Don't look now, but it's happening again.
Once again, the arrival of the winter meetings promised lots of free agent signings and a healthy amount of blockbuster trades.
Bryce Harper! Manny Machado! J.T. Realmuto! Noah Syndergaard!
Surely, by week's end, they would all with different teams. Oh, the intrigue, the drama, the suspense.
Oh, well.
Once again, the meetings failed to deliver much in the way of news. The biggest free agent signing to be officially announced was one (Nathan Eovaldi) which had already been completed the week before.
The biggest trade might have been the Trade of Two Tanners (Roark for Rainey). Not exactly the kind of deal that stops you in the tracks.
This isn't anything new for Major League Baseball. The last few meetings have been similarly uneventful. Every year it's the same old, same old: lots of talk and very little action.
And that's a problem for the game. It used to be that teams got a boost -- right in the middle of the Christmas shopping season -- from the transactions made at the meetings. Ticket sales would jump as interest was ignited.
But that was then. Now, the top free agents often don't sign until after the first of the year. (Case in point: J.D. Martinez, who was unquestionably the biggest acquisition for any team last winter, didn't sign until late February.) And while everyone waits to see who lands Harper or Machado, trades are also held up.
For those you think actual games take too long and don't feature enough action, the same can be said of the offseason, too.
This doesn't happen in other sports. When the NFL, NBA and NHL begin their free agent signing seasons, the action is non-stop. With few exceptions, the top players are signed with the first few days. Sure, a few players take longer to find deals, but they're in the minority.
Meanwhile, signings in baseball can literally take months.
Why?
"I don't really know, because I ask the same question,'' acknowledged Dave Dombrowski. "When I first started -- and people don't realize this -- when the winter meetings ended, there was a trade deadline. You couldn't make a trade for a couple of months, so everything had to be done when you left the winter meetings. And it was like that for quite a few years.
"Then, it got the point where everybody wanted to be signed by the holidays. Everybody wanted a job, so people would sign. I don't really know what's happened to make it change. It just doesn't seem to be very important to people.''
It should be important for everyone. It does no good for the game to have assets like Machado and Harper on the open market well into January. The lack of urgency robs a team from realizing the benefits of any offseason momentum when it comes to ticket-selling and attracting sponsorships.
Worse, fans eventually tire of the lack of movement. Like a 3-2 game that takes nearly four hours, at some point, fans give up paying attention and turn their focus -- and interest -- elsewhere.
Dombrowski also fears that the elongated calendar could wind up costing baseball its best young minds.
"The reality is, if you're the general manager or assistant general manager of a major league baseball team,'' he said, "there is no downtime for people. With free agents signing so late, you have to stay on top of those things. It didn't usually be quite that intensive. So when you start talking about young general managers and longevity in the game ... everybody needs a break at some point.
"They need to change the rules or something so that there's some downtime. Every other sport has it that other than ours.''
Unsurprisingly, it's hard to affix blame for the current mess. Baseball executives insist that agents encourage the slow-play.
"Maybe some agents feel like they can wear you down,'' said Dombrowski, "because they do have downtime, whether it's February or March, they can take some downtime. Maybe that's their strategy; I don't really know.''
Conversely, agents point the finger of blame at front office personnel.
"I'm ready to make deals right now,'' insisted one prominent agent. "But it takes two. (GMs) hold the cards here. They have the money, right? I'd just as soon get my guys settled (earlier in the off-season) and be done with it. But it doesn't work like that anymore.''
(The Players Association has gone so far as to imply that there's collusion at work and that teams are purposefully dragging out the process so as to create pressure on players to sign).
Some have suggested that the absence of a salary cap (the luxury tax threshold doesn't count) is a contributing factor. When teams have a league-imposed, finite amount of money to spend, there's an incentive to assemble your roster quickly before the best options are off the table.
Some sort of roster freeze in the third week of December might help spur activity.
"It's amazing how people work toward deadlines,'' said Dombrowski. "When you have deadlines, people work toward them. And there's no deadline. It's like the (annual amateur draft) - we used to have (a deadline of signing) as the first day of school. Then it went to August 15. Now, it's one month (after the draft). Whatever it is, whatever the deadline is, people work towards it.
"And I have the feeling it would be the same way in this regard.''
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