As much as I enjoy the regular season of Major League Baseball, I am also a fan of the offseason.

I keep glued to the press and the associated intrigue of baseball winter meetings, and this offseason might prove to be an intriguing one indeed.

Trades and free-agent signings are always at the top of my list for the winter months.

Deemed “hot stove baseball” it means, in a nutshell, many people like you and me are gathered around an old wood stove in some small country store, perhaps spitting chewing tobacco at a spittoon, and pondering the future of our beloved Boston Red Sox, or some other team.

I’ve been in a few of those stores with Dad when I was a kid. I can close my eyes and picture those wood stoves. I’ve even filled a few of those pot- belly things myself.

What I remember most about those days were the old-fashioned pickle barrels, loaded with huge dill pickles. For a nickel, you could pick out your very own pickle by sticking your arm in the brine and hauling out the thing.

Next, you either ate it or had it wrapped in deli paper.

Mostly, we just ate them.

I always think of my great uncle Roscoe Fletcher when I think of the old hot stove baseball stuff.

Uncle Roscoe was a large man. I believe, genetically speaking, that my father looked more like Roscoe than any other relative on his side of the family.

With big, broad shoulders and huge hands that looked like meat hooks, he shared an affection for the Red Sox with my father, and when he and his lovely wife Dorothy, my great aunt, came to visit us, Red Sox baseball was always the high point of discussion.

Make no mistake about it: Roscoe knew the game. He wiled away the lonesome hours on his lobster boat, listening to the Sox. The unique aspect of his being a fan was this: He never saw a game – ever – on a TV.

What a treat it was to sit with him and listen to ballgames.

I asked him once about his lack of desire to see a game.

“It [baseball] was meant to be played during the daytime and followed on the radio.”

How he would have loved the 2004 and the 2007 versions of the Olde Towne Team. Roscoe couldn’t tell you the physical difference between Ted Williams and Pete Runnels, but he could rattle off statistics like a computer. And how he loved all the hot stove, offseason discussions.

Hot stoves are burning all over New England. The wood’s on fire with the prospects of adding two-time Cy Young Award-winning Minnesota pitcher Johan Santana to the Red Sox.

Heck, with the money this team now has, it would be more than a likely possibility.

Santana will be a free agent next winter, and the Twins are asking for a serious package of prospects to get the phenom. Toss into that mix the huge money Santana will want now that the team has boasted big salaries throughout their line-up.

Caution should be the watchword, however, especially when names such as Ellsbury, Lester and Buchholz are mentioned in the deal.

But with the Yankees fanning the flames in their own hot stove thinking, maybe doing nothing might be smart in Boston; or as Uncle Roscoe might say, “Sometimes the best trades are the ones you don’t make.”

BDN columnist Ron Brown, a retired high school basketball coach, can be reached at bdnsports@bangordailynews.net