Late last night, a Twitter user claiming to have “multiple connections” in Major League Baseball, suggested that Prince Fielder, the Milwaukee Brewers’ first baseman who is currently a free agent, will be signing an eight-year deal with the Nationals. And for the second time in as many days, a whiff of breaking sports news floated on Twitter set off a flurry of commotion over whether or not the rumors are true. Here’s what Scott Swaim, the self-styled insider, had to report:

Hold up. Before anyone gets too excited about the prospect of the 27-year-old slugger bringing his lifetime slugging percentage of .540 and average annual output of 37 home runs and 106 runs batted in to Nationals Park, it’s worth considering a few factors.

For starters, the Nats still have Adam LaRoche under contract for $8 million in 2012, even though his 2011 season lasted all of 43 games (for which he was paid $7 million). But LaRoche is healthy now, and along with Michael Morse on the roster, do the Nationals really need to shell out several times as much as they’re paying LaRoche to land another first baseman. It’s not as if LaRoche, at 32 and with respectable but unremarkable career stats, would be so easy to unload. And Morse, who hit 31 home runs and batted .303, was just rewarded with a two-year extension worth $10.5 million.

The Post’s Adam Kilgore writes that signing Fielder “would be more of a luxury than an immediate need.”

And then there’s the source of the rumor. Though Swaim’s initial tweet was pounced on and retweeted many times over, including by me, he’s getting a lot of questions for his veracity. Swaim is not some beat writer somewhere; rather, he’s just a guy who claims to be well-connected inside professional baseball. He claims to have had the early drop on other big off-season deals, including Albert Pujols going to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and Carlos Beltrán signing with the St. Louis Cardinals.

The website RantSports.com, for one, doubts Swaim’s authenticity as a deeply sourced baseball reporter:

Is he the man to run to when looking for information? Not so fast, with a quick look at his twitter feed he claims Bobby Abreu is near a deal with the Tigers, could be true but no one else is reporting it, Matt Garza would also be a Tiger very soon, deal hasn’t happened. He has also apparently made claims of Evan Longoria asking for a trade from the Tampa Bay Rays. Matt Linder, of TheOutsidecorner.com, found a blurb written by Mark Topkin of the St. Petersburg times disproving the Longoria claim using Longoria’s own words—

“I don’t have any idea where that rumor came from! It’s completely false,” Longoria told the Times via text. “I’ve said from the start I love Tampa, I love the direction we are heading as a franchise and there is no better place for me to continue to grow as a player and person.”

With all this coming to lite It is pretty tough to believe anything Swaim has said or claimed up to this point, although even with the lack of confirmation around the internet he is still telling others to trust him.

Much higher up on the food chain, Jim Bowden, the Nationals’ former general manager who is now an analyst for ESPN, said that while the Nats are interested in Fielder, there’s nothing in ink:

But Fielder needs to act fast. As The New York Times’ Tyler Kepner noted yesterday, it’s a little odd that a player of Fielder’s caliber is still a free agent so late in the off-season. Some of that could have to do with his agent, Scott Boras, the same guy who negotiated Jayson Werth’s seven-year, $126 million contract before the 2011 season. (And we all know how well that’s worked out.)

Still, the Nats could be a good fit for Fielder, Kepner wrote:

Fielder is better than Morse, and Washington could surely find a spot for him. But Fielder’s case is more about value than talent, and it is Boras’s job to maximize that value in a peculiar market. Naturally, he will explore every angle, but perhaps the solution is a shorter-term deal.

A team could pay Fielder more than $25 million per year, making him the highest-paid player at his position, but for a shorter term — say, four or five years. At 27, Fielder would bet on himself to slug his way to more riches well before the end of his prime.

And for what it’s worth, this Swaim guy, whoever he is, isn’t backing down from his insistence that the deed is done:

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