‘A Weird Social Experiment’: What the Winter Meetings Are Really Like
Meetings veteran Jared Diamond of The Wall Street Journal was kind enough to fill us in.
Jared Diamond wrote exclusively about the Mets (and for a time the Yankees) before focusing on all of baseball for The Wall Street Journal. He was kind enough to join the boys of Good Fundies around this time last year to talk about, among other things, what the heck actually goes on at the Winter Meetings besides the occasional trade and privately begging Bryan Shaw to not wait for a four year contract offer.
Outside of the change in venue from National Harbor, Maryland to the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida, all of the behind the scenes details Mr. Diamond mentioned will no doubt be happening all over again starting today, when the high will be 57 degrees.
The conversation was edited for clarity:
Roger: Are you excited for the Winter Meetings taking place in National Harbor, Maryland?
Jared: I’m not sure excited is the right word, but they should be interesting.
The Winter Meetings are a strange place. It’s this very odd baseball gathering you don’t quite understand until you see it firsthand, because it’s not like anything else on Earth. It’s like this weird baseball convention, where everyone in the baseball world is there and not really a lot happens, but people drink a lot and sometimes there’s trades, and media just sort of hangs out in the lobby, and there’s all these people looking for jobs with suits, and their little binders, and it’s just sort of a weird place, but it’s part of the industry and every year you kind of dread it and you go through with it and it is what it is.
Brian: I was going to ask you about the non-baseball executives that go. So it’s true, people do actually go down to the Winter Meetings with their resumes in hand?
Jared: I would say that’s most of the people at this point. Between them and media it seems like that’s all who is there. There are SO many job seekers. There’s an actual job fair that is enormous, and my understanding is that most minor league jobs for the next season are filled at the Winter Meetings; they hire a lot of people for minor league jobs, not a lot of major league jobs, but minor league jobs yes, all kinds are disciplines.
Brian: Really?
Jared: There are a million…they are so easy to spot: they are young kids, out of college, just out of college, if they are men they wear suits that don’t fit very well. They’re holding a binder or some sort of portfolio of some kind; I don’t really know what’s in it, and they are looking to talk to anybody they possibly can at the hopes that you MAY work for a baseball team.
Brian: Got to respect that hustle man. I do.
Jared: They’re definitely working hard, they’re going for it. I do admire that.
Brian: This is your fourth time you said?
Jared: This will be my fourth Winter Meetings. I was in Orlando, then it was San Diego, then Nashville, and now…Maryland…
Roger: What are you most looking forward to doing in Maryland?
Jared: I just don’t understand, I thought the point of the Winter Meetings was that it was somewhere warm. I thought that was just a prerequisite of the Winter Meetings, that was my understanding, and uh, no, it’s not going to be warm…that’s just not what’s happening this year. The Winter Meetings in San Diego were so great that I think every person in baseball, no matter what they do in baseball, would agree that the Winter Meetings should be in San Diego every year: everyone enjoyed it, and of course that’s not happening.
Roger: Very, very important question: the Rule 5 draft is on the final day of the Winter Meetings. I was just wondering what the attendance is for the Rule 5 draft.
Jared: Oh it’s usually just media that’s waiting to go home, because usually the GMs and whatnot will do their final Winter Meetings beat writer send-off right after the Rule 5 draft. The Rule 5 draft by the way takes about ten minutes. It’s a really weird thing, because most teams don’t exercise their picks, so most of it is teams going “We’re not picking.” And it’s only like two rounds right? So it goes fast, and by then everyone is so ready for the Winter Meetings to be over, it’s like “Okay let’s move this along.”
Roger: That’s so strange because occasionally an All-Star is picked.
Jared: Sure. The Mets picked up a player a couple of years ago who ended up playing.
Brian: Sean Gilmartin.
Jared: Yeah Sean Gilmartin was in -
Brian: Odubel Herrera was drafted.
Jared: I’m not saying the Rule 5 Draft isn’t valuable; it certainly could be. You think of a draft and you think it’s like this big process and then you see the Rule 5 Draft and then 15 minutes in it’s over and you go “Oh okay, that was fast.”
Brian: Yeah well four days of drinking too much and being annoyed by job seekers and you just want to get out of there.
Jared: By the end of the Winter Meetings everybody wants to go home. But I’m not complaining! I don’t want to make it like I’m complaining because it is a part of the job and I do work in baseball, so I would never complain about my job. It’s a great job, but the Winter Meetings is like a weird social experiment. What happens when you put this many people in a confined space for four days, like “watch everyone descend into madness.”
Brian: Have you had a chance to interact with front office and other personnel from teams other than from the Mets and the Yankees so far?
Jared: The GM meetings are a great opportunity for that; the Winter Meetings actually are not as much. The media access at the Winter Meetings isn’t really great: it’s a little too hectic, there’s a little too much going on. But I was at the GM Meeting, which I’ve been to a few times, and that is a great time to get to meet people because there’s two days for an hour a day of formal GM media availability, where every single GM is just standing in a room and you get to talk to them. And there’s not a lot of media relatively speaking at the GM meetings, so that’s very valuable for me, for The Wall Street Journal in general.
The Winter Meetings a little less so. You still get to meet people: there’s agents, there’s still people in the industry to meet and that’s really why I’m going. You guys have followed my work before, you know the Journal, we don’t really cover sort of the “daily horse race” of things, it’s just a little different way of covering, and the main reason I’m going is to just meet people: network, build sources, build relationships. That’s really the value of all of these things more than what I’ll actually be writing…from Maryland.
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