MLB Free Agency: Breaking Down the Qualifying Offer Decisions
It’s come and gone. The deadline for MLB teams to give qualifying offers to their impending free agents has passed us by and left the baseball world to ponder some of those interesting decisions.
One of the bigger dates on the MLB free agency calendar is the deadline for teams to give qualifying offers to their players who will be hitting the free agent market this winter. That deadline passed yesterday at 5 p.m. with 10 players in total getting slapped with the $17.2 million contract for one season.
Now just because a player gets this offer doesn’t mean that they have to decline it. In fact, Colby Rasmus, Matt Wieters and Brett Anderson were the first players to ever accept the offer last offseason since the system was put into place in the most recent collective bargaining agreement. This year, it remains to be seen whether any player will do the same. However, in total, there were 10 fewer offers given than in 2015, possibly because teams were a little more wary that lower level free agents would accept it with what happened last winter.
The reason that these offers are so crucial is because if a team extends a qualifying offer and that player declines, the club that gave it will get draft pick compensation for losing that player to another team in the offseason. However, the organization does run the risk of a player possibly accepting the large sum of money, if the team only extended the contract thinking that they would get draft pick compensation in return. The balance between trying to get as much value as possible while keeping these players’ intentions in mind is one of the more intriguing storylines to follow throughout the entire offseason.
In this article, we will take a look at some of the more difficult decisions that teams had to make regarding their impending free agents. So players like Yoenis Cespedes, Mark Trumbo, Edwin Encarnacion, Ian Desmond, Dexter Fowler, Kenley Jansen and Justin Turner will not be looked at because it is common knowledge that they should have and did receive the qualifying offer.
On the other hand, we will not be looking into situations where players clearly didn’t deserve the money and in turn didn’t receive the offer. This list includes: Edinson Volquez, Jason Hammel, Jason Castro, Mitch Moreland, Chris Carter, Brandon Moss and any other lower tier free agent that didn’t see a $17.2 million check cross their agent’s desk.
With that being said, let’s get into the hardest decisions of yesterday’s deadline day case-by-case.