The Winter Meetings start today and, coincidentally, the Times ran this piece from Mary Jo Murphy on Saturday. It opens with the motto of Britain’s 350-year old science fraternity, the Royal Society:

“Take no one’s word for it,” or, in Latin, “Nullius in verba.”

I feel like that’s probably the best approach for fans following the Winter Meetings at their computer screens, as I am.

A few things will happen, and many, many more things will not happen.

Rumors will be developed, disseminated, then dispelled.

I’ll do my best to sift through the nonsense as best as I can here, and weigh in on whatever rumors I hear that I feel like weighing in on.

What I won’t attempt here, though, is the aggregation of every the rumor I hear surrounding the locals. That, in the first Winter Meetings following the mainstream media’s introduction to Twitter, seems like a fool’s errand.

The Winter Meetings are fun, though, because we love to speculate about what teams could do. That is, after all, why they’ve become such a media event: They are great for Web traffic, because baseball fans can’t get enough of the rumor mill.

My point is just to go forward skeptically, as the Royal Society would. Try to trace back everything you read — here or anywhere else — to its original source, and try to pay close attention to the language being used.