You can imagine my glee. I immediately re-tweeted it and crossed my fingers in hopes that it was true. And then refreshed my BlackBerry about 80 bazillion times awaiting confirmation. I also fired up the web stream of XM Radio 175 Home Plate so I wouldn't miss the announcement when it finally came.
As expected, I was not the only one who was excited about this potential news. Home Plate had the tweet in their update within minutes. If they heard about it so quickly, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, FOX, StarTribune, Pioneer Press, and Gus's Bait Shop Newsletter heard about it too.
With that, I imagine that several phones started ringing off the hook -- Bill Smith's, Joe Mauer's, Ron Shapiro's, Dave St. Peter's, Twins staffers's, anyone's whose last name is Mauer, and probably anyone's whose last name is Smith. But after all those phone calls, the other sources did not do what fans were looking for and confirm the story. Nope. The information coming back kind of denied it. It was more like "things look good, but we're still talking and nothing's done yet." And the tweets of that nature rolled in like waves.
By the five o'clock newscast, Rosen had dialed back on the wording. He was then talking of a "basic framework" being in place and the negotiations were proceeding. I'm sorry? "Framework?" That's about 359 miles away from "agreed." To me, "agreed" means, well, agreed; the contract's all done but the signatures. On the other hand, "framework" is an outline, a plan, a beginning.
The tweet linked to this article, which also said "agreed," at least in the headline. For the record, the article has been changed since it first hit the web.
Tuesday, reports came out that Joe Mauer is surprised about the report and pretty much laughed off the whole thing.
Now, there's a very good chance that Rosen winds up being right, but we won't know for a while. He's very adamant that he trusts his source, and he is a respected journalist in the Twin Cities. Plus, this has happened to him before - he made a similar bold statement about Brett Favre coming out of retirement and joining the Vikings, and it turned out he was right. (I don't really remember how that shook out; I intentionally ignored all Brett Favre talk until I actually saw him in purple.)
All Twins fans hope something great happens. In fact, this whole kerfuffle kind of boosted optimism, because in all the phone calls they got, the Twins and Mauer did admit that talks continue and are going well.
Regardless of whether Joe does ink an extension soon, my beef is with 'CCO's wording and timing of that tweet and the article attached to it. I can't say if Rosen himself wrote any of it - probably not actually. But I really wish that whoever wrote it would have used that "framework" word from the start. And I wish they would have waited. They get the stink-eye from me for making me do all that fretting.
Be sure to read Nick Nelson's much more positive, and more interesting, blog post about the same topic.
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