The 2014 FanSided Faux-Winter Meetings

Dbacks G.M. Dave Stewart talks to the media at the G.M. Meetings in Phoenix Photo Courtesy of azcentral sports.

Baseball’s Hot Stove is firing up, and the 113th annual MLB Winter Meetings are coming up quickly – set for December 7-11 in San Diego. Some activity is (obviously) underway already, but the bulk of the wheeling and dealing is still to come.

Your friends at the Fansided MLB sites are going to celebrate this by participating in a Winter Meetings Simulation event. Starting today, Fan-sided Faux-General Managers will be busily doing a lot of the things we’ve always wanted to do on behalf of our rooting interests:

• Sign Free Agents
• Tender/Non-tender contracts
• Negotiate and make Trades

… and all in the interest of trying to improve the club. It’s an experiment to see how well we – the writers – can improve our teams by being our own GMs. After the fact, you can compare our results to those of our Real-life counterparts… and see who you think did the better job!

You Can help

We want your input! Please add your comments below to tell this General Manager who YOU think should be the priorities to pursue during this off-season. As the acting GM for the Toronto Blue Jays in this exercise, I want to have the input of my fellow fans to help push me through the muck and come out with a team shining like new. Granted, I also want to approach this as I see the Jays would as well, so I can’t go hog wild either.  That doesn’t take the big fish out of the picture, but also means we need to be reasonable. If you want Russell Martin or Pablo Sandoval, help me figure out a deal that works for both the free agent and the team.

Now do realize there are limits to the powers we have as faux-GM:

• Reasonable roster restrictions must be observed
• Reasonable budget restrictions must be observed
• Trades are conducted on a 2-way street: it takes 2 partners to be in agreement, so you can’t just say “Well, just go getJose Altuve/Jose Abreu/Mike Trout/etc”.

For the next several days, we hope to share our experiences with you as the process of building/re-building a team takes place. The details of being a General Manager in major league baseball are difficult, for sure – and we will aim to put as much realism into this process as we can.

But in the meantime: help us out! Tell us what you think we should do, and how it could be done. Then we’ll share with you our experiences about what can actually get done over the course of this FanSided Winter Meetings Simulation.

Thanks very much for the feedback!