The Harper-Vegas Winter Meetings are here, but who's bidding?

LAS VEGAS - It's been circled on the calendar for years, this perfect confluence of baseball's signature offseason event, Bryce Harper's first foray into free agency and everything coming together on the Las Vegas Strip, just down the street from Harper's home.

And after all that anticipation and speculation, it's finally time for this long-awaited spectacle to get underway.

The Winter Meetings officially open for business today, and nobody's debating what the top story will be at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino each of the next three days. This was always going to be the Bryce Harper Winter Meetings, and there's no reason to believe it won't be, even if the man at the center of it all isn't expected to show his face.

Harper may be in town, but he won't be parading through the lobby or the casino or the convention center. Any meetings with clubs interested in acquiring his services will take place off campus, at an undisclosed location, according to sources familiar with this process.

It's believed Harper and his agent, Scott Boras, already have met with multiple teams in the weeks leading up to the Winter Meetings. And, of course, we know the Nationals already made their official pitch to him at the end of the season two months ago.

Stroll through Mandalay Bay, though, and if you can make your way past the odd conglomeration of cowboy-hat-wearing fans in town for a major rodeo and little old ladies oblivious to it all from their perches at the slot machines, you won't go far without hearing Harper's name come up.

Trouble is, nobody seems to be able to figure out what teams are going to pony up enough money to lure away the 26-year-old slugger.

Ask the folks from Los Angeles and they say the Dodgers don't believe in mega-contracts.

Ask the folks from Chicago and they say the Cubs love Harper but have too much money invested in other players, particularly fellow right fielder Jason Heyward.

Ask the folks from San Francisco and they say new team president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi (formerly general manager of the Dodgers) is looking for a long-term rebuild, probably an unappealing situation for Harper.

Ask the folks from New York and they say the Yankees are loaded in the outfield as it is.

Ask the folks from Philadelphia and they say the Phillies are fully prepared to go all-in and make Harper a monster offer, but is that really where Harper wants to play and live for the rest of his career?

It's making for a strange dynamic. This is the biggest-name slugger to hit free agency in some time, and everyone expects him to walk away with the largest guaranteed contract in North American team sports history. And yet there seems to be more talk about who isn't all that interested in Harper than who is excited to bid for him.

Here's the important thing to remember: Boras is a master at this. Teams can keep saying they're not in, until Boras convinces them to make a record-setting offer at the last moment and snatch up a new star right fielder. The super-agent doesn't have a perfect record in these negotiations - last winter was a particular struggle for him, not to mention the rest of the agents in the sport - but he's better than anyone else at getting what he wants and creating bidding wars when there don't appear to be any.

The odds of Harper picking a team this week seem unlikely. This has always figured to be a drawn-out process.

But the Harper-Vegas Winter Meetings are finally here, and you better believe that's going to be the dominant theme of the week.