Before the week began, ESPN senior baseball writer Jayson Stark thought that the biggest thing that could happen at this week’s Winter Meetings in National Harbor, MD was a trade involving Chicago White Sox ace lefty Chris Sale.
He had touched base with a number of teams before he got to the gigantic Gaylord hotel just outside of Washington, D.C. On Monday, the first official day of the meetings, he talked with several interested teams. Things were moving slowly, as Chicago’s price hadn’t really dropped. Nothing had gotten serious until late Monday, when the Washington Nationals emerged as a serious Sale suitor.
“From that point on, it’s pretty much just full alert every second you’re awake on ‘how is this story changing,’” Stark told Awful Announcing from his hotel room Wednesday morning.
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“It isn’t just a place where hundreds of media people assemble to go to work for a week,” Stark said, “it’s a place where the best in the business assemble.”
That purpose is not necessarily be the first to report breaking news, but to get it right. For Stark, that involves staying calm, sane and “just making sure that I’m only going to report information that I am confident about.”
Not every reporter seems to stick to that mantra, especially with the competition in the building and the pressure social media brings to constantly be posting any morsel or piece of relevant information.
“I think there’s tremendous pressure on people in my business, in this environment, to feel like ‘wow, everybody else is tweeting stuff, I better tweet something,’” Stark said. “And I think that’s such a tremendous formula for how to get yourself in trouble and how to be wrong.”
Every day at the Winter Meetings is different for Stark, depending on his different obligations over the week; whether it’s radio hits, TV spots, Baseball Tonight, networking, or actual reporting and writing. Breaking news and press conferences could happen at any time. It’s important to him to see, meet, connect, network and brainstorm with people in the baseball industry.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s rare to see general managers or top team executives hanging around in the lobby and chatting up fans; it’s a business trip for them, after all. Stark said he may get lucky and get a quick chat or interview as a general manager is walking across the lobby to get to some meeting or function or pre-scheduled interview, but he doesn’t count on it.
“A lot of the people that we’re covering at the Winter Meetings never leave their suite,” Stark said. “And so we spend a lot of time texting them, emailing them. Maybe even both of us [will be] talking on our cell phones and never lay eyes on each other. It’s just ironic, because you could do that from home.”
But despite the relative lack of big names at the lobby, Stark always budgets out some time to make his way down and talk shop with scouts or assistant general managers, or swap information with fellow media members.
“I’m going to build that into the day, I just can’t tell you that there’s a set moment every day when I do that because sometimes it doesn’t happen,” Stark said.
That lobby time would ultimately come in handy on Tuesday morning, just after Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal first tweeted that Sale was being traded to the Boston Red Sox for a four-player package led by top hitting prospect Yoan Moncada.
“From the moment it was first reported that he was going to the Red Sox, I don’t know how to describe it,” Stark said. “There’s just this adrenaline rush. Your heart starts thumping and it just ripples through the lobby, ripples through the building in a way that is unlike anything else we do.”
The first report began a whirlwind stretch of several hours with Stark, ultimately delaying his much-anticipated interview for this article by a full day.
Once the full details of the trade to Boston were reported and confirmed, Stark immediately thought that he needed to write a column to react to the deal and put what happened in perspective. He went into the lobby and looked for people he knew could that provide said perspective, and to make sure he sounded them out. He also texted some trusted sources and made a helpful phone call to a team representative.
That process took about an hour, Stark said. He then had to run to his computer to get the column out quickly, filing the story just before Boston’s press conference announcing the trade took place at 4:30 p.m. Stark then attended the roughly 20-minute press conference and spoke to his editors about what was just said and how it could be worked into the column he’d already filed. Some quotes from Red Sox general manager Dave Dombrowski were added.
Baseball Tonight was then approaching, so Stark had to sprint to the green room and get ready for his ESPN television spot.
“That was a really intense, four, five, six hours. I don’t exactly remember how many at this point,” Stark said, “but it’s incredible how it flies by when something that huge happens here.”
How the Winter Meetings location and the baseball world reacts when something happens as every baseball executive spends four days together in the same hotel is what makes the annual event so uniquely special to American sports.
“It’s a fascinating process,” Stark said. “It’s this incredible combination of reporting, networking, socializing and just hanging out. There’s just nothing like it.”
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