There were some reporters who seemed to be throwing some shade on the notion that two kids -- really, one was 13-year-old Devan Fink, one 18-year-old Robert Murray -- broke the story of Billy Butler going the Oakland A’s yesterday. There was some minor grumbling about this information being “leaked” or what have you and how bad that all is. Of course, we never hear about how bad that is when established reporters get the same information from the same sorts of sources in the same way.
But such is the nature of transaction news. It is, by definition, single data point news that does not necessarily require reporting savvy and experience. It usually does, of course -- you gotta get yourself into a place where people trust you with information -- but it doesn’t have to. Sometimes people just hear things. And yes, that someone can be a 13-year-old kid if he’s in the right place at the right time. The key isn’t getting one scoop. It’s getting hundreds and hundreds of them over years.
It’s quite refreshing, then, to see Ken Rosenthal -- a guy who feeds his family on the scoops he gets -- having a great sense of humor about it all. He went on MLB Network and broke down how these kids scooped him. And he made it really fun:
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The key takeaway here: Rosenthal isn’t threatened by the competition, nor need he be. He’s Ken freakin’ Rosenthal, and I bet he knows more than anyone how random some of this info can be at times, even if he has figured out how to tame the randomness of the information market and turn it into a highly specialized skill.