WINTER MEETINGS A COVID CASUALTY
Business will still get done, but sans buzz
For Major League Baseball, this marks another week that would have been.
Like so many things in 2020, whatever semblance that remains of what was scheduled for the Winter Meetings in Dallas, has gone virtual. Moreover, much of the nuts and bolts of the annual convention has been spread over multiple weeks of video and teleconferences.
The business of the meetings will get done, without the buzz and with a disconnect.
“Baseball is a small community,” Padres General Manager A.J. Preller said Monday. “Having everybody together, to me that was always one of the really neat parts of working in professional baseball. There is definitely an impact, not being able to be together in the same place.”
That would seem to be the real significance of the COVID-canceled meetings, where dozens of people from every team’s baseball operations department descend on a hotel conference center along with hundreds of media members and various job seekers.
The four days of discussion, gossip, hype, dealing, eating and drinking is a staple. And a gauge.
In most years, the General Manager Meetings in
early November and Winter Meetings in early December are the events around which the offseason ebbs and f lows.
“When you’re used to that calendar, it’s a little different,” Preller said. “Now it’s like, ‘Where exactly are we in the offseason right now?’ ”
The meetings are also seen as ignitors for some deals. That initial spark will have to occur some other way this year.
There being no Winter Meetings won’t help heat up what has already been a glacially moving free agent market. But the long-term ramification of no face-to-face dealing will likely be few. Deals will still eventually get done.
In-person meetings can expedite negotiations, and having an entire staff in the same hotel suite makes communication easier. But GMs and agents do much of their communicating by texts and phone calls even when physically present at the Winter Meetings.
Preller is out of town tending to personal business this week, staying in a hotel and walking the halls and the lobby with phone in hand and earphones in.
“Like I would at the Winter Meetings,” he said. “… It’s just business as usual, working off the phone.”
Preller, as is his general policy, is not offering for public discussion the subjects of those phone calls. But it is known the Padres are keying on pitching this offseason — acquiring multiple relievers as well as a starter they can place at or near the top of their rotation. The Padres are among the teams to have expressed interest in Japanese star Tomoyuki Sugano, who was posted Monday by the Yomiuri Giants.
A fourth outfielder is also a priority. The expectation is the Padres (and every other National League team) can go ahead shaping their roster with the assumption the NL won’t use the designated hitter in 2021. Multiple reports said Monday that teams were instructed via a memo from MLB last week they should operate under the assumption there will not be a universal DH next season.
Asked what sort of impact he felt the lack of in-person meetings would have on dealing league-wide, Preller said: “I don’t know. Some years there are big announcements at the Winter Meetings. Some years it’s a slower period. I don’t have an answer for that.”
That is an appropriate state of mind for the 2020-21 offseason.
Amid reports that MLB and the MLB Players Association will this week ramp up talks about the conditions under which the 2021 season will begin, no one can give even close to a definitive answer about the timing of that eventuality.
Padres Vice Chairman Ron Fowler, who is part of MLB’s labor committee, is among those in the league who have said the expectation is the ’21 season will not go forward under the same restrictions as in ’20.
As of now, the Padres’ first game is scheduled for April 1. A sampling of those in the game has most speculating spring training will start at least a month later than usual. That seems to be an opinion shaped largely by the belief COVID vaccines will be widely available by March or April.
Teams, who claim to have lost an average of $100 million apiece, do not want to conduct another season in which fans are not allowed in ballparks. The Players Association has made it clear its members won’t be playing for reduced salaries.