The Washington Nationals came into the off-season with nine arbitration-eligible players — and DFA’d Ildemaro Vargas to whittle down the list to eight players that the team has to decide before the Friday 8pm deadline as to the future with each of those players. There are four viable options with these players:
- Non-tender which is essentially a DFA
- Trade to another team
- Agree to contract terms before the deadline. MLBTR gave this the name of pre-tender.
- Tender the player a contract that becomes binding that the team and player agree to move forward to get to a contract value for the upcoming season.
Of note, you can tender a contract to a player without an agreed upon salary for the upcoming season, and either go to an arbitration hearing or agree to contractual terms at any time before that. Of course the Nationals will be diligently working with players and their agents to agree to contractual terms before the 6 pm deadline.
Going into the offseason, here was the Nationals arbitration-eligible list of nine players sorted by service time and their MLBTR projected value:
- Tanner Rainey (5.127): $1.9MM
- Derek Law (5.081): $3MM
- Kyle Finnegan (5.000): $8.6MM
- Luis Garcia Jr. (3.142): $4.8MM
- Josiah Gray (3.075): $1.4MM
- Mason Thompson (3.046): $800K
- Riley Adams (3.005): $1.1MM
- MacKenzie Gore (3.000): $3.5MM
In two consecutive years on the deadline day, the Nationals non-tendered players. Last year it was Dominic Smith and the year before that it was Luke Voit. Basically, there are some players who don’t come to terms by the 6pm deadline, and the Nats get rid of them if they can’t agree to terms. This isn’t just a Nationals way of doing business — many teams take this approach. Some would ask, why do teams wait until the last minute? Sometimes they don’t, but waiting it out is often just part of negotiating. As mentioned, the Nats already DFA’d Vargas last week.
The question with a few of these players is whether the team wants to keep them going forward. Obviously, Luis Garcia Jr. and MacKenzie Gore will get contracts, and it is expected that Derek Law will too.
Both Josiah Gray and Mason Thompson are recovering from TJ surgery, and they are expected to get deals and be placed back on the 60-day IL in Spring Training.
On the bubble are Riley Adams and Tanner Rainey. The $1.1 salary estimate for Adams is just $340,000 over league minimum for 2025 — but does the team see a place for Adams? The same goes for Rainey who has an arb-estimate of $1.14 million over league minimum. Neither player has minor league options remaining.
The most curious case is with Kyle Finnegan. He was an All-Star during the 2024 season and earned a salary of $5.1 million. He had a very good 88.4 percent save conversion rate; however, he lost 8-of-11 games where he was the pitcher of record. His WHIP was higher due to more walks in the 2024 season, and his 3.68 ERA with a poor 4.25 FIP pointed to a pitcher who was luckier than good. But the save rate was more than solid. Part of the issue with Finnegan is that he doesn’t miss enough bats. He put up the worst batter-contact percentage of his career at 79.2 percent, leading to his worst swing & miss rates. But oddly, he also turned in his best swing percentage of his career on pitches out of the zone at 29.1 percent. There is definitely a mixed bag of results for the 33-year-old pitcher.
You certainly don’t want to pay Finnegan the $8.6 million that MLBTR is projecting. A modest raise over his $5.1 million seems fair. This is a tough call on a day that Jon Morosi of MLB Network says there are rumors that Finnegan is currently being discussed as a trade candidate.
Having Finnegan in trade rumors is nothing new. He has been in trade rumors for years now. His salary for the 2025 season could work against him. Expect general manager Mike Rizzo to be diligently working to get his players under firm contracts.
You may hear the term “file and trial” and that was popularized by teams with the firm stance that they treat the arbitration figure exchange date as a hard deadline, and -if- you don’t agree to a salary, they will head to an arbitration hearing. Remember, when both sides exchange numbers for a potential arb hearing, it does not mean you have to go to a hearing. The Nats are not one of those “file and trial” teams.
In their history, the Nationals have rarely gone through the arbitration hearing route. There was the time that reliever Jerry Blevins thought it would be cool (true story) to go to an arb-hearing and a month later Rizzo traded Blevins to the New York Mets for Matt den Dekker. Some say that if you take a team to an arbitration hearing, it creates friction. It seems that players who do that with Rizzo do not get many favors going forward — or like Blevins, do not stay around to see Opening Day. Before the 2019 season, Rizzo went to arb hearings with both reliever Kyle Barraclough and Michael A. Taylor which the Nationals side won. Barraclough was DFA’d during the season, and Taylor headed to free agency after the season.
In 2012, John Lannan had his arbitration hearing before Spring Training camp opened and was supposed to be the fifth starter on that squad, and his manager, Davey Johnson, publicly named Lannan as his fifth starter, but days later, Lannan was sent to Triple-A Syracuse as Rizzo went with Ross Detwiler as the team’s fifth starter. Maybe that arb hearing had nothing to do with it — but maybe it did. The Nats list is small on players who go to arbitration hearings, but the warning is don’t push Rizzo.
First off, let’s explain that arbitration rules generally cover players with at least 3-years of MLB service time and not on a long-term contract like Keibert Ruiz. These arb-eligible players have a chance to negotiate a set salary for the upcoming season and get paid above the league minimum salary of $760,000. There is also the Super-Two rule for players with less than three years of service time to become arb-eligible and a player must rank in the top 22 percent in terms of service time among all players who have amassed between two and three years of service time in the Majors.
Also, this is a good time to look out for salary dump trades if those come available. There are several more players on the non-tender bubble all over the MLB. Again, if a player is non-tendered, they automatically become a free agent. But you can trade an arb-eligible player before the deadline, and the acquiring team then has the decision today to tender or non-tender.
The whole arb-eligible process is multi-faceted. The arb-deadline does not end the process with tendered players as it keeps going until a player has a set contract amount for the 2025 season. Once they do, the team can still DFA a player. The process is certainly lengthy and complicated.
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