Winter Meetings Coverage

On Monday, baseball’s winter meetings kick off down in Orlando. Over the last few years, we’ve made a point out of covering every transaction, and many rumored transactions that may or may not take place, with around the clock coverage on the site. That will continue this year, and you can expect detailed breakdowns on every move that takes place next week. But we’ll be adding a new twist this year – we’ll be on site.

Along with David Appelman, Maury Brown, Joe Pawlikowski, and Eno Sarris, I will be down at the Swan and Dolphin wandering around lobbies and listening to Scott Boras compare one of his mid-level clients to an inner circle Hall of Famer. It’s really the kind of thing I’ve dreamed about since I was a boy.

Since this is our first trip to the meetings, it might be a bit of an experiment. After all, we’re not traditional reporters, and we won’t breaking any stories or landing any big scoops. We can offer analysis and commentary without actually being in the same city as the people making the moves, so I don’t expect that aspect of our coverage to change much. But being in the same geographic location does offer some advantages, and gives us the ability to do some things that we otherwise couldn’t do.

Before we decide what we’re going to do for four days, I’d be interested in getting input from you guys on what you’d like to see from the four FanGraphs staffers on site. Are you interested in us asking questions at the press conferences, or would you prefer that we leave the gathering of public quotes from team officials to those who specialize in that kind of work? Do you want some accounts of what it is like to be at the meetings, or are you tired of people telling you that they’re standing around watching an agent talk on his phone?

We’ve got something of a clean slate. We have a few ideas that I think could be interesting, but we’re also up for doing things that you guys want to read. So, you’ve got a few days to make some suggestions, and starting Monday, we’ll see what we can do.