There's been no news on the Albert Pujols contract front since he put his Spring Training deadline on negotiations in place. Not a whisper from either side. And with that deadline coming up Wednesday, sportswriters across the baseball-speaking world remain determined to attempt, over and over, to make the same skimpy facts sound new and exciting.
In the interest of making this easier on the SLM readership, I have translated some of the most common Pujols-filler-column phrases into English, and present them here as a public service.
"Sources familiar with the talks"
Given how little has leaked from these negotiations from either side, this could be literally anyone who's familiar with the talks. I haven't personally acted as a source for Joe Strauss or Jon Heyman, but I can't confirm that my parents haven't. Buster Olney might be corresponding with super-agent Dan Lozano's receptionist, but he might also be corresponding with any receptionist in St. Louis who's been reading Buster Olney columns.
That's right—this is a rare situation in which the Familiar Source Feedback Loop is in full effect. Recently Olney and Strauss came out with extremely similar reports on the same day. The two-source hypothesis would suggest that they both had access to the same hypothetical Q-source, but the possibility exists that they somehow managed to source reports from each other simultaneously. Einstein didn't believe in Quantum Sportswriter Entanglement, but I remain undecided on the matter.
"Other teams could have interest, including…"
A rough translation would be, "I checked Baseball-Reference to see who had a lot of money and a bad first baseman; they included…"
"10 Years, $300 Million"
A completely unsourced bit of contract speculation derived either from scanning one of Jayson Stark's early articles on the subject or taking Alex Rodriguez's current contract and rounding up. This would be much easier on the Cardinals if sportswriters had decided to round down.
"A rival executive said…"
This is a clue to stop reading. Executives from rival teams, especially the ones that don't want to offer their names to a reporter, have no special access to the negotiations; have little incentive to do the legwork; and offer no special baseball-executive insight, so far as I can tell. Not only do you not work for the Chicago Cubs, you're also exactly as familiar with the talks as they are.
So if Buster Olney calls, let him know what you've heard.
