I can laugh about it now. But there was a time when it wouldn't have been a laughing matter.

I'm talking about the games competing reporters play at baseball's winter meetings.

First off, understand, the winter meetings are one of the greatest events in sports to follow from afar. Sitting at home or in your office, keeping up on the latest rumors and gossip -- it doesn't get much better than that.

But to be here, digging for that stuff, that's a different story.

Having done it for four years, covering the Yankees for the New York Daily News, I can tell you, there's nothing fun or funny about it.

Basically, for the beat writers who cover the event, it's four days of either (1) sitting in a hotel ballroom, waiting for announcements or (2) "sweeping" the lobby, hoping to catch up with a GM or manager or agent who happens to be strolling by. In most cases, you find, you ask the GMs, managers and agents the same questions that they're going to ask you. That is, "Anything going on?" Most of the time, the response is a shake of the head.

But, the beat guys have to write something every day, so they "work the phones," checking in with other agents, maybe a player or scout. A "source."

Now, when a beat writer from Paper A sees a beat writer from the competition, Paper B, on his cell phone, or on one of the lobby pay phones, this sounds an alarm in the head of the writer for Paper A. The alarm says, "The competition is on to something." Of course, Paper B could just as easily be talking to his wife, but the alarm goes off nevertheless.

Experienced beat guys prey on each other's anxiety. There are war "techniques", like taking out the media guide of another team, let's say the Padres, and studying it. Then for good measure, the writer will leave this media guide at his work station bookmarked to a page. This makes the other guy think, "Does my team have something going with the Padres? Do I know someone I can call with the Padres who will help me?"

Oh, I know it all sounds silly, but the competition is fierce for every little bit of information. So fierce that Wednesday, one writer ran away from me during the middle of a conversation because he suspected a writer from another paper was reading the computer screen of his paper's columnist. The writer walked into a spot behind his columnist and set a screen so the competition couldn't even think about screen-peeking.

Once the competition walked away, the writer and columnist conspired to have a lengthy BS session with a certain agent in the lobby. Their plan was to make it look, as best they could, like a very important conversation. They wanted the competition to squirm.

All this over a little scuttlebutt. Hilarious.

Easy for me to say -- I've got Peter Gammons, Jayson Stark and Tim Kurkjian on my team.

Backtalk: Here are some entertaining responses I received from my previous Pulsecard on the foul language of baseball. Enjoy!

When you use Microsoft Word as your source to check if something registers as a word you are seriously hurting your credibility. Do you also use Bill Gates & Co. as the last word on other topics? Perhaps they have the definitive answers to many of life's mysteries. While "upside" might not have any synonyms (or antonyms for that matter) in your precious MS Word thesaurus, it does indeed have entries in proper dictionaries. You might want to learn about their existence.
-- Brian

Mark Shapiro didn't graduate from Princeton because he knew how to use the word "impact" correctly. Besides, he's right and you're wrong. "Impact" is both a noun and a verb. His statement, "I see Matt Lawton impacting our ballclub," although anything but profound, is a grammatically correct intransitive use of the verb "impact." Also, which version of Microsoft Word are you using? It's no thesaural authority, but my generation-old copy offers no less than five synonyms for "upside." I hope that there are more impactive topics to be covered at the winter meetings than your own equivocal annoyances with a general manager's use of the language.
-- Nick Fargo

I found your "foul language" piece very amusing and timely. As a Mets fan, I can always appreciate criticism of Steve Phillips! Since it was your pedantry I found fault with, please excuse my own.

From Webster's College Dictionary (1991): "The verb impact has developed the transitive sense 'to have an impact or effect on' (The new reading program has impacted the elementary schools favorably) and the intransitive sense 'to have an impact or effect' (Our work here impacts on every department in the company). Although recent, the new uses are entirely standard and most likely to occur in formal speech and writing."

Also, the Oxford English Dictionary (online) has a listing for "impact" (verb) and even recognizes "impacting" as having been in use since 1917.
-- J.K. Givens

Jeff Bradley is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at jeff.bradley@espnmag.com.