There have been various rumors bandied about so far this off-season about free agents, trade possibilities and the like. One such vague trade rumor floating around has been the possibility of Justin Upton coming to the Cubs from the D’Backs. Theo Epstein says don’t get your hopes up about any wild trades.

“[We’ll] try to identify possible trade fits,” team president Theo Epstein said Wednesday. “But I don’t think it’s the type of offseason where we have potential fits with 25 of the 29 other clubs. We’ll pursue everything, but realistically I think our fits might be narrower this year. [We’ll] try to use that as a strength, turn it into an advantage and focus on the free-agent market.

“We’re going to have a pretty well-defined trade market really quickly, because we don’t have unlimited assets to deal. We don’t necessarily have redundancies at positions in the big leagues or at the upper levels.”

Maybe he’s just tempering our hopes so that we’ll be super excited when he pulls off the trade that will bring the Cubs the 2013 World Series crown.

Jed Hoyer spoke on the Dan Haren/Carlos Marmol trade that never was.

“We never had a done deal,” general manager Jed Hoyer said. “To me, [that’s] every part of the deal is done — you send out a press release and obviously we never got to that point.

“With Carlos, we got to the point where we were close enough and we needed to go to [him] and ask if he’d waive his no-trade to the Angels. Once we involved the player, it leaked out and then everyone ran with it like it was a done deal. It was unfortunate. It was a miscommunication.

“Carlos just ran with it that he had been traded, even though the deal wasn’t complete. I guess that’s one of the negatives of no-trade [clauses]. You start involving external entities when you’re trying to finalize a trade and that’s not the best thing in the world for keeping stuff quiet.”

Jed’s still bitter about all the no-trades Jim Hendry handed out.