Today's inspirational verse comes from Toronto Blue Jays catcher Darrin Fletcher, a man who has been around the major block enough to have earned his pension twice over.

Not that that makes him a bad guy, necessarily.

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	Darrin Fletcher probably isn't following all the trade speculation and updates on ESPN.com this week: Rumor Central Trade Central

But we digress.

"There shouldn't be all this trade talk in the papers," Fletcher said over the weekend. "It's distracting. It's a media-generated, National Enquirer-type mentality."

Now we have no particular truck with Darrin Fletcher. Until now, there wasn't a whole lot of reason to be overly concerned with Darrin Flecther's position on the trade deadline.

But since he's so obviously wrong -- well-meaning, but wrong -- well, it's our duty to point this out, to him and everyone else.

First, we must stipulate that we media bastards don't handle trade rumors any better than we did 70 years ago. It's still bushels-in, teaspoons out. It's still general managers and scouts whispering leads, many of them false, passed around from reporter to reporter like a bottle of Old Rainboot amidst a huddle of railroad hobos, and then watching them repeated in the morning sheets, as they were meant to be.

And the ratio of truth to falsehood still runs at about 50 percent.

But with all due respect to young Fletch, trade rumors are one of the few things that separate baseball from the lesser sports. Because trade rumors lead to trades, trades lead to interest, and interest leads to people going to the ballpark.

And baseball needs all the people in the ballpark it can get.

Not that you'd hear this from anyone, but baseball still has not regained the level of in-house popularity it enjoyed before the Great Owners' Lockout of '94. It was an act of insanity for which the owners have already paid plenty, and will pay for again in the afterlife.

Hey, don't yell at us. It was in the release.

And the fact is, trade rumors make baseball fun in those dead days in the heart of summer, when the pennant races haven't started yet but the lousy teams have already staked out their positions at the bottom of the standings.

Besides, baseball is the only sport that still has trades. And trades, though they may cause some momentary trauma to the players, are still good for the game.

Basketball almost never trades players, because of the nightmarish salary cap restrictions. And when they do, they have rules that prevent the teams from acting on completed trades for weeks.

Hockey has some trades, and occasionally blockbusters (see Jagr, Jaromir, for most recent confirmation), but their trade deadline comes nearly at the end of the season, by which time a lot of teams have given up the ghost and for whom a trade would affect nothing.

And football? Are you kidding. Coaches, sure as they are that their eye for talent is without flaw, only cut players they know will never play again in the NFL, thus what's the point of a trade, right?

We may be overstating that last paragraph a bit, but it just felt good saying it anyway. In truth, the cap strangles deals even more than the NBA cap does, and NFL general managers don't like pitting their judgment against each other except on draft day.

And as far as we know, there has never been a trade in golf, tennis, auto racing or any of the other individual sports. And if there have been, please don't tell us.

No, this is something endemic to baseball and baseball alone. At a time when the game is trying to show why its unique facets are worth your time and attention, the trade deadline serves a useful and enjoyable function.

Besides, and this is a big besides, players talk about trades as much as we medioids do. We're a clearinghouse -- a profoundly inexact, hyperactive, sometimes even desperate clearinghouse, but a clearinghouse nonetheless. Players often ask writers, "What do you hear?" Given baseball's often clumsy sense of media relations, that's something of a compliment.

So with the deadline fast approaching, and then another one after that at the end of August, we'll be at it again. Not with much more exactitude, but not much less, either.

And if it's any consolation, did you hear that Darrin Fletcher might be going to . . . but now we're just being gratuitous Enquirer types.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com