Atlanta Braves Morning Chop and rumor wrap: waiting for the green flag to drop

The Thanksgiving weekend is now behind us and we’re at 2 weeks prior to the Vegas Winter Meetings. What happens there won’t stay there thanks to the power of twitter.

The amount of information one can learn from a smartphone is truly amazing. The combination of this device, twitter, broadband telecommunications, and the internet have turned the sports media industry on its ear over the past decade.  What we will learn about the Atlanta Braves off-season will be learned in mere minutes instead of hours or days as a direct result.

It has become something of a feeding frenzy, though.  The process of ‘developing trusted sources’ for information has seemingly devolved into different levels of rumor sources… things like somebody who heard a player make an off-handed comment at an airport or a manager chatting up a fellow customer at the Honey-Baked Ham store.

There is mostly some civility to the process among the professional media… while oftentimes, the ‘first to report’ can simply be the reporter who types fastest, there are gestures to those who start the ball rolling:

The other trick, of course, will be the rise of the n’er-do-wells who wish to prey on fans’ rabid desire for breaking news by spoofing the real reporters.  So watch for the blue check mark that denotes a verified twitter account.  And you might want to mute certain accounts (cough @bravescody) for the duration.

With that to start us off,  let’s dig into the current rumors and thoughts as we head into a week that could truly kick off the interesting part of the off-season.