If NFL, NBA and NHL free agencies are a mad dash, MLB's is a gentle stroll, its moments of hyperactivity inadvertent and unpredictable.
Cody Bellinger, the best position player not named Shohei Ohtani in this year's free agent class, was (re)introduced by the Chicago Cubs on Wednesday, two days before the start of March. Blake Snell, Jordan Montgomery and Matt Chapman -- the Nos. 3, 6 and 8 free agents on ESPN's list, respectively, at the start of the offseason -- have yet to sign and don't seem particularly close to doing so.
And while it's easy to pin the blame on Scott Boras, who represents all four of those players and has become infamous for his willingness to stall, the reality is that baseball's limitless offseasons tend to encourage dawdling. And this latest example has seemingly rekindled Major League Baseball's long-held desire for some sort of signing deadline, an endeavor that so far has been fruitless.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred reminded reporters this month that the league previously proposed a December signing deadline that was "not warmly received" by the MLB Players Association, which has consistently fought against artificial restraints to a free market system.
"We'd rather have two weeks of flurried activity in December, preferably around the winter meetings where you're all there to write about it and we all get excited about the upcoming year," Manfred told the assembled media in Tampa, Florida, on Feb. 15. "That will be a project in the next go-around."
Manfred's latter point was in reference to labor talks around a collective bargaining agreement, which expires after the 2026 season.
If recent history is any indication, the topic will continue to go nowhere.
During early labor talks in 2019, MLB proposed a multiyear-contract deadline that would land on the last full day of the winter meetings, which are typically held in the first full week of December. After that, free agents would be allowed to sign only one-year deals until the start of the following offseason. The MLBPA rejected the proposal. MLB tried again in the summer of 2021, less than six months before the CBA's expiration, this time proposing a seven-day window -- once again spilling into the end of the winter meetings -- for players to sign multiyear deals. It was formally rejected by the union in the fall.
Each time, said a source familiar with the league's strategy, MLB presented its proposals on a trial basis, allowing players to back out if the new system was deemed unfavorable. The union, sources said, never countered. The MLBPA canvassed a wide group of agents and players after the first proposal, and they were virtually unanimous in their belief that a deadline would negatively impact players, a source familiar with the union's thinking said.
MLBPA executive director Tony Clark told reporters in Scottsdale, Arizona, recently that a signing deadline is "going to do more damage to players in those conversations than the other way around," alluding to a widely held belief among players and agents that front office executives would use it as a tool to suppress salaries.
Said one agent: "Teams wouldn't make their best offer until the deadline, a lot of players would get desperate, and they'd end up taking bad deals."
David Forst, the Oakland Athletics' general manager, called it a "reasonable" concern, echoing the sentiments of several people in his position. But he also brought up the biggest motivation for a solution.
"It's not great for the game and the marketing of our game to have this stretched out over five months," Forst said. "I don't think any other sport has this situation. And I think, if we're looking to market the game to the fans and sort of bring interest to our offseason, it makes more sense to have a lot of activity at once."
The NFL, NBA and NHL offseasons don't include signing deadlines, but the fixed budgets inherent within salary cap sports have historically triggered quick resolutions. Last year's NBA free agency began on June 30 and saw 67 players sign new deals within the first six days -- 42 of which were for eight or nine figures. Fifty-seven NFL players signed contracts at the official start of a new league year on March 15, with 39 others signing the day after that. The start of NHL free agency on July 1 yielded 159 new deals within the first 24 hours.
MLB's pace resides on the other end of the spectrum. Twenty-five players have signed deals that guaranteed at least $20 million this winter, and 10 of them didn't do so until the offseason's third month. Snell, Montgomery and Chapman probably won't have deals by the start of March, but neither will a host of others, including J.D. Martinez, Michael Lorenzen, Brandon Belt, Adam Duvall, Tommy Pham, Mike Clevinger, Ryne Stanek, Michael A. Taylor and Joey Votto.
Justin Turner, who didn't sign his contract with the Toronto Blue Jays until the second-to-last day of January, called the prolonged free agencies "a black eye" for baseball, but he stopped short of pushing for a signing deadline.
"You don't know if it's actually going to help players or if it's going to hurt them," Turner told reporters this month at the Blue Jays' spring training complex in Dunedin, Florida. "If their backs are against the wall and they're up against a deadline, are they going to get the best deal in free agency that they could? Maybe not. We just don't know how that would look."
Boras took his usual hard stance when asked about signing deadlines after Bellinger's introductory news conference, calling them a "death knell" to players' rights.
One can reasonably make the case that this offseason is in some ways an outlier, either by pointing to how owners have used uncertainty over their regional sports networks as an excuse to limit spending or by noting that Boras' highest-profile clients all come with concerns that would prevent mega-contracts. The Decembers of 2019 and 2022 offer fresh enough examples of how baseball's offseasons can come alive. But the lack of a deadline for a sport without a salary cap will always create the possibility of what took place at this year's winter meetings, when more than 500 media members descended upon a sprawling resort in Nashville, Tennessee, from Dec. 4 to 6, and hardly anything of substance took place.
It was a missed opportunity for a sport that is perpetually clamoring for the nation's attention.
"When baseball leads 'SportsCenter,' there's big things happening in Major League Baseball and we are on the front page or leading the news -- those are awesome things for baseball," Seattle Mariners GM Justin Hollander said when asked about the league's aspirations for a signing deadline that coincides with the winter meetings. "How the sides work it out in terms of making sure it's good for everyone -- I put my hands in the air and say, 'You guys figure it out.' But the idea of baseball being in the headlines more because great players signed great deals in either existing places or new places, it seems like a good thing."
Deadlines clearly spur action in baseball, whether it's for making trades, signing arbitration-eligible players or, as was the case in the weeks that followed the 2021 season, beating an expiring CBA.
The Texas Rangers committed $500 million to middle infielders Corey Seager and Marcus Semien during a 24-hour period in late November 2021. The time between the end of the World Series on Nov. 2 and the start of the owner-imposed lockout on Dec. 2 also saw the New York Mets commit more than $250 million to Max Scherzer, Starling Marte, Mark Canha and Eduardo Escobar. Wander Franco, Sandy Alcantara and Byron Buxton all landed lucrative extensions in that span, and players such as Chris Taylor, Marcus Stroman and Raisel Iglesias signed eight-figure free agent deals.
"It was fast and furious," Rangers GM Chris Young said, "and it was fun."
It was also an example those in favor of a deadline consistently pointed to for how one can spur action without suppressing salaries. But it might be instructive in another way: The deadline, as one prominent agent noted, wasn't final. Teams and players knew that, eventually, business would resume, and yet the threat of a stoppage created enough urgency for action. "It was team driven," the agent noted -- and not fueled by desperation from players who feared their markets would collapse.
It's why a handful of the front office executives approached on this topic brought up the possibility of an offseason moratorium -- a temporary pause on free agency, only for it to start back up again within the same offseason.
For one even to be considered, MLB and the MLBPA would have to consider this topic much longer than they have in the past.
"You have to find a system that just creates a spot where maybe there's some downtime in the offseason, but there's some excitement as well that's built up because people know -- there's some certainty -- that they're going to get some activity for a period of time," San Diego Padres president of baseball operations A.J. Preller said. "And obviously people that are a lot smarter than myself will think of ways to do it in a way that doesn't make the market artificial."
ESPN's Jesse Rogers contributed to this story.