This feature, for the uninitiated, aims to satisfy our cravings for hot-stove information while recognizing it is for the most part nutritionally devoid. Today’s rumors three:

Teams are “kicking the tires” on Alfonso Soriano: First, note that Ken Rosenthal, who presents this information courtesy “a major league source,” gives us “kicking the tires” in quotes. I don’t know what to make of that. Does that mean it’s a direct quote from the source? Is it Rosenthal’s literary interpretation of making the little air-quotes with his fingers?

More importantly, when teams kick the tires on Alfonso Soriano, what do they expect will come out? Normally you hear of tires being kicked on frequently injured reclamation-project types, the Chris Youngs of the world. And maybe in those cases, all kidding aside, the term means only that the team is doing its due diligence: investigating all the necessary medical records, consulting doctors, and talking to kinesiologists, phrenologists and any other experts that might provide insight on whether the player will hold up for a full Major League season.

Soriano has had a series of minor injuries with the Cubs, but he played 137 games in 2011 and 147 in 2010. His issue isn’t health: It’s that he’s not very good. So unless a team thinks kicking his tires is going to shock him into walking more and becoming immune to the effects of time, he’s probably not going to be very valuable to anyone even if the Cubs do pick up a hefty chunk of his remaining contract.

A better way to put it might be that many teams are looking at the tires on Alfonso Soriano, and seeing that the treads are worn down and the sidewalls are scratched up and the tires probably were never as good as everyone said to begin with. Smart money says the Cubs would be pretty happy to get rid of him and any portion of his contract they can salvage, so maybe he does get moved. But he’s probably an emergency donut tire on a good team at this point.

The Marlins told C.J. Wilson they want him in their starting rotation: Man, the Marlins say a lot of things, don’t they? Lips grow loose after boozy nights of stone-crab claws and frozen cocktails in Miami Beach. Not for C.J. Wilson, of course: He’s str8-edge. But maybe Jeffrey Loria or some other member of the Marlins’ brass is one of those I-seriously-love-you-guys type of drinkers who doesn’t know when to shut up. “No, really, bro… whatever it takes. $160 million? Carl Crawford money? Anything, bro. Seriously, bro, I want you in our starting rotation, like, RIGHT NOW!”

And then the next morning: Oh man my head hurts, what the hell did I tell C.J. Wilson last night? I somehow forgot I operate the team that has never spent more than $60 million on payroll. Actually I think I’ve already blown our entire 2012 budget on stone-crab claws.

The last hot-stove rumor is actually an anti-rumor. But it’s so definitively worded that I thought it worth noting here. If you’re trafficking in rumors, it makes sense to qualify almost everything you write to cover your ass for when you’re wrong. So it’s refreshing to see something like this published on Dejan Kovacevic’s blog for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

“Let me skip past the newspaper-ese and spell this out a different way: If you just had the conversation I just had, you wouldn’t give another second of thought to [Andrew] McCutchen being traded.”

Hat tip to MLBTradeRumors.com for various links. But I assume you’re already reading MLBTradeRumors.com.

I reached Lucchino briefly in his office this morning. He said he couldn’t talk to me. He said there would be no announcement today.

I followed that up with, ‘‘Do you have any comment on how indecisive this makes you guys look?’’

‘‘Goodbye, Dan,’’ he answered. ‘‘Nice to talk to you.’’

Click.

Dial tone.

– Dan Shaughnessy, Boston Globe.

I suspect Larry Lucchino was lying, and that it wasn’t actually nice to talk to Dan Shaughnessy.

Via Rob Neyer.

Over at Baseball Nation, Rob Neyer and Jason Brannon debate whether Albert Pujols could be older than his listed age.

Brannon — arguing that he is older — makes one very good point: If Pujols were admittedly 17 or older when he immigrated, he would have been ineligible for high-school baseball and thus unable to put his ridiculous awesomeness* on display for college coaches.

But Brannon keeps coming back to a couple of silly arguments, namely that Pujols supposedly lied to his wife about his age to get a date, and that there must have been a reason so many scouts missed on Pujols.

Telling little lies in pursuit of the opposite sex is a tradition that long pre-dates Pujols’ entrance to this country, and is in my opinion very, very different than lying about your age for professional gain. Not that it necessarily means Pujols didn’t lie about his baseball age, only that the two things probably have nothing to do with each other.

And as for the scouts, they straight-up screwed up. Even if Pujols were several years older than he claimed to be, he was still destined for a Hall of Fame career. Say Pujols is, I don’t know, 40 years old right now. Say he was 28 when he was playing JUCO ball in 1999 and 30 when he was ranked the 42nd best prospect by Baseball America. He was still on the brink of dominating Major League pitching for at least 11 seasons. That’s a massive whiff by scouts everywhere, no matter how old he was.

Also, Brannon notes that Pujols’ OPS+ has been in decline for four straight seasons, which is true. What he fails to mention is that the first two of those — 2008 and 2009 — were the best two of Pujols’ career by that stat, and they correspond with what are supposedly his age 28 and 29 seasons. So nothing really out of the ordinary there.

There’s certainly plenty of empirical evidence to suggest Pujols is older than he says he is: He looks it. But there were two dudes in my middle school with a full meadow of chest hair by seventh grade. (I know because their gym lockers were on either side of mine and it made me very uncomfortable.) Maybe Pujols is just one of those pubert guys, as unlikely as it seems.

Finally, I wonder to what extent it matters. Pujols is such a bizarre outlier in terms of talent and consistency and healing ability that maybe there’s some chance he is 35 and he’ll still be pretty awesome six or seven years from now anyway.

Or maybe he’s actually 31 and he’ll start falling apart sooner regardless. Until we have more concrete evidence, this is all just speculation — some of which might factor into some teams’ decisions while pursuing him on the open market, but none of which should affect the way we appreciate the tremendous things he has been doing for the last 11 seasons.

*- But the ridiculous awesomeness itself probably does not hold up as evidence of Pujols’ advanced age. This is Albert Pujols we’re talking about, no? We’ve all seen the Bryce Harper video, and Harper hasn’t yet proven to be a Top 10 All Time hitter. Smart money says Albert Pujols looked pretty damn impressive playing baseball at every age. And there are plenty of stories of various future greats needing to show birth certificates in Little League.

There’s a good story in the Times about Irving Franklin, the founder of Frankin Sports who helped popularize the batting glove in Major League Baseball and died at age 93 on Thursday:

Batting gloves, like batting helmets, were a relatively late addition to the national pastime. Unlike the helmets, the gloves are not required. But players say they provide comfort, warmth, improved grip and shock absorption. They say gloves give them a more secure feeling about their grip, especially early in a swing.

Irving Franklin’s son, Larry, recalled Monday that his father was eager to get a top-flight player to endorse something his company made. He signed up Schmidt, who suggested batting gloves. They teamed up at spring training in 1983. Mr. Franklin contributed his knowledge of making sporting goods from leather; Schmidt gave a player’s view, as he continually criticized and tweaked designs.

It goes on like that, and details the way Franklin secured MLB’s designation as the league’s official batting glove, and how Mark McGwire eschewed big money from Nike to stay with Franklin for way less during his record-breaking season in 1998. Then there’s the very last paragraph of the story:

Irving Franklin was particularly pleased about his batting gloves because the name of his company was so easy to see when television cameras closed in on a hitter. His other official major league products, cups and supporters, were not.

Lead: buried.

According to about 8,000 different people on Twitter, the Phillies are close to signing or have already signed Jonathan Papelbon to a four-year deal worth $50 million.

Papelbon’s coming off a strong season and has always been a very good closer, outside of a shaky 2010 campaign. But a four-year deal with the Phillies will encompass his age 31-34 seasons and pay him handsomely to provide less than 70 innings a season.

If the deal goes through, the Phillies will have roughly $93 million committed to five players for 2013 — Papelbon, Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Chase Utley and Ryan Howard. Those are all great players, of course, but by then they’ll be an average age of around 34.

The Phillies have shown a willingness to spend a ton of money lately — their payroll neared $170 million in 2011, according to Cots. But I refuse to believe dedicating so much money to so many older players is a great way to sustain a winning franchise, and given that Howard and Utley are already showing signs of decline it’s not hard to see (and cross our fingers and hope for) all the ways in which the Phillies could crash and burn within the next couple of years.

Most Mets fans don’t want to believe that, I know, and will instead point to the Papelbon signing as an example of the rich getting richer — the Phillies forgoing their 2012 first-round pick to sign Proven Closer McGillicuddy and Win At All Costs because That’s What Winning Teams Do, Heart and Guts.

And in truth, given the likely limited time in which the Phillies have to take home another championship, maybe it’s not a terrible idea to go all in for another run or two before the payroll grows lousy with old men. But they can go screw anyway. And adding Papelbon, perhaps the game’s most revolting closer, just spews more flammable vomit on the smoldering puke pyre that upchucks its way to the top of the NL East every year.

And don’t even ask me how the flaming vomit could itself vomit. It’s the Phillies. They find a way.

Oh and you know Papelbon’s going to grow a chin beard now. It’s written in to the Phillies’ facial-hair policy, actually.

Remember that stuff Patrick Flood wrote about his jumpshot in his long-ass David Wright thing? Sometimes I feel a little bit of that when I write outside the confines of this blog now. I am so comfortable writing for people who read this site regularly that when I think about writing for new audiences, I feel compelled to show them why they should read this site regularly, then I start worrying that I’m trying too hard, and on and on like that.

The good news is that usually once I stop thinking about who’s going to read what and actually start writing, things flow OK and I wind up with a piece I’m no more or less happy with than the posts I make here. All of which is a long-winded way to say you should go check out my guest column at Baseball Prospectus today.