You'll never get to heaven with a smile on your face for me.
I need the wide open space...
I’m in Nashville now, but not at the Opryland Hotel, which is what happens when you decide to make an entire resort out of tacky. I’m working from a coffee shop about ten minutes away, because I love the coffee (it’s a Barista Parlor, which has a few locations around Nashville, all incredibly cool and each different in décor and atmosphere) and the solitude.
I used to love the winter meetings. They were once the focus of the offseason, with trades and signings for days; I still remember the year they were first in San Diego, when the transactions came so fast in the final 24 hours that I had to triage and ended up not writing up some moves (Ervin Santana to the Twins comes to mind) because I just didn’t have time or sufficient battery life on my computer to do it all while also flying back across the country. This was where everything happened, and between my years with the Blue Jays and much of my time with ESPN, I looked forward to coming to the meetings – even in years when they were in terrible spots (the Gaylord Opryland Hotel is atop the list, although the year they did it in Indianapolis in December was also a low point, just because it was so incredibly cold) – because it meant I was right there in the center of the baseball world. For a few years, even the rule 5 draft was fun and exciting, until the CBA signed in November 2011 gutted it by giving clubs an extra year before they had to protect players, which was quietly one of the most anti-labor moves of the last fifty years of CBA negotiations.
Pictured: Inside the Gaylord Opryland’s Christmas hellscape.
I also looked forward to the social side of things. This was a chance to see a bunch of friends and acquaintances I might not see all year, and sometimes the serendipity of just bumping into someone in the lobby or at a meal or joining you in trying to escape the hotel would lead to the best moments of the week. These interactions were always interspersed through the meetings between furious bouts of writing or the occasional actual meeting – the “meetings” part of the winter meetings refers to front office folks and the minor leagues, with very few if any meetings for those of us on the media side. There’s a scouting directors meeting, a farm directors meeting, a trainers meeting, and so on, but other than the BBWAA meeting (which I think I have skipped every year since the time they gave the rat fink Bill Madden the lifetime achievement honor then known as the Spink Award), we’re just waiting for stuff to happen or even a solid rumor. Mixing in social time made the meetings hum.
Those winter meetings are a thing of the past. We don’t get anywhere near the same volume of transactions here, which most folks blame on the fact that once upon a time getting all thirty GMs together had real value because we weren’t all carrying supercomputers in our pockets that made us reachable 24 hours a day anywhere on the planet. Teams don’t bring as many people to the meetings as they used to, for cost reasons, mostly. The list of media attendees has changed dramatically as newspapers and, yes, online outlets have cut back. (Someone should hire Hannah Keyser.) Many friends I used to see here don’t come, or are out of the business entirely. I mostly come now because the Athletic has a social event one night here for our quite large contingent, which is fun and also a rare chance for me to see the editors who do so much to make my torrent of words presentable to the world. I’ll catch up with a small number of friends, but running the hotel lobby gauntlet is a challenge. (I got lucky yesterday, running into Derrick Goold the moment I walked in, and he is somebody I do actually want to talk to.) I will actually go spend some time at the main hotel later, but I can work a lot more and faster if I’m not there, assuming we get something to write about. Plus I’m drinking better coffee than anyone else at the meetings, which is a small victory I’m happy to take.
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You may have noticed that this newsletter came from Substack rather than the previous Tinyletter. Mailchimp announced last week that they’re shutting down the free Tinyletter service, and their paid options are exorbitant for this modest endeavor. I don’t blame them at all for what is ultimately a business decision, but I wonder about the wisdom of even running Tinyletter without a less expensive option to try to upsell those of us who were using it.
I did write up the Atlanta-Seattle trade built around Jarred Kelenic, which went up before Ken Rosenthal reported that Atlanta intends to keep Marco Gonzales moving in some future trade. I also wrote about the Sonny Gray and Kenta Maeda signings.
Over at Paste, I wrote about eight new small-box games that would make great stocking stuffers. I also mentioned SCOUT, which I highly recommend (and comes in a tiny box), and would throw in a mention for Hanamikoji, which I’ve had for years but just began to play again on Board Game Arena, reminding me what a great little game it is.
On the dish, I posted my updated ranking of my all-time top 100 board games, as well as a separate review of the area control game The Wolves, which came out a little too late for my 2022 best-of list. I also posted a new music playlist just this morning. I’ll do my year-end music posts the week of December 18th, which should get me clear of most baseball transactions and also comes after my best board games of 2023 post for Paste, which should run around December 12th.
In what will probably be my last show of the year, I spoke with Nik Sharma about his latest cookbook Veg-table, which is pretty great – I recommend the brothy beans with mushrooms, the pasta with broccoli and miso, and the fried rice with shrimp, pancetta, and asparagus. The future of the podcast is up in the air at the moment, but at the least it’ll be on hiatus around the holidays.
Thanks for reading and sticking with me amidst some changes. I’ve been on Twitter much less, for obvious reasons, but you’ll be able to find me here, as well as on Threads, Bluesky, and Spoutible.
And finally, please consider wearing a mask when you’re gathering this month, and get your COVID booster. The strain running around now seems more serious than last winter’s, and hospital admissions and deaths due to the virus are rising again. Stay safe.
Keith