DANA POINT, Calif. — Kenny Williams craned his neck to steal a peek at the lobby bar television, hoping to see if his friend was about to become president-elect of the United States.

John Gress/Reuters

M. Spencer Green/Associated Press

John Gress/Reuters

All 30 general managers at baseball’s annual executive meetings here at a Southern California resort spent Tuesday distracted by more than arbitration seminars and beckoning golf holes. Like many other citizens, they sat around televisions expecting to watch the national election returns deep into the night.

But Williams, general manager of the Chicago White Sox, followed the coverage with a keener sense of anticipation than any of his contemporaries. Not only is he one of just two African-American general managers — the Los Angeles Angels’ Tony Reagins is the other — but as a fellow prominent member of Chicago’s black community he has known Barack Obama for almost 10 years, and considers him a friend.

They have hung out at mutual friends’ barbecues, shot hoops at a local health club as recently as this summer, and — with Williams intrigued by public-policy issues and Obama a longtime White Sox fan — discussed each other’s jobs far more than their own.

“I’m interested in all these questions of foreign policy and national security,” Williams said. “In between his games, shooting a couple of baskets, he asks me, ‘What about your pitching?’ I said, ‘Excuse me, you worry about national security, I’ll worry about the pitching.’ ”

Williams said he was invited to Obama’s election-night event Tuesday in Chicago, but couldn’t go because of these meetings. So Williams watched from afar with his fellow general managers.

Williams voted for Obama via absentee ballot, which is how most baseball executives choose to vote when these meetings — which kick off the winter hot-stove season in early November — overlap election Tuesdays. The last time they fell during a national election was 2000, when they were held in — as if anyone present could forget — none other than Florida.

On that night, the current Mets general manager, Omar Minaya, then the team’s assistant G.M., also was wondering if a friend of his would become president-elect. Minaya worked as a scout for the Texas Rangers in the 1990s when George W. Bush was the club’s general partner, and the two became close. Like most executives watching returns in the hotel bar, Minaya returned to his room that night under the impression that Al Gore had beaten Bush.

“I went to sleep thinking that one guy won,” Minaya recalled on Monday, laughing, “and I wake in the morning like, ‘What? What’s going on?’ ”

Williams said that irrespective of Tuesday’s election results, Obama’s rise in national regard had already changed his outlook on race in America. That perspective was forged long before he spent most of this decade as baseball’s only African-American general manager.

A native of San Jose, Calif., Williams, 44, said that his mother was one of the very few female black executives at Pacific Gas & Electric in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Before that, he said, his father had to file suit to become one of the first black firefighters in San Jose. Kenny Williams’s godfather is John Carlos, the United States Olympian, who, along with Tommie Smith, caused great controversy at the 1968 Mexico City Games by raising a closed fist as a gesture of black solidarity in their medal ceremony.

“Regardless of what happens tonight, it’s heartwarming to me that people in places like the South have clearly embraced new ideas — guys on tractors down there are saying they voted for Barack Obama,” Williams said. “Just his becoming the Democratic nominee, the ability to tell my children and my grandchildren you can be anything you want — and really mean it — is very special. I didn’t think I would see it in my lifetime.”

When he saw Fox News declare that Obama would carry Pennsylvania, Williams reasserted that he was taking nothing for granted: “I feel like this is one-run lead in the second inning.”

Williams said he first met Obama as an Illinois state senator in about 2001, at a barbecue hosted by a mutual friend, the Chicago banker Jim Reynolds. At the time, Obama was probably less of a big deal than Williams, a former White Sox player who had just become the team’s general manager.

“I wasn’t introduced to him as, ‘Hey, this is a future potential president of the United States,’ ” Williams recalled. “He was a guy who was impressive, out there helping people.”

With Obama living on the South Side of Chicago as a die-hard White Sox fan, he and Williams began to meet increasingly often. Obama threw a ceremonial first pitch during the 2005 American League playoffs, when he told The Chicago Tribune, “The White Sox have been my team when they’ve lost. Now I’m gloating.”

Obama could gloat even more when the White Sox swept the Houston Astros in the World Series, giving the team its first championship since 1917. When Williams and the rest of the team was invited to the White House to meet President Bush, Williams said Obama was one of the first people to greet them at the door — with his White Sox hat on.

It didn’t take long for Obama to bring up the primary topic he always has with Williams.

“He asked about pitching then, too,” Williams said. “It’s always about pitching.”