If you caught Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos holding an axe and standing over a cherry tree, he wouldn’t stop at admitting he’d just chopped it down.

He’d explain why it needed chopping, and why he’d chosen that particular tree. He’d have a whole wall of pie charts pinned up in his office on the subject, and have spent weeks talking to people about the cherry tree, getting them to weigh in on whether or not chopping it down was going to help in the long term.

It’s not just that Anthopoulos cannot tell a lie. Plenty of people in the sports world avoid lying by telling a selective version of what they know, which serves the same purpose as fibbing.

What makes Anthopoulos unusual is that he won’t say anything at all unless he believes it to be objectively true.

So you can see why he’s frustrated.

Anthopoulos and his team have a strict and as yet unbroken policy that they will not discuss active negotiations. Not off-the-record, not in an oblique aside, not at all. While Anthopoulos worked under previous GM, J.P. Ricciardi, he learned firsthand how leaks complicate business and, eventually, make doing any business at all almost impossible.

With others, you might suspect it’s a pose — the last honest man in baseball. After watching Anthopoulos operate for two years, you accept that it’s a principled stand. He doesn’t just want to succeed. He wants to succeed while doing things in a certain way.

Doing things that way — straight up and refusing all comment on even the most far-fetched rumours — has made the Jays the de facto second man in every deal anywhere in baseball.

“Prince Fielder,” says someone on Cleveland radio, and suddenly the Jays are in on Fielder. The Jays are not in on Fielder. Not now, not ever. Not for that sort of money with that troublesome physique.

But since Anthopoulos will not go on the record to say he has no interest in Fielder — partly because of his self-imposed code, and partly because he hates talking down any player, even when what he thinks is true — he’s dangled out there like a guy hanging off a ledge with an anchor made of money tied to his ankle.

Someone writes that the Jays are going to splash out this winter — the same thing the same people wrote last winter — and it feels like it might be true because Anthopoulos won’t say it isn’t. Apply that same principle to the cases of Heath Bell, Jose Reyes, Albert Pujols, C.J. Wilson, Yu Darvish and … well, everybody essentially.

If you believe what you read, the Jays are on the verge of signing every player in baseball and letting the surplus ones clean the stands at the Rogers Centre until they’re needed on the field.

For agents and national writers, Anthopoulos has become an unwilling stalking horse. Throw any rumour you like his way, and it’ll stick at least halfway because he won’t go on the record to call it a lie.

Every major deal Anthopoulos has kickstarted has come as a complete surprise upon unveiling. The exception is the Roy Halladay trade, which was pushed into the public sphere by his predecessor. It only got done after Anthopoulos had pulled it off the rumour mill and back into the secure confines of the boardroom.

That’s how he did the Nestor Molina-for-Sergio Santos deal Tuesday. The Jays had been linked with every closer on Earth — from pitchers to car salesmen to lid shutters. Every closer except Santos. And, predictable in their unpredictability, that’s who they quietly landed on.

Down in Dallas, Anthopoulos continues to spread around his mantra — if you’ve heard we’re involved, then that probably means we aren’t. In the space between the last Winter Meetings and this one, he’s gone from saying it with mild amusement to exasperation.

That won’t stop anyone from doing it. It’s career-retarding in the media business to repeatedly report an absence of information. Anthopoulos is the unique executive who provides gossips with a vacuum to fill.

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It doesn’t impede his ability to do business. All it does is create an unrealistic expectation amongst fans.

That could bite him in the long term.

For right now, it’s fascinating to watch a guy operating a multi-million dollar entertainment business like a 19th century storefront bank — quietly, fairly and with an absolute guarantee that your business will not be spread out in the street for everyone to talk about.