Hey, everybody. This is Richard Deich and welcome to the sports media podcast. My producer, as always, is Lou Pellegrino. My guest this week is someone who is a longtime colleague of mine at Sports Illustrated and absolutely one of the best colleagues that any of us there had. That is Tom Breducci. He is a longtime senior writer for Sports Illustrated covering baseball, as well as a color analyst

and a field reporter for Fox Sports coverage of Major League Baseball.

Tom Verducci, welcome to the sports media podcast.

And Tom, I'll let people behind the scenes.

Thank you for staying through my, this is now my third intro, I believe, of this podcast.

We'll see if we can make it work on this one.

Tom, one of the reasons I

want to have you on is because the winter meetings are coming up. You are going to be in Las Vegas

for them. And so let's start with there because I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast

would be interested in how these things are covered. So first off, given so many media

organizations now that will be there, how do reporters approach covering this?

And is there any way to get, to beat people on news or to get some kind of exclusivity?

Well, it's a great place for reporting because you do have as many baseball people as you'll ever see underneath one roof at the same time, whether it's front

office people, reporters, and especially agents who tend to run the agenda.

So it's great that you can get people physically in one place.

And I say physically, it almost have to put that in quotation marks because you don't see

a lot of the people because of technology.

A lot is done via cell phone now.

And I know when I first started back in the mid-80s, my first winter meetings was at San

Diego.

And that was back when you literally had to see somebody.

And that's why there was a lot of trolling in the lobbies.

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