Major League Baseball announced the cancelation of the in-person 2020 Winter Meetings and Owners Meetings; as a result, Minor League Baseball has released the event staff responsible for the Winter Meetings and Trade Show, set for this December in Dallas.
Instead, the agendas of both meetings will be conducted remotely, as needed.
These moves aren’t necessarily surprises. Talk that the Winter Meetings would be canceled have been circulating since August, when MLB polled its teams about their thoughts on whether the Winter Meetings would be needed given the COVID-19 and the upcoming changes to Minor League Baseball. Apparently not.
The Owners Meetings had been scheduled for November 17-19 in Arlington, Texas, while the Winter Meetings December 7-10.
The Winter Meetings have been held since 1901. In the last half decade their purpose and scope have changed; once a gathering to celebrate baseball both on the MLB and MiLB levels, in recent years the Winter Meetings have devolved into two separate gatherings–MLB in one hotel, MiLB in the other–and with MLB general managers now meeting in a separate set of meetings, the Winter Meetings has not been the trade central it was back in the days when Rollie Hemond set up a table in the hotel lobby, announcing he was open for business when it came to trades.
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