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In an eventful baseball offseason, this is perhaps the greatest and certainly the most hammy baseball story: A Braves fan named Aaron Lunsford broke news on Twitter that his team signed veteran catcher A.J. Pierzynski after Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez told Lunsford’s dad of the acquisition inside a Honeybaked Ham location in Woodstock, Ga.
If you ever wonder why these days it so often seems like randos on Twitter beat national baseball transaction reporters to offseason news, it’s because a) there are dads everywhere who will happily chat up Major League managers on line at Honeybaked Ham and b) at this point, all of them know someone who is on Twitter. It’s pretty awesome, if we’re being honest. 2014! Ham!
Lunsford even started a blog called Hamrumors.com to celebrate his scoop. It’s good, funny and totally reasonable:
Like I said, not a big signing, but I can’t imagine that the Braves wanted Fredi chatting up random men at a ham store about unannounced transactions. (I should say that my dad was wearing a Santa hat. And everyone likes Santa.)
The way the story was reported by Mark Bowman and David O’Brien was that basically my dad “overheard” a conversation that Fredi was having with his son (my parents seemed to get the impression that Fredi was alone) regarding Pierzynski being an “option” for the Braves (which everyone who reads about off season moves already knew). Obviously somebody with the Braves told Bowman or DOB that version of story. (Which based on my father’s story is absolutely false).
Lunsford’s thorough recap of his scoop is well worth a read (some language mildly NSFW, but honestly, if your boss cares that you’re reading a single, text-based blog entry containing light profanity while you’re at work on Dec. 26, you might want to start polishing up your resume).
