On Sunday, nearly all of baseball’s most prominent executives and reporters descended upon Nashville for MLB’s yearly Winter Meetings. The Winter Meetings are widely thought of as the time when plenty of free agents get signed, players get traded, and the seeds of a championship team are planted. But in reality, the event is a giant Minor League Baseball job fair, bringing not just major league executives and both national and local reporters, but also thousands of job seekers, minor league personnel, and companies looking to sell their products to organizations.
One of the people within baseball to not get his foot in the door with baseball as a job seeker at the Winter Meetings is MLB Network anchor Greg Amsinger, who will be hosting a solid chunk of the MLB Tonight coverage live from Nashville. In fact, Amsinger was like many baseball fans who didn’t even realize that the Winter Meetings were essentially a giant job fair.
“I didn’t know that was what people did,” Amsinger told Awful Announcing. “I didn’t know people used the Winter Meetings for that purpose. When I heard ‘Winter Meetings,’ I always heard stories of Jack McKeon sitting in the lobby, opening his briefcase, and saying ‘we’re open for business.’ That’s all I ever heard about the Winter Meetings. I didn’t know that young, aspiring broadcasters and media members would go there to try to get a gig.”
One of those people that is *not* a novice at the Winter Meetings is Peter Gammons. He’s been attending for more than 40 years, and spoke about just how much the Winter Meetings have grown over their history.
“I think it was 1976, right around there. Bill Veeck had just bought the White Sox,” Gammons said to AA. “They were at this hotel in Hollywood, Fla., and he came in, put a desk down in the middle of the lobby with a big sign that said ‘for sale.’ He’d invite teams to come over and make trade offers to him, it was hysterical. And there were only about 10 of us watching. Today, Brian Cashman comes out of an elevator and a sea of people immediately envelops him.”
Gammons also noted how much the Winter Meetings have evolved in addition to grown.
“It’s always been about enjoying the game and what’s good for the game, and I think baseball gets a lot of publicity out of them. These meetings were owners deciding rules and so forth. Now, there’s general managers, there’s players, and it’s much more of an atmosphere of ‘this is all about players, not owners’, and that’s one of the things I’ve always liked about baseball compared to football. Football is an owners sport, and baseball is a players sport. I have no problem with players making as much money as they can make. I think it’s great.”
However, the major league moves are most often talked about, and the Winter Meetings have evolved into a chaotic affair with trade rumors constantly cycling around the baseball world and the hot stove getting turned all the way up. Because of social media and the 24/7 news cycle, it’s impossible to not cover the Winter Meetings if you’re an outlet like MLB Network. This year, MLB Network and its stable of reporters, analysts, and anchors will be live from Nashville through Thursday for a total of 35 hours and as you’d expect, they’re not holding back with their coverage during this chaotic week.
Being on site in Nashville is also different for Amsinger from being on site at a different live remote.
“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever covered. It’s one of my favorite events. You rarely see every big league manager, every big league GM in the same building. You rarely see baseball fans get so close that they could touch them as they walk around.
“Ever since MLB Network took over this event, we have two locations for our sets. We have numerous on-air staff and production staff there. We’re on from the morning around the clock. Studio shows, all morning, all day, all night. So you’re walking around with the energy of live television in two different locations of this hotel/resort. We’ve taken this huge structure in Nashville and turned it into a monster TV studio, and everyone walking around is a live studio audience. It has a really unique energy — it’s not like doing a pregame show before a big game. It’s almost like, in many cases, the show is the big game and the show is never off the air.”
MLB Network’s year-round coverage of the game has also helped turn the Winter Meetings from a milepost event to a cog in a larger, 365-day machine, in the opinion of Gammons.
“MLB Network does so much every day around the year that to a lot of people, the Winter Meetings are just part of a wheel that keeps turning. It’s not like this is the one week where we get a lot of news — which it was 40 or 50 years ago. Now, it’s year-round, every day, and we’re running on that wheel all the time. As a fan, it’s a lot of fun.”
Gammons also spoke about the vast environment in Nashville at the Opryland Resort, one of the favorite targets of sportswriters whenever the Winter Meetings are held there.
“It’s one of the widest hotels I’ve ever seen in my life. This is the hotel, the Opryland, where Kevin Towers once offered a player to anyone who could find his room. It’s the center of where something is going on all the time.
“The biggest thing is having a hotel setup where we can find everyone and they’re set up in a place where people gather. That makes a huge difference. As much as the media has changed over the years, there’s a lot that’s exactly the same. There’s a gathering that’s always existed, and being in touch with the baseball people and not having them spread out over miles of the state of Tennessee makes it a lot easier.”
The tone of the Winter Meetings coverage, in which MLB Network is essentially waiting on transactions to occur or rumors to surface, also creates some interesting challenges compared to a typical day during the regular season when there are live games to preview and/or recap.
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