Take Me Out To ... The Winter Meetings In Vegas, Baby, Vegas

NO, GENERAL MANAGERS can't set up in the lobby anymore. The place is crawling with agents trying to get a little face time for their players, kids just out of college who desperately want to work in a major league front office, former players who are trying to get back into the game, fans looking for a recognizable face and sportswriters who are desperate to find something, anything, that resembles news. If G.M.'s showed up, it would be like the Beatles getting mobbed in A Hard Day's Night.

So with the men who make news locked in their suites, the Bellagio lobby turns into a rumor echo chamber. The first big rumor to make the rounds on Day 2 is that Yankees general manager Brian Cashman slipped out of Vegas and headed for San Francisco to meet with Sabathia. Nobody seems quite sure how Cashman made it out of the hotel without being noticed. "He must be like James Bond," says one baseball scout, though nobody is quite sure what he means.

The other persistent echo is that Peavy is going to the Cubs. According to the grapevine, the deal is all but done. The trouble is that some say it's a two-team trade, others say it is a three-team trade, and for a while it is even rumored to be a four-team trade.

After so many hours the talk begins to overwhelm you, and the only way to escape the madness is to pull a Cashman, get out of the hotel, go down to Fremont Street—a $25 cab ride from the Bellagio—and catch a little bit of what Vegas used to be. You can see Binion's and the Golden Nugget and the neon cowboy smoking a cigarette on top of the Frontier. Here it's a bit rundown and seedy: exotic dancers, sad-looking men slumping at craps tables, wrinkled women who pull the lever on the side of the slot machine rather than pushing the more convenient MAX BET button in front.

There is no sign of baseball anywhere—nobody wearing a baseball cap, nothing baseball-related for sale, no one talking about the Gerald Laird trade. Two women dressed like mermaids stand outside a casino named Mermaids, and I ask if they have ever heard of Brian Cashman. They have heard of Cashman, but they seem to be confusing him with Big Jim Cashman, a classic character who helped build Las Vegas. They do not care about baseball. They do offer me beads to wear.

DAY 3
CC signs; Peavy deal blows up; an old-fashioned baseball trade saves us

EVERYONE KNOWS THAT the Red Sox and the Yankees do not like each other, but seeing the "You sunk my battleship" looks on the faces of Boston officials in the moments after New York signs CC Sabathia (seven years, $161 million) tells a more complete story. "You have to understand," one Red Sox official says, "they won last night. Sure, we knew there was a good chance they would sign CC. We planned for it. But now that it has happened, I can tell you, it's like a punch to the gut. We never stop competing with the Yankees."

Within minutes his Blackberry buzzes, and he is summoned to the Red Sox suite. And just minutes after that, the rumor hits the Bellagio floor that Boston is serious, very serious, about trying to sign super slugger Mark Teixeira.

THE GENERAL SENSE throughout Day 3 is that these meetings are a dud. Yes, in the wee hours of Day 2 the New York Mets signed closer Francisco Rodriguez, who saved 62 games for the Angels last season, and baseball men are talking about the Metropolitans' finally being collapse-proof in the last weeks of September. We'll see about that. Yes, the Sabathia signing livens things up for a moment. But the Peavy trade crashes and burns and leaves Cubs G.M. Jim Hendry walking through the casino muttering, "I'm not trading seven players for one."*

*This leads more than one wise guy to suggest that the Cubs could not have traded seven players to the Padres anyway. It would need to be an even number so that the players could be split evenly in the divorce.