Before the internet became an inextricable part of our lives, here’s how people got their baseball trade rumors: They didn’t. At least, not in a way that we recognize today. Maybe there would be a rumbling and/or a grumbling that filtered its way into the morning paper, or maybe there was a complicated deal that was taking so long to put together that it made it into a weekly publication, like The Sporting News or Baseball Weekly. There were weekly notes columns, and the best purveyors were adept at slipping a rumor or three into them, but the cottage industry of baseball rumors didn’t exist.



And without millions looking forward to consuming a specialized subclassification of niche baseball news, the rumors that did squeak through didn’t always resonate the way they should have. Our brains weren’t wired for it yet.



Which is why a lot of you are squinting at the headline and wondering if it’s real. Because if there had been a real...