Baseball Teams And Fans Will Miss Winter Meetings, Latest Victim Of Covid-19 Pandemic

Like the All-Star Game, Hall of Fame Inductions, and two-thirds of the regular season, the Baseball Winter Meetings have been cancelled by the coronavirus pandemic.

Originally scheduled to open Sunday and fill every room of the Omni Dallas Hotel, the four-day event is invariably the highlight of the social calendar for owners, executives, managers, scouts, player agents, journalists, and job-seekers – not to mention team physicians, traveling secretaries, public relations directors, plus exhibitors of new products who show their wares at an enormous trade show limited to baseball professionals.

Until this year, when Major League Baseball absorbed Minor League Baseball and disbanded 40 of its teams, the entire event was created, coordinated, and hosted by the National Association of Professional Baseball Clubs, the corporate name for the minor leagues.

Wild and wooly events, including huge free-agent signings and multi-team trades, often happened during the winter meetings – especially during the heydays of such ostentatious and outspoken executives as Bill Veeck, Ted Turner, Whitey Herzog, and George Steinbrenner.

Veeck was in his second stint as owner of the Chicago White Sox in 1975 when he ordered GM Roland Hemond to set up shop in the lobby of the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, FL.

Hemond’s desk consisted of a telephone and a sign that said “Open for Business.” Then Veeck proceeded to make dozens of calls to Hemond’s phone so that the White Sox GM would look busy to rival general managers who walked by.

During the Hawaii Winter Meetings two years later, Turner orchestrated a four-team trade involving the Braves, Pirates, Mets, and Rangers – and announced it at 3 a.m. in Honolulu so that it would break in time for the morning sports news on the East Coast.

In 1980, Herzog came to the Dallas Winter Meetings in the dual role of manager and general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. After completing a trade with the Cubs that he said required 74 phone calls, the future Hall of Famer said, “The general manager is doing a great job,” said Herzog. “Now if the manager doesn’t screw up, we’re in great shape.” Days later, he made an 11-man swap with the Padres, helping San Diego GM Jack McKeon earn the nickname “Trader Jack.”

Steinbrenner seldom sent his manager to the meetings but invariably overshadowed his GM of the moment, usually Gene Michael or Clyde King, by making his own deals, often courting and signing the most significant free agents on the market.

These days, player agent Scott Boras usually hogs center stage, often holding impromptu press conferences not far from the live microphones of MLB Network, ESPN, Sirius XM Satellite Radio
SIRI
, SNY, and a myriad of others.

Last winter, then-Forbes colleague Barry Bloom and I were dining together at Fleming’s, a San Diego steakhouse, when Boras walked in with a dozen well-heeled clients, passed around bottles of expensive wine, and started celebrating the signing of Gerrit Cole, whose nine-year, $324 million contract was the largest and longest anyone received during the four-day gabfest.

Fellow pitcher Stephen Strasburg and slugging third baseman Anthony Rendon also received enormous deals announced at the 2019 winter meetings. Both got seven-year deals for $245 million.

Hotel bars are invariably the gathering place of choice for agents, sometimes accompanied by their player clients, and executives of the teams willing to sign them. Writers in search of scoops and rumors also hang around the periphery.

The late Milton Richman, long-time sports editor for the now-defunct United Press International, was a master at unearthing rumors that soon morphed into scoops. And while he was waiting, he would sometimes roll up his shirt, show off his muscular flat stomach, and race up and down the closest corridor at top speed. Never mind that he was well into his 60s before he gave up the practice.

The format of the winter meetings has changed only a little over the years. There’s still an awards banquet, job fair, new products trade show, traveling secretaries trade show, workshops, seminars, and a manager’s luncheon for beat writers – who are encouraged to socialize but not talk baseball.

The meetings usually start with the announcement of new Hall of Famers selected by one of four rotating Veterans Committees and end with the Rule 5 Draft, which allows teams to draft players left off the 40-man rosters of other clubs. A virtual version of the Rule 5 Draft will be held Dec. 10 but almost all other aspects of the winter meetings, including the Cooperstown selections, will have to wait til next winter.

That’s too bad, since teams that are active traders or signers dominate tabloid back-pages and allow baseball, even while inactive, to make headlines for a week when winter sports are actually playing.

Also cancelled by Covid-19 in recent weeks were the in-person annual meeting of general managers, normally held in November, and the off-season owners meetings.

Cancellation of the Baseball Winter Meetings not only creates huge financial hits for the host hotel and nearby properties used to house overflow visitors but also for local restaurants, car rental companies, ride-sharing services, airlines, airport limousines, and various vendors and businesses, including coffee shops normally packed with baseball people who are early risers.

Since pandemic-related questions still linger over length of schedule, payment of players, and retention of rules changes instigated as 2020 experiments, the winter meetings would have been a lively hotbed of baseball news even without the usual deluge of trades and signings.

An annual event since 1901, the winter meetings – including the trade show – are closed to the general public. But the vendors who buy exhibit space realize their investment from high-volume sales of hats, bats, equipment, memorabilia, publications, and services to professional teams in both the majors and minors.

The 2021 winter meetings, pandemic permitting, are scheduled for Nashville.