In early December every year, Major League Baseball holds winter meetings in an exotic locale.  It’s part flea market, part convention and part drunken orgy.  You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Wayne Krivsky and Chuck LaMar wearing their ties like Rambo headbands, singing “Eye of the Tiger” and trying to get a 180 pound hostess to take their spare room keys.

But a lot of serious business gets done at these things.  Companies who make bobble head dolls, imprintable seat cushions, and of course, magnet schedules spend the weekend schmoozing dozens of minor league teams.

The set-up at the meetings this year in Vegas will be a little more conducive for the media horde who are there hoping that the big league teams will trade or sign somebody.  Last year’s convention was at the monstrous Opryland Hotel in Nashville, a hotel so big that legend has it the big eight player-Dontrelle Willis-Miguel Cabrera trade to the Tigers was held up for two hours because Dave Dombrowski and Larry Beinfest decided to meet face to face and ended up in opposite wings of the hotel wandering around looking for the room.

This year, the whole thing takes place at the Las Vegas Hilton.  Writers can stake out the lobby, blow their per diem at the slots and never risk getting any actual sun.  Nothing says “fun” like Bruce Levine and Gordon Wittenmyer sharing a banana daiquiri (one drink, two straws, natch) and wondering, “Is that Andrew Friedman, Jon Daniels and Josh Byrnes working on a three way trade, or are the Jonas Brothers here?”

Barry Manilow has a permanent nightly gig in the Hilton’s 1,600 seat theater which is sure to just confuse the shit out of Peter Gammons.

Ask anybody in the game and they’ll tell you that the most generous clubhouse tipper is Clifford Floyd.  For my money, nobody makes a streusel like Michael Cuddyer’s mom, and the scuttlebut in the lobby is that if Hank “Little Stein” Steinbrenner misses out on CC Sabathia and Derek Lowe that he’s prepared to top any offer for the guy on the market with the biggest hook, diminutive southpaw Barry Alan Pincus.  Every scout I talked to, says that Pincus has a great work ethic, had a great year in Winter Ball last year playing for a team in the Copacabana League and as one tout put it, “He throws the pitches that make the whole world sing.”

With uncertainty surrounding the ownership future of the team, it’s expected that Jim Hendry, Chuck Wasserstrom, Peter Chase, Ronnie Wickers and Crane Kenney will spend most of Monday and Tuesday at the PBEO Job Fair.  I’m not sure about the other guys, but Wickers has the kinds of skills that could land him a job as an integral part of the Yankees or Mets organizations.  Have you seen how many windows there are in those new stadiums to clean?

If you are in Vegas, you won’t want to miss the Banquet that closes the meetings at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, December 11.  Check out this excitement!

The stage is set and the performance will be one-of-a-kind.  The formal event of the Baseball Winter Meetings will feature a variety of comedy acts.  The show will kick-off with one of the most popular performers in entertainment today, comedy ventriloquist Ian Varella.  The second act to perform will be “Mr. Las Vegas” himself, Mr. Ron Kenney.  And of course, what’s a show in Vegas without impersonators?  Brinnon & Marks’ comedy team act will provide you with impersonations of past and present celebrities!

That’s awesome, you mean, you spend just a few days in Vegas and you get to see Varell, Kenney, Brinnon and Marks?  Wow!  Who the fuck are these people?

If they’d have had this thing at the Mirage, at least you could go home and say, “The guy who looks like Joe Piscopo was kind of funny.”  Kind of.  It’s Danny Gans, after all.

The Cubs sale will be a hot topic at the meetings.  Final bids are due today (you still have time if you put off finishing up yours, like I did), and by next Monday, the Cubs should start the meetings with a pretty fair idea of who the new majority owner of the team is likely to be.  Formal approval won’t come for months, but you would assume the Cubs could, at the very least, run long term contract acquisitions (like a trade for Jake Peavy, or a free agent offer to Raul Ibanez) by the top bidder (or two), and see if they’d have any objection to that contact ending up on their books when they assume control of the team.

Of course, knowing the Cubs, they’ll botch this somehow, and end up turning down a trade for Peavy and passing on all of the free agent outfielders, only to panic in March and sign Jock Jones and Frank Castillo.

So what do the Cubs hope to accomplish at these meetings?  I mean other than Hendry trying to bring the dinner buffet to its knees?

Get the Jake Peavy trade done: By now it’s the worst kept secret in baseball.  Padres owner John Moores has ordered his general manager, Kevin Towers to trade Peavy to get his contract off the books, while Moores goes through his divorce.  Peavy has a no-trade clause and has decided to only accept a trade to the Cubs.  Because Towers can’t stop talking (on Wednesday he told Yahoo! Sports that he found a third team to flip him a prospect to make the deal work), the trade talks get updated on a nearly daily basis.

Find a rightfielder: I’m not sure if Wittenmyer told you or not, but Kosuke sucked last year, and the Cubs are forced to spend yet another winter trying to find a lefthanded hitting right fielder.  This worked so well the first three times they tried (see: Burnitz, Jeromy; Jones, Jock; Fukudome, Kosuke).  The two free agents who seem to best fit the bill are Bobby Abreu and Raul Ibanez.  Both will cost at leat $10 million a year.  Ibanez is 37, and Abreu says he’s 34, but if he is, it’s a Pujolsian 34.  The Cubs have talked to the Marlins about unproven Jeremy Hermida and the Padres about Brian Giles, but Giles has five-ten no trade protection now, and Levine says he already turned down a trade to the Cubs last July.

Arbitrate: The Cubs had three type-A free agents when the offseason began.  They paid Ryan Dempster to stay, told Kerry Wood no-thanks and hired a limo to drive Bob Howry out of visual range.  In a normal year the Cubs would offer Wood arbitration and not offer it to Howry.  That way if Wood signs with another team the Cubs get two draft picks.  Not offering it to Howry would actually encourage another team to sign him because they’d owe no compensation, although, they’d still have Bob Howry.

But if the Cubs really are up against it payroll-wise (which remains to be seen), offering it to Wood has some danger.  If he accepts, he’s going to win $9 or $10 million.  And, given his injury history, he’s going to find it hard to find more than a two year deal at best on the open market.  His best bet might just be to accept arbitration and stay with the team he wants to play for and make a nice hunk of cash.  The Cubs obviously know that and it certainly seems possible that one of the reasons Hendry was so quick to talk up Wood’s chances of getting a multi-year deal someplace else were meant to plant a seed in Kerry’s mind that going somewhere else is a good idea.  As it stands, the Cubs probably can’t offer him arbitration for fear that he’ll accept.  How ludicrous is that?  A useful, key player wants to stay, and you are afraid he’ll actually do it.  Now this is how to run a baseball team, isn’t it?  How did they ever go 100 years without a World Series winner?

Amazing, isn’t it?