So what exactly does it mean to not offer someone? Players on the 40-man roster are technically under contract for next season. However, their salary may not have been determined yet. Pre-arbitration players will meet the league minimum. Arbitration-eligible players will either go to arbitration and plead their case against the team for their salaries, or come to a “new contract” and avoid going to an arbitration case.
However, not registering someone would mean that we do not want this player in our team next year. So they don’t tender the player instead of offering that contract for 2026. It’s almost always about money. Typically, arbitration-eligible players are not tendered because the team believes the system requires them to pay more for that player than the team wants to pay them or believes they are worth. If a player is not tendered, he becomes a free agent.
MLB trade rumors published their list of non-tender candidates around MLB. They had three Cincinnati Reds players on their roster: infielder Gavin Lux, outfielder Will Benson and reliever Sam Moll. Last year the Reds had just one player non-tendered: Ian Gibaut. They would eventually re-sign him to a minor league deal in February.
Gavin Lux is expected to make $5,000,000 in arbitration next season if the team keeps him around. Will Benson is expected to receive a pay increase of up to $1,700,000 for 2026 through arbitration. And Sam Moll is expected to get a raise to $1,200,000 if he sticks around and goes to arbitration.
Cincinnati could potentially save $5,560,000 if the projected arbitration numbers are just perfect and they were to forego these three and also replace them on the roster with players who make the league minimum (which is $780,000 in 2026).
With these specific players, the question is how they performed, how they should perform, and can the team replace them and get better production and/or value from someone else.
Gavin Lux was a below-replacement-level player in 2025 by the Baseball Reference version of WAR (-0.2 WAR), and slightly better than a replacement-level player by the Fangraphs version of WAR (0.3 WAR). Lux was roughly a league average hitter who has a good average and on-base percentage, but showed very little power. The big negative impact on his value is that both places agreed he was a terrible defensive player in 2025. While he has never been considered a good defensive player, his value in 2025 was almost seven times worse than his previous worst season. That kind of change makes you wonder how valid it was in 2025 and whether it’s something you can expect to happen again.
Will Benson is a much talked about player within certain Reds fan circles. His hit stats look good. He hits the ball hard and the highly questionable but often cited “expected” stats on those batted balls say he should find success at the plate. But when you look at what he actually did on the board, it’s not great. In 2025, he hit .226 and had an on-base percentage of .273 while facing mostly right-handed pitchers. He also struggled the year before, hitting .187 with an on-base percentage of .274.
And then there’s Sam Moll. He pitched well with Cincinnati in both 2023 and 2024. But in 2025, he was struggling. He made the team out of spring training, but gave up four runs in 2.0 innings to start the season and was sent to the injured list. A week later, he began a rehab assignment with Louisville and spent the full 30 days with them, then was optioned there and remained with the Bats for the next five weeks. He returned to the Reds in July and then stayed with them for two months, but on September 2 he was sent back to Triple-A where he remained for the remainder of the season.
With the Reds this year, his ERA was 6.38 while pitching 18.1 innings. In Triple-A, his ERA was 5.00 while pitching 27.0 innings. Moll will also be 34 years old next season. The team didn’t trust him during a playoff run in September. The writing may be on the wall, but stranger things have happened than holding on to him and hoping he can get back to where he was two or three seasons ago.
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