It’s the offseason, so we’ve got a combination of A) set-in-stone deadlines for team to do roster-related things, and B) people complaining that nothing of note is happening on any given day.
One of those
deadlines is coming up on Tuesday: the deadline for teams to decide whether they’re going to tender guys without guaranteed contracts for 2026 or shuffle them off into free agency. This deadline is generally expressed as the non-tender deadline, focusing not on “hey we will pay you a salary as circumscribed by the Collective Bargaining 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 making league minimum-ish that have option years generally get tendered since they don’t eat up a roster spot. Guys that will make relatively low (for MLB players) arbitration-eligible salaries are also usually tendered, unless the team straight-up doesn’t want them on the roster.
Where it gets complicated are the guys whose team control is expiring, who are due modest (for MLB salaries) if not substantial paydays, whose non-tender isn’t a referendum on them as a player, but a referendum on their expected production only relative to the relatively rigid arbitration-eligible pay scale to which they’re entitled.
By my quick count, there were about 60 non-tendered players at the deadline last year. Of those, right about 40 percent did not appear in the majors in 2025. The next-biggest group was guys barely low replacement, at right around a quarter. In total, 70 percent of non-tenders provided zero or negative fWAR at the big league level in 2025.
With one exception, the remaining guys were not too exciting to scoop up — split almost evenly between guys that barely had positive fWAR (less than 0.5) and guys that 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 turned 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 fetching the Orioles a Trade Deadline return.
So, Laureano is the obvious answer to this question for last year, but the question is — what about this year?
Speculating on who it might be is a bit tough, because you don’t know whether a random low-salary guy is going to get squeezed for roster purposes but do great anyway. Higher-salary guys include:
- Nathaniel Lowe, who was awful last year but was a 3ish-win guy for three seasons prior;
- Camilo Doval, who might be a floor-esque option if he does eat a non-tender given that he was just fine in relief last year;
- Alec Bohm, who probably isn’t getting non-tendered buuuuut…;
- Adolis Garcia, who may not be worth his sky-high projected arbitration-eligible salary but was really good two years ago; and
- Luis Garcia Jr., who finally had a breakout in 2024 but got whacked with xwOBA underperformance (and regressed horribly defensively) in 2025 and seems like a fairly easy pick if the Nationals actually decide to move on.
Anyway, who ya got?
