NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. -- There is no better bar scene than the one that happens early every December at baseball's winter meetings. There, over adult sodas, people from every corner of baseball come together and talk shop. Ideas fly and tongues loosen and your rumors are born.
But it feels like we've heard all the rumors, and so many of the trades are already in the rear-view mirror. That's fine. Under the protection of anonymity, there's so much more that those baseball people can teach a curious person.
So I asked as many people as I could some version of these questions: What is the thing that would most surprise someone outside of baseball about what happens inside baseball? What were you shocked to learn when you got to peek under the hood? What do we not know about how the sport is run?
The answers were as diverse as the roles of the people who gave them. But up and down the answers from people all over baseball's front offices, three particular themes emerged.
Ownership
"It's underappreciated how much of an impact ownership has on every situation," one person told me.
Fans see the general manager on television and think he's making every decision -- one characterized the GM as the "face of the franchise." We think they have the ability to make every decision based on maybe a little constraint from an ownership-issued budget. But reality is fairly different.
One member of a front office talked about deals that had been nixed because they reached a bit far into the club's coffers. Others speculated that certain players had been signed because the owner willed it to be.
And there aren't just explicit decisions from ownership.
"Sometimes there's implicit pressure from ownership, that this is something they might want to do," one person said, laughing.
Others mentioned things like "that's his guy" when it comes to certain hires or acquisitions. It's understood that they prefer certain temperaments or skill sets.
Late one night, one person with only a few years' experience summed it up best: "In the end, we all work for eccentric billionaires."
Analysis
When I once considered an opportunity with a team, I discussed it with my wife. In the grand tradition of love, she surprised me by not surprising me, and by knowing me all too well.
"You should think hard about it," she said then. "I know you would really like to see their data sets."
Those data sets were an ongoing theme early this week in Washington, D.C.
"We were in an era where a lot of great statistical analysis was being done on the internet," one respondent reminisced, "but now the internet is far behind right now due to the proprietary data the teams have."
There was some brain drain, as many of yesterday's blogging analysts now pepper front offices, such as Houston's Mike Fast and Chicago's Jeremy Greenhouse, among others. But if more data were available, this baseball person was sure that the public would produce another crop of great analysts: "Today's people could be there, but they've got one hand tied behind their back -- teamwork is so much richer."
In a slightly different way, one person who had crossed over was surprised by the importance of a type of data they encountered once inside a team.
"I used to hear that a guy had good makeup, and I didn't know what to do with it," they said. "Was it like team chemistry, where it's good when everything is going well and bad when things are tough? Before, I often didn't know what to do with that information and how to weigh it."
Sounds like throwing out the baby with the bath water, because it's hard to know how important makeup can be.
"But now, I have access to information that shows me much more about a player's makeup," they continued, "and can see how past players with similar talent levels have been disqualified by poor work ethic, and how many good players make that important adjustment because they are curious and care and work hard."
If it sounds like the work of scouts to gather this information, you're not wrong. The trick, others agreed, was to find those scouts that can actually demonstrate a good track record at recognizing makeup.
"Then you trust that evaluator," one front office member said, "and it's not snake oil."
Context
Overall, every answer came back to one word, an important word as we all yell at the screen about this terrible trade or that terrible signing: context.
And not only the kind of context where we don't really know what other offers the teams were looking at, or what demands the other general managers were making in trade talks. There's more complexity that surprises those who join baseball.
"Teams are constantly making decisions that they don't like," one respondent said with a laugh. "When someone says that's a terrible decision, a team might agree. But they might also say it's better than the alternative. Context is missing sometimes."
That can come from the "moving parts" that are the ever-changing parts of a major league roster. Or those earlier demands of ownership, explicit or implicit. Or from information that teams have that we don't. One baseball person was explicit about the nature of that information, exclaiming, "Every pitcher is injured at all times. It's just how much they can handle."
Sometimes context can even come from the arcane rules that were just hammered out when the players and baseball agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement.
"Complexity in the rules," one experienced front office member said with a sigh. "The rule book is really long, and there's a lot to know in there when it comes to making moves and changing a roster."
On some level, nobody is going to feel too bad for the select few who manage to join baseball's front offices. They get to see all the best information, and they get to make the decisions that so many of us fans wish we could make.
But that doesn't mean we can't appreciate that complexity while we are railing against their decisions. Long nights, early mornings and ridiculously complicated and nuanced decisions can lead to exhaustion. Perhaps we should take it a little easy on our favorite team the next time they make a trade we don't like.