Inside Baseball's "Family Reunion"
With much of the Baseball world gathered in Nashville this week, a look inside the annual Winter Meetings
You could make a compelling argument that, thanks to modern technology, Baseball’s annual Winter Meetings have outlived their usefulness.
General Managers routinely text and Facetime these days. Do they really have to fly across the country to be under the same roof to swing deals and negotiate with agents for 4 days every December?
Can’t MLB managers and trainers and public relations and marketing executives gather to talk shop for the better part of a day or 2 each year on Zoom rather than in a handful of sterile hotel ballrooms?
Do we really need a massive trade show for vendors to promote new-fangled give-away items or for entertainers to try to book ballpark appearances for next season when all the information anyone really needs is on the internet and orders can be made and deals can be closed via email?
Can’t hundreds of major league and minor league job seekers looking to launch or advance their careers submit their resumes via email rather than stake out a hotel lobby, dressed in their finest threads, looking for anyone with a club logo on his or her polo shirt who just might be somebody?
The simple answer is “Yes.”
And yet dozens of representatives from each of Major League Baseball’s 30 clubs and the leadership and staff members from each of the 120 Minor League teams have descended this week on the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville, the site of this year’s annual industry get-together. And there are in excess of 1,000 members of the print and broadcast media on hand to chronicle it all.
The Winter Meetings are held over 4 days nestled in between Thanksgiving and Christmas when few fans would be thinking or talking about Baseball. And that’s why they go on and will continue.
The event puts Major League Baseball in the news every December, about half-way between the end of one season and the start of a new Spring Training.
I’ve always considered the Winter Meetings the line of demarcation between one season and the next. They’re when “this season” becomes “last season” and when “next year” becomes “this year.”
The tradition is nearly 100 years old, with the first Winter Meetings having been held in New York in 1927. The meetings have taken place every year since with the exception of 2020, when they were held virtually due to Covid, and 2021, when they were canceled due to the MLB lockout.
They were held in New York or Chicago almost exclusively into the mid-1940s. Then, for decades, the meetings were constantly on the move. Los Angeles one year, St. Petersburg, Columbus, Jacksonville, Louisville, Toronto, Honolulu, Rochester, Boston, Mexico City, Houston, Miami, Anaheim and many other locales, both large and small.
In recent year, there’s been more of a rotation, with Nashville, Orlando and San Diego hosting most of the meetings over the last decade.
While just about everyone on hand has meetings to attend and things to accomplish over the 4 days, there is a warm social nature to the event during which many people from across the industry see counterparts, old friends and maybe even some former co-workers, in many cases for the one and only time all year.
Every time the elevator doors open, you never know who might get off, often creating an unanticipated opportunity to renew acquaintances with someone you’re thrilled to see. And after about 15 seconds, you think to tell the impatient person with his finger on the “Door Open” button that you’ll catch the next one.
That’s why someone once described the Winter Meetings to me as “Baseball’s Family Reunion.”
I’ve attended the Winter Meetings about a dozen times over the years. My first trip was to Nashville in December of 1989. I was a senior at Northwestern University, looking to land a job in the minors that I could start immediately after graduation in the spring. What, in those days, was an every-man-for-himself employment cattle call has over the years become a very organized event, the annual Professional Baseball Employment Opportunities Job Fair.
In my day, there was a bulletin board hidden away in some rarely visited corner of the hotel that listed job openings. Marketing assistant. Grounds crew. Concessions director. Community relations director. Public relations intern. And, occasionally, broadcaster. If you saw a job that interested you, there was a room number listed. You’d slide your resume under the door. In an era before cell phones and email, you’d return to the board later that day or the following morning in hopes that your name had been scribbled into a slot for a job interview.
I got a few interviews that week and, days after finishing up at NU, launched my career as an intern with the Rochester Red Wings of the Triple-A International League. I’d return to many other Winter Meetings after getting to the big leagues in 1996, first as a club public relations executive with meetings to attend and media to wrangle and later as a big league broadcaster who had no official business but relished the opportunity to catch up with old friends from across the majors and minors.
There’s always something going on at the Winter Meetings.
There’s an annual manager’s luncheon, at which each big league skipper shares a table with his local media contingent and PR person. Each of the managers also meets with media members who may want to talk with him in a press conference setting at a designated time during the first couple of days of the meetings.
The Hall of Fame’s era committees meet at the Winter Meetings each year and vote on candidates who, if elected, would join the Baseball Writers’ selections in the following summer’s Hall of Fame class. (Congratulations to Jim Leyland, who was elected Sunday in Nashville!)
The Hall also announces the winner of the annual Ford C. Frick Award at the meetings each year, recognizing a big league broadcaster for career excellence and a lifetime of contributions to the game. It was a thrill for me to be a fly on the wall in Orlando in 2011 the day iconic Expos and Marlins voice Dave Van Horne, my former Marlins radio partner, got the news he had been honored.
There’s a large media workroom, where hundreds of writers are usually hard at work cranking out content. The room has a large dais in the front for any major press conferences that might be held during the meetings.
There’s always the day super agent Scott Boras casually wanders into the lobby or the media workroom and is immediately surrounded by a throng of writers holding their iPhones or recorders. “Oh, you guys wanted to talk with me?” He always has an agenda, and he always has a lineup card full of memorable quotes.
A few memorable Boras quotes in recent years:
“People call me all the time and say, ‘Man, your players aren't signed yet.’ Well, it doesn't really matter what time dinner is when you're the steak.”
In 2021, on then-free agent Kris Bryant: “For me, Bryant, he’s tall in stature. He’s kind of the Sean Connery of Major League Baseball ... Positional versatility makes him Untouchable. He has Bond-like abilities to create a great middle of the lineup. He’s always Red Hot in the Hunt For October. He’s an extraordinary gentleman in a League of His Own. Bryant has many roles, and they’re all hits.”
On then-free agent Carlos Rodon: “When you think about sculpting a pitching staff and you’re a thinking man, the target, without a doubt, is Rodon.”
On then-free agent Max Scherzer: “Teams that are pursuing a championship, they’re certainly not pursuing the minimum. They’re going directly to the Max.”
I’m going to stop now. You get the idea. But there’s a lot more where this came from, and you’ll hear it out of Nashville this week.
For most fans, the focus on the meetings is on the trades that might be made and the free agents who may sign during the meetings.
There was a time club executives would meet in hotel lobbies and restaurants. In 1975, when the meetings were held at the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, FL, new White Sox owner Bill Veeck, a legendary promoter, famously set up a table in the lobby with a sign that read, “Open for business.” Veeck, who would be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991, made 6 trades and acquired 22 players during his brief stay in South Florida.
Now, with the preponderance of media in attendance, you’re not going to see Brian Cashman or Dave Dombroski sipping tea in the coffee shop across from the bell stand. And you’re certainly not going to see Jed Hoyer next to the concierge desk with an “Open for Business” sign.
Every club’s Baseball Operations team has a suite in the host hotel. Suites are assigned based on the organization’s leader’s tenure. Sorry, Peter Bendix, but you’re not laying down your head in the Presidential Suite this year. But, on the bright side, the ice machine is likely right outside your door.
The suites are home bases. War rooms. They’re filled just about all day by club officials, often the team’s manager, special assistants and some of the organization’s top scouts. The suites are bursting with every snack and drink option under the sun, and you can rest assured it’s a busy 4 days for the hotel’s room service staff.
Teams are in contact with one another. Is there something we should talk about? OK, let’s get together. What time works for you? Your suite or mine?
When these meetings take place, most of the occupants clear out of the suite of the team that plays host. It’s often 2 or 3 officials from each club that will get together. They’ll chat and see where it goes.
Occasionally, deals get done in a single meeting. But that’s rare. Often, it’s a matter of laying groundwork so that something can get hammered out later in the meetings or even later in the offseason via phone, text or email. Sometimes, it’s largely an information-gathering session. Careful notes are taken. Something said that might seem innocuous in one of those meetings might provide the spark for a deal at a later date, remembering that an organization might have asked about a Double-A lefthander, for example.
In between meetings, the war room is a place where ideas are bounced around. There’s often a dry-erase board or an easel with a giant pad on which priorities are listed and ideas are jotted down. It’ll get turned around or even moved into the bedroom before the Royals posse arrives for their meeting at 3:15.
The club’s head of public relations is often in the suite or at least in regular contact, standing by in case he or she is needed to prepare a press release about a pending deal or for anything else. The best and most experienced PR chiefs tend to spend chunks of the day roaming the lobby, keeping in touch with any local media that may have traveled to the meetings, touching base with national media and collecting any intel that might be worthy of being brought back to the suite.
The question I’d often get when I served in that role was pretty straight-forward: “What are you hearing?”
Shortly before dinner time, any local media that has made the trip generally gets an audience with the general manager, who will walk them through the day. There aren’t often a lot of specific details shared. It may be, “We met with 4 or 5 clubs today and a couple of agents. We have more meetings planned for tomorrow.” Media might ask about priorities. What sense the GM is getting about how markets are developing. There aren’t many bombshells dropped in these daily get-togethers, but they’re part of the routine.
At night, most of the attendees of the meetings head “off campus” to grab dinner, their iPhones always in sight just in case something breaks. Hotel bars tend to be busy places as the hour grows later and people return from dinner. Some GMs and top baseball ops officials will occasionally go out for dinner, but many will tell you they never leave the hotel from the time they check in on Sunday until the time they check out following the annual Rule 5 Draft on Thursday.
There are cocktail parties at which big league clubs host representatives of their minor league affiliates—owners, general managers and front office execs. It’s a great chance for people on the baseball and business side of the big league operation to spend some time with the their counterparts from the team’s Single-A, Double-A and Triple-A affiliates.
And really, unless you’re a senior baseball operations executive, once your meetings are done, it’s a lot of killing time. The old “hurry up and wait.” Members of the media circle the lobby at all hours of the day and night. You’ll probably see some tweets this week about the number of steps writers are getting on their Fitbits, especially with the meetings returning to the Opryland.
If you’ve never been to the Opryland Hotel, it’s an experience. It’s basically a city unto itself. Nearly 3,000 guest rooms, many of which look out into a massive glass-encased atrium, more than 9 indoor acres. There’s tropical vegetation and a 44-foot waterfall. Orchids, giant palms and even banana trees. There’s a quarter-mile-long indoor river that runs through the resort, and while you’ll see catfish, carp and koi, you probably won’t see many general managers riding the Delta Riverboat to their next meeting.
Yes, there really is a riverboat that runs through the hotel.
The Opryland is also home to a waterpark, and this week I wouldn’t bet against catching MLB Network’s Kevin Millar on the Rapid Remix waterslide.
There’s a lot to see and do at the Opryland. But as the 30 clubs work to improve for the 2024 season, there won’t be much time to play at this week’s Winter Meetings.
While you’re here…
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Great look behind the scenes! Thanks Glenn.
One of, if not the most useful and informative post you’ve written on this blog. Very interesting.