hot stove

hot stove (plural hot stoves)

1. A relatively low-powered kitchen appliance used in lieu of a proper stove.

   You can try boiling water for that spaghetti on the hot stove, but it might take a few hours.

2. A hotplate.
3. A stove with a hot element.
4. (figurative, by extension) Any potentially harmful situation.
5. (baseball, attributive) The baseball off-season where trades take place and teams look to sign free agents.

   the hot stove report

• 1986 April 30, Dan Shaughnessy, “Pregame prediction was just a little off”, in The Boston Globe:

  Years after Mike Ruth retires from the NFL and the Celtics hoist No. 33 to the rafters, Hot Stove folks from Bedford to Bellows Falls, Vt., will recall the night Roger Clemens rode into the baseball record books.

• 1989 February 13, Roger Angell, Season Ticket: A Baseball Companion, Ballantine Books, page 22:

  Finding Dempsey in my mind's eye in January was not quite startling, ...but some other catchers turned up in my hot-stove reveries as well. Bob Boone, for instance.

• 1994 November, Peter C. Bjarkman, Baseball with a Latin Beat, McFarland & Company, page 286:

  While stateside fans are left during winter’s harsher months with only hot-stove scuttlebutt about the hometown nine or perhaps a steady diet of financial bulletins concerning baseball’s exploding list of instant millionaires

• hot stove league

• MLB.com hot stove report