We all want our jobs to be easy, right?
We all want to show up, be told by our bosses, “Hey, you know that thing that you do well and that you enjoy doing? You’re going to be on that for half the day, and then we’re going to send you home with full pay because you're going to do such a good job. Oh, and no one’s gonna bother you with all the stupid bullshit you usually do all day long.” What a dream! If you ever got a day like that, wouldn’t every other day feel like garbage? Like the universe was punishing you, denying you your rightful station? Like something that you should have had was being taken away from you?
Anyway, a bunch of baseball writers are throwing a hissy fit because the Winter Meetings are slow.
Before the Juan Soto deal was finally completed yesterday, the talk of the Winter Meetings was how boring they are. Nothing was happening. There weren’t any real good rumors. Everyone was just waiting for Shohei Ohtani to sign, and not sure what to do until then.
And so, Ken Rosenthal wrote an article about it, and many of his colleagues in Nashville for the Winter Meetings approvingly retweeted it.
Here are the main points Rosenthal made:
The Winter Meetings should be fun
Baseball’s offseason lacks urgency
Players should be forced to make deals at the Winter Meetings
Baseball doesn’t have the wild offseasons that basketball and football and hockey have, and it should
Let me address each of these points in turn, making my strongest, most cogent arguments to rebut them:
No they shouldn’t
I don’t care
No they shouldn’t
I don’t care
To me, the Winter Meetings are bureaucracy. Some business guys need to do business tasks, and it’s convenient for them to all stay in the same hotel for a week in order to do said business stuff. It is therefore incumbent upon the enterprising baseball reporter to also stay in that hotel and find out exactly what business items were or were not transacted that day.
That’s it. It’s not supposed to be fun, or entertaining. It’s supposed to be work, and when you’re done, you think, great, won’t have to do that again for another year, and then you go home to your family. It’s silly to believe that if you’re there, you’re owed a circus. You aren’t owed anything. This meeting is not an entertainment product. Meetings about how to improve entertainment products are not themselves obligated to be entertaining.
There just…isn’t more to it than that. The problem here is that a large group of baseball writers want the Winter Meetings to be something they aren’t. Proposing solutions to solve this non-problem — What if we have a transaction freeze from December 15 through February 1? What if you can’t make trades after the Winter Meetings? — will do nothing other than make those six weeks really boring. If an agent thinks he can get a better price by holding out through the Winter Meetings, then that’s what he will do, no matter when it finally becomes possible to sign guys. You’ll just have less news and more uncertainty for a longer time. And that won’t work!
If players are taking longer to sign now, it’s because market forces are compelling them to. Every baseball executive has a spreadsheet that says what a player is likely to be worth, and in a lot of cases they’re the same spreadsheets. If an agent doesn’t apply pressure, then that’s the number a team will offer. If an agent makes a team think that the player might not sign, or isn’t interested, and then the pressure builds over time, then maybe the team comes up to the agent’s number. It’s all business. And it’s not a problem that it isn’t happening right this second.
I mean, think about the Rays for a second. Sorry I’m asking you to think about the Rays, but hopefully I can justify it. The Rays do a bunch of stuff that sucks — openers and trading players super early for prospects and crying poor and forcing their fans to root only for laundry and be unable to make any real, emotional connection to one of their players — because it works for them. Those things are in their interest. If you are a baseball writer, are you then going to turn around and be mad at an agent for doing things in his player’s own interest?
Because, just to be clear, baseball writers are mad at Shohei Ohtani and his agent. They’re mad at him for not giving them a story and mad at him for preventing them from getting the normal Winter Meetings stories too, since everyone is waiting to see where he goes. I mean, here’s Ann Killion:
And here’s that colossal bag of shit, Chris Russo:
Setting aside the tastelessness of that atomic bomb comparison, what both Killion and Russo are saying is essentially the same thing: How dare you? We are supposed to have stories here. We are supposed to have rumors. And we’re being prevented from having any of that by one guy? Just because he doesn’t like it? Ridiculous.
Let’s ignore how misleading and useless those rumors always are. Remember when the Giants had locked up one Arson Judge last offseason? Seemed like a sure thing, until it went up in flames. But boy, did those rumors stoke an awful lot of fruitless speculation whose memory is even now a bitter pill to swallow. We were all misled and excited over nothing. But at least there was content!
This is what everyone whining about a lack of action this year wants. Rumors. Articles. Tweets. To be the first on something. To turn a meeting into a sign that every other team has no chance. And all of these are exactly what Ohtani and his agent are preventing reporters from doing. He explicitly does not want rumors. He does not care a whit about a reporter’s ability to do their job, which is the right attitude to have. It doesn’t affect him. It can’t. He’s true to himself.
And Ann Killion hates him for it.
She could write that article in her sleep. “Hearing Ohtani to Braves. Sources say deal isn’t done, but it’s close to the finish line. Here’s why he might have chosen Atlanta and what he’s going to make.” Anyone could. It’s so easy. If I could, I would love to have a week where I only had to write stuff like that, and I got paid for it. Just give me that chance.
And maybe, just maybe, if I had that chance long enough, I too would start to think it unfair that the Winter Meetings were slow. After all, remember how good it was for that one week when I was on Easy Street and I could just write about rumors? Ah, memories.
I agree overall with your point, Doug. But i don’t read the same thing from Ann’s quote that you do. I, too, was surprised at the punitive tone of Ohtani’s attitude towards this process - and it has changed my perception of him. And that, I think, was Ann’s reaction. Of course, others may see it differently.
Brilliant, Maestro! Pithy as heck!!