With just over two weeks to go until the Major League Baseball trading deadline, all of the attention is fixated on what the Los Angeles Angels will do with pending free agent and two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani. During the first half of the 2023 campaign, Ohtani is crafting arguably the No. 1 baseball season of all time. The Japanese phenom is pitching to a 3.32 ERA and is on pace to strike out over 200 batters while striking out, on average, over one batter per inning. At the plate, he is hitting .302 with a major league-leading 32 home runs and 71 runs batted in.

Ohtani is undoubtedly the consensus most valuable player in the American League, but yearning to compete for a World Series championship. The Angels failed to qualify for the postseason in Ohtani’s first five years with the team – even with future Hall of Fame outfielder Mike Trout as his teammate – and the team is currently on pace to miss the playoffs yet again. In fact, fans at the Major League Baseball All-Star Game at T-Mobile Park were imploring Ohtani to come to Seattle, chanting as such during his at bats.

Dan Patrick, while hosting his eponymous program, The Dan Patrick Show, welcomed ESPN baseball reporter and writer Buster Olney onto the program, who is preparing for a Sunday Night Baseball showdown between the Angels and Houston Astros. Expectedly so, he led the discussion by asking Olney just how much Ohtani would be a topic of discussion.

“It is going to dominate the sport where the question is going to be asked every day, ‘Have you heard anything about the Angels putting the word out that they’re ready to talk about Ohtani,’” Olney affirmed. “….We’re going into this two-week period where they’re going to be facing teams that they’re chasing…. At some point in those last 72 to 96 hours, we should hear; we probably might hear from [owner] Arte Moreno whether or not he’s going to trade Ohtani. If he is traded, you talk about a frenzy – idiots like me are going to be talking about this 24 hours a day.”

Earlier in the week, Olney suggested that the New York Yankees were a serious contender in the forthcoming Ohtani sweepstakes during an appearance on Get Up! While Olney has historically been a credible source of information, there are a deluge of people trying to obtain intel about the situation. Because of the ease of access and saturated content ecosystem, there are plenty of false reports on social media – most of whom are perpetuating misinformation and disinformation. Instead of speculating himself, Patrick decided to ask Olney how many teams he thought had legitimate chances to trade for the superstar athlete.

“What I’m hearing from GMs is that they don’t know if the Dodgers, this year, would do that type of move,” Olney said. “I think the Yankees would absolutely be all in, which makes sense to me.”

Throughout the rest of his answer – in which he listed the Texas Rangers and Tampa Bay Rays as additional trade partners – Olney used adverbs of possibility, neglecting to falsely present any information as fact. The practice is representative of a journalist maintaining their responsibility to be a trustworthy conduit of information – and ensuring their reporting, not themselves, become the center of attention.