The NFL was on the back page of the Boston Herald on Thursday. A day earlier, it was the NHL. The day before that, the NBA.

So when do the baseball winter meetings start, anyway?

Turns out they were this week in Las Vegas, which back in the day would have been a perfect setting for an event marked by lavish spending and huge gambles. I'm not one who thinks the past is always better, but the winter meetings absolutely were better when they could shock you with Barry Bonds signing with the San Francisco Giants (Louisville, 1992) or Miguel Cabrera getting traded to the Detroit Tigers (Nashville, 2007).

Dave Dombrowski made that Cabrera trade, and he also shook up the meetings two years ago when he acquired Chris Sale for the Boston Red Sox.

He can make things happen and can make news, which is why it was a little sad that some of the biggest news he made this week came in a suggestion that baseball needs to change the way it conducts its offseason business. The winter market needs some sort of deadline to spur business, he told reporters.

"It's amazing how people work toward deadlines," Dombrowski said, according to Chris Cotillo of MassLive.com.

It's amazing to think what a winter with a deadline might have looked like this year. Imagine if the baseball world had gathered in Las Vegas knowing this would be the week Bryce Harper and Manny Machado would sign. Imagine if trades involving Noah Syndergaard, J.T. Realmuto and Corey Kluber weren't just discussed but actually got completed.

This isn't about blaming Scott Boras, the mega-agent who represents Harper and has made it a tradition to turn big free-agent pursuits into all-winter marathons. He's just trying to take advantage of the system that exists.

This isn't about blaming teams like the Miami Marlins, who spent all week talking about a Realmuto trade and by the end had only narrowed the field to six teams, according to Clark Spencer of the Miami Herald. They're just trying to make sure they get the best deal possible.

It's not about curbing salaries, because in some ways a deadline that pressured teams to act might even end up raising how much they're willing to pay.

Crafting a deadline that works for everyone wouldn't be easy, because the business has changed in big ways since the days when there was an "interleague trading period" that ended when the winter meetings were over. It's been a long time since anyone made any distinction between interleague trades and other ones, and it's been a long time since free agency became a bigger part of the winter news than trades.

If a deadline covered free agents as well as trades, what would happen to players who didn't find a deal before the deadline? And how would ownership convince players and agents (who would need to agree to a change) that the deadline wasn't just another attempt to depress salaries?

If they made it a trade deadline—with no deals allowed from, say, the end of the meetings until March 1—would that also open up the free-agent market and spur faster action? Possibly, because teams need to fill holes somewhere and often consider both trades and free agency to do it.

It's worth exploring, because the current schedule doesn't help the game and isn't great for most of the people in it.

Fans may not care that front-office people now need to work 52 weeks a year, or that players go to family gatherings at Christmas without knowing where they'll be reporting for spring training in February. But almost any player would rather have some certainty, and almost any exec would prefer a small bit of downtime.

Fans do care about seeing their team try to improve, and they care about where the stars of the game will land. A week of big rumors in early December, followed closely by all the major signings and a few major trades, would spur conversation all over the sport.

It would likely help ticket sales, too, because this is the time when teams are starting to push those for 2019.

Instead, there's no deadline of any kind. Instead, most every team pulled out of Las Vegas on Thursday with plenty of work still to do and plenty of time left to get that work done.

Baseball squandered a week when it could have grabbed the spotlight, because not only did Harper and Machado not sign this week, but neither was even the subject of a decent rumor about where he'll end up.

"The whole market remains somewhat mysterious" for the two big stars, Jon Heyman wrote on FanCred on Thursday night, saying the two were likely "weeks away" from signing.

Meanwhile, even Dombrowski's own Red Sox were said to be slow playing the bullpen market, according to a tweet from Evan Drellich of NBC Sports Boston.

You can't blame them. Every team, every player and every agent should always try to use the rules for their own best advantage.

It's up to the sport as a whole to change the rules when necessary. After another winter meetings where baseball mostly ceded the spotlight, a change is more necessary now than ever.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

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