It began Friday night, with a trio of signings by the New York Mets and lasted all weekend.
Off the board came Marcus Semien, Starling Marte, Mark Canha, Kevin Gausman, Jon Gray, Avisail Garcia, and early Monday afternoon, Max Scherzer.
It was an unprecedented four days of activity, and it could continue into Monday night and Tuesday.
The activity was so frenetic that some likened it to the July 31 trade deadline and the winter meetings, all rolled into one.
Few doubt what spurred the spate of signings: the looming expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement, which is set to expire Thursday, and most agree, will result in a lockout by the owners, shutting down trades and free-agent signings for the foreseeable future.
Players and agents were desperate to get deals done before the lockout began, and that created conditions for the market to take off. Some players, it appears, didn't want to wait out a lockout that could last until February, only to see the free agent signing season turn into the baseball version of the two-minute drill in the run-up to spring training.
Some teams, it would appear, also wanted some certainty to their roster before the curtain comes down on baseball's Silent Winter.
The heightened activity was a reminder of what the Hot Stove Season used to be like, before it became standard for it to drift into the New Year, and in some cases, past the opening of camps in Florida and Arizona.
These days, the NBA, NFL and the NHL get their free agency done in a hurry. In those sports, clubs line up like eager shoppers outside big box stores the morning of Black Friday. And then, when the doors open, all the best stuff is snapped up in a matter of hours. The leftovers are then picked over, and they, too, are gone within a matter of days.
Not baseball. Nope, the offseason proceeds at the same languid pace as the games themselves, with no one paying any attention to the time passing, or, for that matter, the fans turning away in disinterest. There's no clock for the games, and now, the same turgid approach to business is the hallmark of each offseason. No hurry, folks.
Except there is a hurry. Baseball is competing for the attention of fans (and would-be ticket buyers) in the winter, but the length of time it takes free-agent deals to get done -- or trades to be consummated -- takes forever. After a while, fans find other things to occupy their interest and take their money.
Meanwhile, agents and baseball executives parry back and forth, with no sense of urgency, and no deadline to get business transacted.
The last four days, however, have shown baseball what can happen when both sides are faced with a deadline. Suddenly, there's motivation to get things done quickly. If deals the magnitude of Scherzer's -- who now owns the game's highest average annual salary at $43.3 million -- can get done in a compressed window, then so can all of them.
For years, people in the game have debated how we got here, how it came to pass that baseball's offseason proceeds at a snail's pace. There are theories, each with merit.
First, the arrival of analytics has resulted in every team having access to the same data, and coming to the same conclusions about a player's value.
Secondly, the absence of a true salary cap has convinced both sides that there's no need to rush into agreements. In the other three sports, there's a limited amount of money to spend, and if you wait too long, you risk being left behind when teams reach their budgets. It's true that baseball has a threshold for its CBT (competitive balance tax), but it's not as limiting. Every year, a handful of teams willfully ignore it.
Of course, there's great irony to be found in the fact that baseball has been prodded into activity by the near-certainty of a coming work stoppage.
But when owners and the Players Association finally get around to hammering out a new labor agreement -- perfectly mirroring all of this, real bargaining won't begin for weeks -- they should take some lessons from this weekend.
Once they address free agency, salary arbitration, a way to eliminate tanking and the myriad of issues on each other's wish lists, perhaps they can agree on a window for free-agent signings. Allow free agents to begin signing within days of the conclusion of the World Series -- as is the case currently -- but come up with a hard deadline of mid-December for deals, say, greater than $10 million total.
That will still provide six weeks to conduct business on the biggest deals of the offseason. For players on smaller deals, or on minor league deals with spring training invites, talks can continue into January and February if necessary.
The union will initially object, fearing that the compressed period will represent some violation of the free market. But six weeks is plenty enough to get even the most lucrative contracts hammered out. Teams will then have the biggest acquisitions in place, ready to be marketed for the next season, in plenty of time to sell tickets for Christmas and beyond.
Importantly, MLB won't be ceding the winter any longer and can help build marketing momentum. In New York, the Mets dominated sports coverage for the weekend, despite rare wins for both area football franchises.
This can be a regular thing, if both sides can see past their agendas and own self-interest.
What a shame that it took the prospect of the game's first shutdown in a quarter-century to prove the point.