Last week, there was a time when it seemed like the Twins were on the verge of signing Eric Gagne for a set-up role in the bullpen. Then, the story came out in the Star Tribune that the Twins had halted negotiations just when Gagne was ready to sign for what the Twins were offering — $3 million plus $500,000 in various incentives. The Twins were supposedly going in a different direction. The story made the Twins look like they had blinked and it sounded very plausible.

At about the same time, the Gagne/Twins tale was being talked about by one of the hosts on the XM/Sirius baseball channel. In that telling, the Twins were ready to sign Gagne until his agent, Scott Boras, said the base salary was fine but added a proposal for $500,000 in incentives that caused the Twins to walk from the deal. Obviously, that story didn’t get as much play in the Twin Cities, but that version made Boras sound like the bad guy.

Of course, there was a third version (saw it in a St. Paul column) that the Twins were never really serious about Gagne and, of course, each of us decide how seriously we want to take that story.

Information is a good thing and there’s really no such thing as too much information — unless it’s those “25 random things about me” posts on Facebook. But understand that many, many stories that people are very, very interested in can be spun and respun until the material on which the story is based can barely be recognized.

That’s one of those then-and-now differences between the time when print newspapers offered the only in-depth coverage of a team and the contemporary media. The same thing happened last Friday when Jason Varitek reached the inevitable conclusion of his negotiating drama with the Red Sox. One of the XM/Sirius hosts Friday afternoon read all the different “breaking news” accounts of the contract — and there were about four different versions of the deal being circulated as “fact” at the time.

Given a choice, I prefer the contemporary media over the old days. And I’m taking the word of our guys, LaVelle and Joe, because I know they combine old-school standards with their new-school toolkit.

The information consumer — you ‘n’ me ‘n’ your neighbor Sally — has to be a bit more critical about what we accept as fact. And the fact that, because of the internet, we can update our facts 24/7 instead of watching them run off the presses once a day understandably changes the way that reporters go after the real story.

All of that being said, I think something’s gonna happen so that the Twins who start the season in April look different from the Twins as they look right now. As Twins president Dave St. Peter said during his fun appearance at the Hot Stove League banquet during TwinsFest weekend, “There’s still a lot of off-season left.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 9:25 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.