Behind the Scenes at the Winter Meetings…. AKA Baseball Heaven
First things first, the MLB Winter Meetings are nirvana for baseball nerds like myself…..
Oh, hey legendary sportswriter Peter Gammons, how are you? What’s that Boston Red Sox GM Dave Dombrowski? Sorry I couldn’t hear you because I was too busy saying hi to your manager John Farrell. Hey LA Times Dodgers’ beat writer Andy McCullough, have you seen NBC Sports’ Craig Calcaterra? I need to follow up on our conversation earlier and I got sidetracked by the New York Posts’ Joel Sherman. Oh, by the way, cool new glasses Pirates’ manager Clint Hurdle.
You couldn’t turn around without being starstruck by people who would only be stars to readers of this blog. It was fantastic.
It wasn’t just shaking hands and pleasantries, though. I was able to have some really good conversations. For instance, while waiting for the guys on the MLB TV set to announce baseball’s two newest hall of famers, John Schuerholz and Bud Selig (whom I have some thoughts on), I had a really interesting semi-debate with MLB.com’s Mark Bowman about the independence and objectivity of an MLB-owned news organization and the conflicts faced by writers of even nominally independent outlets like ESPN.
Mark’s point, which was very well taken, was that given ESPN’s financial stake in the success and popularity of baseball as a sport, writers there are really under the same pressures that face writers that are actually paid by MLB. Mark also said that he’s careful to write exactly what he feels and while you won’t see anything on MLB.com overtly ripping the league, the news stories on the site are as even handed as possible.
I also had a couple of really great talks with ESPN’s Jayson Stark and Jerry Crasnik. Both are unbelievably nice guys (as is the aforementioned Calcaterra) and, obviously, incredibly knowledgeable. I spoke with Jerry in particular for about 20 minutes and while we were talking, Jayson came up to talk through strategy on who was going to write the news and opinion pieces for the new Hall of Fame announcements.
One of the most exciting things that I was able to experience was watching Jon Morosi break a story. I saw Jon send a text with the Matt Holliday to the Yankees news to someone at MLB and around 5 minutes later I got the push notification to my phone with the info. As I got that alert, I was standing in a group with Jon and some other people listening to his take on the signing. It was all very surreal.
Most people at the winter meetings fall into one of three buckets. Bucket one was covered in my first Winter Meeting dispatch: job seekers looking to get into the baseball business. Bucket two consists of fans enamored with the players, GMs, managers, and coaches that walk by. While bucket three is the press seeking scoops from the baseball operations guys. There are certainly a lot more people interested in the baseball insiders than the reporters covering them. As one of the few sportswriter groupies there, I was able to get a lot more access to the writers than I thought. I just didn’t have that much competition. Plus, I was one of the few people there not looking for a job and they’re all just really nice guys.
There’s just so much going on at the Winter Meetings. It’s baseball concentrate. On one hand, there’s all the wheeling and dealing with the teams and their representatives, on the other there’s the media circus surrounding all that, plus general socializing between everyone involved. With the teams scattered all over the country, writers don’t get chance to see other writers in person very much. TV personalities don’t get a chance to see other TV personalities; managers don’t get a chance to see other managers, etc. At the meetings, they all come together and seem happy to get a chance to mingle and hang out.
It was beyond fun and beyond cool. I made some great contacts with writers, got a few good selfies, and I’m definitely going to try to go next year. I wish I could go to the rest of this years’ festivities, but the real world beckons.
-Max Frankel
