Whether it's because he practically had the opportunity to re-sign himself at a raise, or whether it's because the qualifying offer was going to put a damper on his market, all signs pointed to Jose Abreu accepting the one-year, $17.8 million contract for 2020.
And so he did. There's talk about a multi-year deal still in the works, which you'd expect given the mutual emotional history between the player and the team, but it'd have to take an unusual shape, whether via front-loading the deal or overwriting the qualifying offer.
Or maybe this is the front office's way of trying to gain some separation from suffocating embrace between Abreu and Jerry Reinsdorf. From free agency in 2021 to a three-year deal, nothing would really surprise me at this point.
Abreu wasn't the only one to accept the qualifying offer. Jake Odorizzi took himself off the market by reupping with the Twins for another year. That's a dagger for some Sox Machine offseason plans, but he was lower on my list of targets. He's succeeded as a starter with a very specific usage plan, seldom throwing more than six innings. Fortunately, he was deployed by the Rays and the Twins (which has a lot of former Tampa Bay employees), both of whom understood the dangers of TTOP. The White Sox tend to overexpose players with limitations due to lack of talent elsewhere, turning them into Tommy Callahan's potential sale:
I wouldn't have fought it if the White Sox signed Odorizzi, but maybe this will allow the Sox to get someone who won't be as vulnerable to mismanagement.
The players who rejected the qualifying offers:
- Madison Bumgarner
- Gerrit Cole
- Josh Donaldson
- Marcell Ozuna
- Anthony Rendon
Will Smith- Stephen Strasburg
- Zack Wheeler
Smith is crossed out because he signed a three-year, $39 million deal with the Atlanta Braves. I'd say "let the games begin," but that already happened.
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In other news, Abreu earned himself a 19th-place finish in the American League MVP voting. Mike Trout ended up winning that honor. He and Alex Bregman hogged all the first- and second-place votes, but Trout topped 17 ballots to Bregman's 13. Cody Bellinger won the honors in the National League.
Nobody seems to be talking about Abreu's finish, but James Fegan is catching hell for having the gall to give Yoan Moncada a 10th-place vote on his ballot. That put Moncada on the board, tied for 22nd.
Of course by "gall," I mean "knowledge that Moncada was strong enough to finish in the top 10 in WAR and looked every bit the part," and by "hell," I mean "bad tweets."
Down-ballot bitching is usually pointless, unless it's evaluating the votes of a voter who left a top-three candidate off the ballot entirely. It's especially dumb here because Moncada ended up finishing tied for 22nd, which is an extremely cautious ranking if you were to rank, say, the top 25 players in the league. This is how that sort of ranking happens, right? Ballot transparency does far more good than harm, but this is one of its unfortunate byproducts.
