Along with the Seth Smith rumors out of Colorado, this is seemingly the one other rumor that just will not die this offseason. The Braves had gone a while without hearing their name rumored in talks with the Baltimore Orioles for Adam Jones, but that has changed in the last few hours.
Source:#Orioles and #Braves are making progress on an Adam Jones deal.Hearing Jurrjens is involved.This could mean Crisp to Baltimore.
— Scott Swaim (@MLBInsideNews) January 3, 2012
This is basically the same rumor we heard a few weeks ago, just to be promptly shut down by the two Braves beat writers, who are very well connected with the team. The reported deal of Jair Jurrjens, Martin Prado and a top-tier pitching prospect made absolutely no sense for Atlanta and you have to wonder why some reporters believe it enough to write about.
It's also worth noting that Scott Swaim is not a national writer nor does he have any credibility to speak of, so take the tweet for what it's worth. It's more than likely just a bored fellow on the Internet trying to pick up a few retweets and an extra follower or two.
Martin Gandy of Talking Chop had this to say regarding the rumors, and it is spot on, in my opinion.
I've never heard of this Scott Swaim character, and it seems that Google hasn't really heard of him either, and he only has like 900 twitter followers. But then what happens is that someone like a real journalist, this Roch Kubatko who writes for MASN (and has an aptly douchey named blog "School of Roch"), picks up that tweet and puts it in his column, and he has like 5,000 twitter followers, so it's starting to get some traction. Then Buster Olney links to Roch's column saying that something is happening, and he has like 350,000 twitter followers. At the same time, Ken Rosenthal (he of the 171,000 twitter followers variety) puts up a column about the Orioles searching hard for starting pitching, and everyone in Braves Country ® thinks that lends credibility to the earlier rumor about interest in Jurrjens ... and here we are. And this rumor will get repeated over and over.
It's tough to determine which rumors are true and which ones are completely made up in this day and age of social media, but this Adam Jones rumor appears to be completely false. It's probably worth keeping an eye on in the coming days, but the Braves will not do something stupid to get Jones. While talented, he simply isn't that good of a baseball player.