Twitter becomes a big player in baseball

An elusive combination of speed and power helped one "player" emerge as the star of this week's baseball winter meetings.

No, not Curtis Granderson, a prized outfielder the Mariners failed to land and who was dealt to the New York Yankees in a three-team swap. Granderson is fast, but can't cover thousands of miles in the blink of an eye. And while he hits home runs, he lacks the power to reach millions of people with the push of a button.

That's strictly the domain of Twitter, the social networking tool that generated more buzz at the Indianapolis meetings than any of the baseball names tossed about.

Modern technology like Twitter, and Web sites that use it to maximum advantage, like mlbtraderumors.com, are quickly reshaping the face of the winter meetings. Once the place where key deals were often struck at the hotel bar after midnight, top team executives and player agents are now just as likely to be hunkered over a BlackBerry in their private hotel suites, contemplating how best to exploit an information explosion to their advantage.

"This is definitely the first meetings where Twitter was the whole deal," said Tim Dierkes, 27, the Illinois-based founder of MLB Trade Rumors.

Dierkes' Web site had averaged 9 million monthly page views this year, but shot up to 6.1 million views during the four days the meetings were held. The site acts as a clearinghouse of sorts for baseball rumors churned out by hundreds of media outlets, as well as private tips.

But where Dierkes and his staff of eight used to rely mainly on computer RSS feeds from roughly 150 newspaper blogs, as well as phone calls from reporters and readers tipping them off on breaking stories, the vast majority of content now comes from tweets put out over the Internet.

The result is an information overload, with some rumors canceling others out before Dierkes can even get them up on the site.

"It's harder to follow because the volume of information is getting so high," he said.

That led to reports coming out at the meetings about teams having interest in certain free agents, only to be contradicted minutes later by denials. In the case of free-agent outfielder Jason Bay, there have been reports his former Red Sox team was highly interested in keeping him, followed later the same day by others that suggest they are leery of his health.

One eyebrow-raising tweet had the Cubs possibly trading problematic outfielder Milton Bradley and his high salary to the Mariners for performance-plagued pitcher Carlos Silva and his hefty contract. The Mariners immediately shot that one down, but still, the rumor lived on and later morphed into Bradley being dealt in a three-way trade with the Rays and Dodgers, also shot down.

All of them made their way to MLB Trade Rumors. And after that, to the living rooms and offices of fans across the country, many of whom were no doubt confused about who — or what — to believe.

But for now, the majority of fans don't seem to care about digging through a mountain of instant information for a nugget of solid fact. That's evidenced in the popularity of sites like MLB Trade Rumors, which has more than quintupled its annual page views since its creation in 2005.

The so-called "Hot Stove League" of offseason baseball rumors and deals has become nearly as popular for fans as in-season games. ESPN, MLB TV and Sirius XM Satellite Radio had makeshift studios set up in the hallways of the Indianapolis Marriott Hotel so they could broadcast from the meetings.

When they weren't on air discussing possible deals, the hosts and panelists on these networks were glued to their BlackBerrys waiting for the next Internet update on mlbtraderumors.com coming from reporters working the lobby downstairs. And because of Twitter, those reporters no longer have to go back upstairs to their computers to file their stories, choosing instead the speed and convenience of typing a 145-character instant update on their BlackBerrys to get the story out there.

Fans and media members aren't the only ones noticing how much more information is out there than there used to be.

Mariners general manager Jack Zduriencik said there is less face-to-face interaction between team officials and agents at the meetings than a few years ago. He has also noticed there is a lot more information shared.

"I mean, think about the sources of information," Zduriencik said. "Whether it's blogs, Internet, these sports talk shows, television stations. You think about the ways that information gets out there."

Zduriencik added that the job-switching from one team to another by various scouts and executives is also far greater, leading to friendships across the game and the gossip-sharing that comes with that.

Nowadays, he said, it's common to be in a meeting with three or four agents and have them constantly checking their BlackBerrys or text messaging someone while they speak.

Zduriencik doesn't use Twitter, but admits his iPhone often beeps with incoming text messages during meetings. When the Mariners held private meetings of team officials in their suite, going over potential deals, they had one or two of them monitoring computers and plucking out the latest information.

"We'll share it," he said. "A lot of it's just rumors, dialogue from people in the lobby. I chuckle sometimes on a couple of the names I hear [linked to the Mariners]. I'll go, 'That's funny.' And then a day or two later, I'll get a call from that agent and I'll go, 'Ah-ha!' "

Zduriencik says this happens far more often than people think.

"If you really think about it, you have to create a market," Zduriencik said. "So, how do you create a market? You create it by, if I talk to you, talk to you and I talk to you, then I can go tell you, 'Hey, I just talked to three general managers.' Which I did. I'm just creating my own market. That's what it does. And it spurs action."

GMs have long been known to exploit the rumor mill, attempting to make people believe there is plenty of trade interest in a certain player when there might not be any. It's the same with player agents who will whisper about interest in their clients by a specific team before they even contact that club's general manager.

The difference is that, in the past, it might have taken weeks for rumors to circulate by word-of-mouth about a certain player or team. Now, a whisper from one team executive or player agent can be distributed across the country in a matter of seconds via Twitter.

"If I came to these meetings and had a client nobody cared about, of course I'd use this stuff to get his name out there," said one agent, who wanted to be anonymous. "One minute, there's zero market for his services and then, five minutes later, the perception is that you've got five teams banging down your door."

For all the notoriety Twitter has lent to his site, Dierkes isn't sure it's the best thing for him. He misses the days where one newspaper blog post would contain five player names in trade rumors, instead of having to sift through five different tweets containing the name of one player each.

"I think fans want to see all the information," he said. "But I think the way we've been getting it out there is not ideal. All these tweets are not as of much value to the reader."

And as that lesser value becomes apparent, he added, he can see media scaling back on the volume of tweeting done. And that, he added, should lighten some of the information load.

"Readers do not care who got it first," he said. "I think they'd rather see one complete story or blog post containing information that stands up."

So, too, might some of those who frantically scurried the hallways in Indianapolis, trying to keep pace with rumors that — thanks to new technology — were far stronger and faster than they were.