After yesterday’s debacle (and then the Ohtani one last week), I’m gonna try to do this without needing a mid-day edit to the post. Probably won’t succeed, but them’s the breaks.
Today is (not non-tender day…) accept/reject Qualifying Offer day. 13 players were tagged with the QO a couple of weeks ago, which you can see here. Will any of them accept the QO and remain with their team and teammates for another go-round in 2026?
There are a few factors for your consideration.
First, accepting the QO is pretty rare. Going back to when draft pick penalties were instituted, my rough count was nine QOs accepted out of about 70 QOs offered. That’s a 13 percent rate or so (I may have miscounted or misremembered my earlier count), which would suggest one or two acceptances if everything worked out just at its usual rate. And, there are some guys in this QO class like Zac Gallen and Michael King that could probably do with a one-year pillow deal.
Buuuuut, the lockout looming in 2027 might change the calculus. There was some unnamed executive that was quoted as saying that broad expectation was that everyone would reject the QO, because taking a guaranteed one-year deal that could rebuild value while heading into a potentially-cancelled or curtailed season is not much of a benefit, when you think about it. I won’t elaborate too much because I don’t know if this point needs to be beaten to death, so hopefully you get the idea.
The other thing is that rejecting the QO doesn’t actually stop the player from being able to either re-signing with their former team, or taking a similar pillow-ish deal in general. All it really does is make the market for the player a little worse because every team but the QO-offering team has to bear an extra cost to sign the player. So, there’s not that much harm in rejecting the offer, unless the player wants to move on. The same rate of players reject the QO and re-sign with the offering team as accept the QO, so the penalty has come into play only for about three-fourths of QO-offering instances.
Anyway, what do you think?
