LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — “Oh, you’re going to be busy” was often the response I got for Winter Meetings introductions after I said, “I’m Jen; I’m on the labor beat.”

This is my second Winter Meetings. It feels like a zoo, between people there for that reason and also Disney Adults. Autograph hounds also lined the halls, hoping to get a glimpse of a retired player, or maybe even Pete Alonso.

If there was anything I would deeply resent MLB for, it would be for placing me in a place with Disney Adults for extended periods of time. Also that it was held at a property that only served Starbucks coffee (don’t cross the picket line!! don’t pay for Starbucks coffee!!).

Oftentimes, being at Winter Meetings is just a lot of running around, meeting with people, going to meetings, going to pressers, and writing. It’s a lot of waiting, too.

Covering baseball labor, for me, is not necessarily too far off from what I’ve been reporting on, having written about Minor League labor many times. Jumping to Major League labor merely feels like the joke I made when I covered my first regular season MLB game: “Cal League veteran gets called up after 13 seasons.”

In a lot of regards, too, I won’t be covering the Cal League the way I have my entire career. The majority of the league is owned by private equity now. That alone shifts the vibe. There used to be a time where the oldest operating Cal League ballpark faced the setting sun and first pitch had to wait until the sun set over the batter’s eye, but it’s changed a lot — some reasons for the better (much improved facilities), some for the worst (private equity).

I’m also BBWAA now, pending dues, which is not necessarily something I imagined when I first started becoming a gremlin at John Thurman Field. Now, though, I’m the person asking Dave Roberts about his salary cap comments on an Amazon podcast and trying to track down Diamond Baseball Holdings. If there was ever one (1) thing that stood out to me as a student at Mills College, it’s that we had a handmade poster on our newsroom wall that said, “You are the watchdogs, not the lapdogs, of your administration.” Even in baseball, that remains relevant — especially as the league is about to head into a likely contentious labor battle.

This will never preclude me from the constant shitposts I make (I have a hat that says “hard news daddy” because I exist to create cursed things in life, as well) or inadvertently turning “what if I walk off the Sphere” into my most used phrase (I don’t even know how to get onto the roof of the Sphere but I say this probably five times a day now). Saying “who’s gonna ask the blood question” was something that made a lot of sense in the press room, but not necessarily something many wish made sense. Tracking the days with the amount of quarter zips seen is just a way of the meetings.

In all of this, I realize that it’s not unusual for anyone to make the jump from A-ball. I guess it just so happens that it looks like it’s my time to make that jump.

The answer was 3:54 p.m. ET on Dec. 9, if anyone wondered.