In case you hadn’t already figured it out, none of us here at Knuckleballs has any sources anywhere close to the Twins or MLB offices who ever feed us any news that we can be the first to break. We get no scoops on the traditional media. We aren’t the first bloggers to find out anything. Whatever we know, we read or hear somewhere else.

And I’m getting tired of it.

How cool would it have been if we at Knuckleballs could have broken the news first about Joel Zumaya signing with the Twins? Can you imagine? We’d be getting props from all the real reporters for breaking the news.

But that doesn’t happen. The real baseball sportswriters don’t even know who we are… and probably never will. Well, that’s not TOTALLY true, I did introduce myself to one of the Strib Twins beat writers once, so if he has a really good memory, maybe…

Alas, if we want to break news like the big boys and girls, there are really only three things I can do about it, though.

• Option 1: I could, I suppose, quit my well-paying day job, giving up the career I’ve spent over three decades building, and start over by applying for some sort of entry level position in the sports department of a media company that reports on Major League baseball. Eventually, if I lived to be a healthy and productive 90-year-old, I might rise to the level where I would have access to people “inside” baseball.

None of that, of course, is going to happen.

• Option 2: I could also quickly tweet or post news and rumors that “real” sportswriters break and pretend that I had my own independent sources for that information. I know it sounds unethical, but apparently that doesn’t stop some big time writers for major eastern newspapers from doing it. Still, that just sounds unethical, doesn’t it? But it’s certainly a lot less work than Option 1.

But if I’m going to throw ethics out the window in favor of expediency, why bother even going to the effort of following a bunch of real reporters and plagiarizing their work? That leads to Option 3, just making stuff up.

• Option 3: Yes… why not just make up stuff? After all, fabricating stories might be borderline unethical, too, but it’s kind of a “victimless” ethical lapse, isn’t it? Plagiarizing is far worse… you’d be taking someone else’s hard work and passing it off as your own. That’s just not right. It affects the value of the work product turned out by the original writer. But making stuff up doesn’t hurt anyone, really. And who knows, some of it might actually turn out to be right!

So with that prelude, here then are my first Purely Fictional Rumors:

At their meeting in Arizona, MLB owners voted to award the 2014 MLB All-Star Game to Target Field in Minneapolis.

There will be no official announcement for a while, however, and a source close to people who went to school with a guy who shared a cab with someone who used to get high with a former team executive who was familiar with the discussions tells me that there remains real doubt about whether the game will actually be played at Target Field. It seems the Twins were given “conditional” approval to host the game, but the conditions came from two different groups of owners.

One group, who thinks the Home Run Derby is the coolest thing about baseball, will only support the Twins’ bid if the fences at Target Field are shortened by 15 feet. While the Twins don’t necessarily like that idea because they don’t like paying the money it takes to attract and keep pitchers who are… well…  actually good at pitching, they were willing to go along with those demands.

However, another group of owners will only support the Twins’ bid to host the game if the fence distances are NOT shortened. It seems this group has been trying to get rid of the Home Run Derby for years and are convinced it won’t go away until MLB finally holds such an event where nobody hits any home runs. They feel Target Field may be their last best hope of such an event occurring.

In other words, Wrigley Field may yet get the 2014 All-Star Game to celebrate the 1,000^th year of that dilapidated ballpark’s existence.

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Sources who went out on an all-night bender with the second-cousin by marriage of a girl who Joe Mauer once thought about asking to the prom but didn’t because a friend told him what kind of things went on after proms and he just wasn’t the kind of boy who did those things even if his date REALLY wanted to tell me that Mauer still isn’t 100% sure he’ll be healthy and ready to catch full time for the Twins on Opening Day. However, once again, Joe is reluctant to play rehab games in Rochester, preferring to stay at his home in Ft. Myers until he’s damn good and ready… er… until he feels 100% certain he can contribute to the Twins line up more than Drew Butera can.

The same source went on to say that Terry Ryan’s response to Mauer was something akin to, “STFU and play MF’ing baseball when and where we tell you to, you coddled SOB.” Shortly thereafter, Mr. Ryan reportedly received a strongly worded written rebuke from Mauer’s agent… or his mommy… the sources weren’t clear on which.

A totally different drunken fool of a source reports that one compromise under consideration would see the Twins play their April games at Hammond Stadium in Ft. Myers. The Twins front office has not denied any of these reports, but insists that the organization’s inquiry with Ft. Myers Little League, Inc., about the possible availability of their ballpark for Ft. Myers Miracle games in April, “has nothing to do with Joe.”

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That’s it for today. I can’t tell you how great it feels to be just a bit closer to the level of all the “real” baseball writers!

-  JC