It’s the offseason, so we have a combination of A) set deadlines for the team to do schedule-related things, and B) people complaining about nothing of note happening on any given day.
One of those deadlines is approaching on Tuesday: the deadline for teams to decide whether to sign guys without guaranteed contracts through 2026 or declare them in free agency. This deadline is usually expressed as the non-tendering deadline, where the emphasis is not on “hey, we’ll pay you a salary as prescribed by the collective labor agreement” but on the guys who are told: “No, go away.”
For most players, a non-tender is pretty simple: the team simply thinks it can do better with the roster spot. Guys who make minimal competition and have option years generally get tendered because they don’t eat up a roster spot. Guys making relatively low salaries (for MLB players) who are eligible for arbitration are also usually offered unless the team doesn’t want them on the roster.
Where things get complicated are the guys whose team control expires, who are owed modest (for MLB salaries) if not significant paydays, whose non-tendering is not a referendum on them as players, but a referendum on their expected production, only relative to the relatively rigid, arbitration-eligible pay scale to which they are entitled.
By my quick count, there were about 60 undrafted players at the deadline last year. Of these, about 40 percent did not appear in the main league in 2025. The second largest group consisted of boys who could hardly be replaced, about a quarter. In total, 70 percent of non-tenders in 2025 yielded zero or negative fWAR at the big league level.
With one exception, the remaining guys weren’t all that exciting to brag about – almost evenly split between guys who barely had a positive fWAR (less than 0.5) and guys who did stuff, but not even exciting, average production stuff (between 0.5 and 1.5 fWAR).
The exception, well… maybe you already knew: Ramon Laureano, who parlayed a non-tender from the Braves into a two-year deal with the Orioles, where he went absolutely ham offensively (.364 wOBA, .372 xwOBA, 138 wRC+) and managed a 3.0 fWAR season across 488 PAs, while also netting the Orioles a Trade Deadline return.
So Laureano is the obvious answer to this question from last year, but the question is: what about this year?
Speculating on who it could be is a bit difficult because you don’t know if some random guy on a low salary will be pushed for selection purposes but still do a great job. Guys with higher salaries include:
#player #offered #tomorrow