/MVP we’re talking about, so anything he says should be accompanied by angelic beams of light.

Oh my god.

Where has Justin Verlander‘s focus gone?  The intensity and precision he showed during 2011 is all but completely destroyed at this point, probably.  If he is already considering next Christmas as a priority–forgetting the fact that there is an entire new baseball season between now and then–then clearly, he is going to step out on the pitcher’s mound at Comerica Park on Opening Day, and burst into tears.

Bill Hall is planning to go for a run and there will be no survivors!

And now for someone a little newsworthier, we have Andrew Bailey, former A’s closer, current guy-the-Red-Sox-signed-out-of-anger-or-fear-or-whatever.  At the moment, the only picture of him wearing a Red Sox uniform will be on sites like MLB and ESPN, where he will smile and wear his new hat.  Otherwise, we’ll have to wait in anxious anticipation to see if he looks okay.

But there are bigger issues afoot!  Andrew, it seems, is most concerned with his entrance music!  Which means that he is so sure of perfection in 2012 that he isn’t committing any of his worries to his performance.  Call to the Pen exclusive:  Andrew Bailey Promises Perfection in 2012.

That is a white hot rumor-nugget if I’ve ever heard one.  Which to say, materialized one from nowhere.