It is a perfectly fine and normal reaction this morning to have woken up and proclaimed that the Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series last night. In a perfect world, they’d have. In the real world, the pretty much kind of did, for a bit, and that’s enough for most of us.
That the Los Angeles Dodgers completely a completely bonkers comeback on the field in their opponents’ stadium is the reality, but that’s a mere detail to that Evil Empire at this juncture of their dominance. That they were so close
to the brink by this Jays club is the real story, and likely will be for many in the game as we drift further and further from the actual details.
It’s akin to the same way so many remember the ‘97 Marlins and ‘01 Diamondbacks instead of a decades-long Yankees dynasty that won however goddamn many titles they won in that span. Baseball fans across the world, perhaps especially in markets that so rarely make it to the big stage, naturally gravitate to those special, similar teams who actually do.
Anyway, the 2025 MLB season is in the books. Players whose contracts reached their conclusion at the end of the 2025 MLB season officially become free agents today, and five days from today they’ll be able to sign with any team in the game (should they so choose). That means the likes of Emilio Pagan, Nick Martinez, Miguel Andujar, and Zack Littell could only negotiate with the Cincinnati Reds for five days (should they so choose), after which they can sign elsewhere – but as of today, they’re all free agents.
Qualifying Offer (QO) decisions must also be made within five days from today, though there is zero expectation of that being a drama-inducer for the Reds again this year. They can’t give a QO to Martinez again after they did so last year, and nobody else who’s a free agent warrants that kind of one-year, $22.025 million dice roll.
Trades, though, can officially begin happening again today (if any front office exec is up to it and not laying on a beach somewhere for a few days). It feels as if Nick Krall’s entire personality is I got sunburned once when I was seven, so it’s doubtful that he’s out there on la playa. Maybe he’s already hard at work!
Option decisions from both the player side, the team side, and those rarely-activated mutual options must be decided upon within five days from today, too. Players on the Reds that fall into that category include Scott Barlow, Brent Suter, and Austin Hays, with varying expectations on the reality that they get picked up and return.
November 21st marks the deadline to tender contracts to players who are under team control and within the arbitration and pre-arbitration windows. The non-tender deadline, it’s when the Reds will face tough decisions on keeping guys around who are now earning raises due to service time but may not be producing better than players they can find for cheaper. Sam Moll and Connor Joe might see their time up at that point, while the likes of Ian Gibaut and Santiago Espinal likely would have had the Reds not gone ahead and lopped them off the roster within the last week.
December 10th will see the Rule 5 Draft, where clubs can effectively pluck prospects who haven’t been promoted fast enough out of other organizations under the right set of parameters. Each club gets the chance to ‘protect’ players who’ve spent enough time in their own systems by placing them onto the 40-man roster, but obviously those roster spots are pretty precious and limited. So, you’ll see a lot of transactions in the run-up to that draft as teams try to position themselves for the long-term the best they can.
For those players who get tendered a contract in November and are arb-eligibles, they’ll have to sort out a precise figure with the team by mid-January lest an independent arbitrator get involved and settle it for both parties in truly awkward fashion.
How the Cincinnati Reds manage to navigate a lot of this administrative stuff will ultimately determine how much risk they’ll take in the more liquid markets of player acquisition, since finding out a) exactly who’s still around and b) how much those guys will precisely cost is of the utmost priority for this penny-pinching franchise. If they can get through the options/roster-adds/arbitration section of their offseason without any big surprises, we’ll find out just how many low-level guys they’ll be willing to spend on in late January and February this time around, players in the typical mold of Hays, Wil Myers, Tommy Pham, Barlow, Buck Farmer, and Hunter Strickland. You know the deal.
Those are the key dates to look forward to now that the Toronto Blue Jays have more or less basically won themselves a World Series. Congratulations to them, and I suppose to the Dodgers for playing a great heel.
