ORLANDO, Fla. — In normal times, Major League Baseball’s February owners’ meetings serve as an appetizer for spring training, the lords of the manor convening to dissect their industry’s strengths and faults with the excitement of pitchers and catchers residing around the corner.

On Tuesday, at a luxury hotel not far from Walt Disney World, the game’s powers hopped aboard their 2022 ride to nowhere fast.

In what amounts to a timeout from the heated, largely fruitless collective bargaining that has characterized Rob Manfred’s lockout, the commissioner launched this three-day get-together by huddling with many of his industry’s owners regarding myriad matters, as is the norm, although the lockout obviously informs all of the game’s matters at the moment. The players, meanwhile, are holding strategy sessions in Florida and Arizona.

Negotiations are expected to resume, if not improve, after the conclusions of the meetings at the end of this week. It is the owners’ turn to make a counterproposal after the players declined their request to turn to a third-party mediator.

Manfred will hold a news conference at the owners’ meeting conclusion on Thursday, at which point he’s expected to announce the obvious: The start of spring training, scheduled for next week, will be delayed.

His MLB Players Association counterpart, the union’s executive director Tony Clark usually returns serve by holding his own media availability. The two sides realistically must reach an agreement by the end of this month in order to avoid a delay of Opening Day, currently slated for March 31. That won’t be easy given how far apart they remain on virtually every core economic issue, from the luxury-tax threshold to service-time manipulation to revenue sharing to arbitration to the minimum player salary and more.

Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner, a member of the labor policy committee that is representing the owners in the negotiations, arrived on Tuesday, as did Mets president Sandy Alderson.