Photo by hyku via Flickr

For those of us who prefer to spend our “working” afternoons in pursuit of player transaction gossip, Major League Baseball’s winter meetings are the highlight of the season. For a few days each December, the front office honchos from every MLB team, the agents who represent the millionaires who play for them, and the media whose job it is to report it all (and we mean all) gather in the lobby of some hotel room and try to swindle each other. In the process, general managers do their best to end up on the post-trade Frank Robinson/Babe Ruth side of things, agents do their best to have their players end up on the Kevin Brown side of things, and sports writers do their best to not end up on the Rob Neyer (scroll down) side of things. With so much action — and the scoop-hungry masses who are tasked to cover it — concentrated in one place, the winter meetings turn into something of a perfect storm for rumor-making.

Until this year, the worst to come out of all this might have been the hurt feelings of a player or two. But that was before the combination of Twitter and what one Winter Meeting press attendee characterized as the “mom’s basement contingent” conspired to make a mess of things in a manner that can only lead us observers to conclude that this whole new media democracy set-up is actually capable of policing itself.

On Monday at 3:00 p.m., Rotoworld senior baseball editor Aaron Gleeman tweeted that he and his colleagues were “going to learn a lot about everyone’s quality/standards of reporting this week” and that “[s]ome people aren’t gonna look so good.” Presumably, this was a reference to the same mom’s basement contingent that his fellow baseball rumor monger Jason Rosenberg had implied was polluting the proverbial well. Gleeman followed that up six minutes later with a response to a tweet from MLB Trade Rumors‘ Tim Dierkes (who’d taunted the rest of us with promises of a “spreadsheet that I will never share, with the major reports that were wildly wrong”) where he claimed that he wasn’t “going to go nuts ‘outing’ anyone,” but that it would “be tough not to remember what’s going on.”

We here at Unfit tried to get a hold of Gleeman so that he might enlighten us as to what was going on. But since we don’t seem to have the clout of, say, Peter Gammons, we got no response. So here’s a guess: Mom’s basement reporter-type hears some crazy rumor. Mom’s-basement reporter-type prints said rumor without so much as vetting it with any sources. Report gets tweeted, retweeted, and kind of becomes news. Until, that is, a not-so-mom’s-basement-reporter-type susses out the truth, sinking mom’s-basement-guy’s rumor and maybe his or her (well, we’ll guess his) fledgling career.

‘Course, without the ability to so quickly and widely publish his rumor, mom’s-basement guy is left with an audience of exactly his mom. A fact which should bring the whole Twitter thing home to those of us who are totally stoked about being able to receive news in real time. That’s nothing new. But that the mom’s-basement joker(s) got so jumped on serves as proof that not all media types are so blinded by the relative shiny newness of social media that they can’t police themselves. And that’s encouraging — even if the end result is that those of us who crave instant updates have to wait just a bit longer.