ORLANDO, Fla. — The winter meetings, Major League Baseball’s sprawling annual convention filled with team managers, front-office officials, job seekers and media, wrapped up Wednesday. Exiting attendees might not realize they probably won’t be back next year.
MLB’s owners are expected to lock out the players at midnight entering Dec. 2, 2026, and if that comes to pass, MLB would cancel at least the major-league portion of next year’s meetings. The winter get-together, slated for San Diego in 2026, is always held a little later in December.
During the last lockout in December 2021, the league office canceled the big-league segment but still put on meetings for the minor-league side.
It’s unclear if MLB would again hold the minor-league segment in 2026 if there is no big-league event. The MLB side of the meetings go by the wayside during a lockout because during the shutdown, MLB forbids standard club-player communications outside of collective bargaining. Free agency would be frozen, with no trades to be made either.
Thursday marks the 25th anniversary of one of the winter meeting’s most famous moments: Alex Rodriguez’s signing to a $252 million deal with the Texas Rangers, a then-record contract for any athlete. But to some club officials in baseball, the winter meetings are in some ways a relic, and ultimately, in an age of video calls and text messages, less vital than they once were.
“It’s great to see people and shake hands and hug,” one veteran front-office executive said Wednesday. “Transactionally, 98 percent of our communications are text, even here.”
Some officials wouldn’t mind if the meetings were discontinued entirely. That’s unlikely to happen, however, for a few reasons.
For one, many attendees enjoy the opportunity to meet in person and have conversations they might not normally have. The site of this year’s meetings, a hotel near Walt Disney World, was bustling. There were more than 250 formally arranged meetings by the league’s count, with plenty more that were impromptu. MLB also counted about 10,000 hotel room nights.
“I think it’s awesome,” said one club executive on Wednesday, who, while talking to a reporter, said hello to at least five different passersby, including a rival general manager.
Some agents echoed that sentiment, and the league itself sees value in the meetings in many ways. Perhaps most important is that in the middle of basketball and football season, the meetings give fans reason to pay attention to baseball.
MLB granted 470 credentials to media members across nine countries: Canada, the Dominican Republic, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, South Korea, the U.S. and Venezuela. Press conferences for major transactions are often held during the meetings, like Dylan Cease’s signing with the Toronto Blue Jays.
The league office wants a free-agency signing deadline, which could make baseball’s hot stove more exciting, but players and agents have long opposed one for concerns it would hurt them financially.
“We want to make the winter meetings as exciting as possible,” commissioner Rob Manfred said in 2019, when the league made a proposal to institute a deadline.
The union believed a deadline would create take-it-over-leave-it propositions that would ultimately force players into deals they don’t want.