What Kind of Player Wants to Sign Before Thanksgiving?

The players at the top of the market usually determine the shape of free agency. A team in need of offensive help in the outfield isn’t going to drop $100 million on Anthony Santander until it knows Juan Soto is no longer available. And Santander probably wouldn’t sign anyway. His agent would want to try to squeeze an extra few million out of a team that, having missed on Soto, needed desperately to go home with something.

A year ago, Shohei Ohtani held up the free agency deluge, and everyone reacted like he’d gotten to the front of a long line at Starbucks and had no idea what he wanted to order. (I mocked the public opprobrium then, but having stumbled into that simile I get it now. Everyone hates the Starbucks lollygagger.) Then Scott Boras, who usually waits out the market anyway, took even longer than usual to find homes for his top three clients. So free agency didn’t get going in earnest until mid-December, and stretched into March.

Of course, that’s only the top of the market. Every year, there’s a flurry of activity that starts only days after the end of the World Series, including some fairly big names changing teams.

The RosterResource archive, which makes it easy to investigate the history of this sort of transaction, goes back to the 2019-20 offseason. In that time, there have been 40 instances of a player changing teams between the end of the World Series and Thanksgiving on a major league free agent contract. Including two on Thursday while I was writing this, in fact! See, the offseason’s not dead after all.

Most of these 40 players fit into four categories, and some of them into more than one.

(For all of these players, the games played and WAR totals include production only under that contract for that team.)

Every season, there are upwards of 500 free agent signings. Most of them go unnoticed and involve players you’ve never heard of. Because each team is not just trying to fill a lineup and a rotation, it has to have depth — not just at the major league level, but in the upper minors as well. And there are limits on how many players a team can carry, both on the major league-eligible 40-man roster but in the organization as a whole.

So when the season ends and teams start planning for free agent signings, putting 60-day IL players back on the 40-man, and preparing for the Rule 5 Draft, guys around the edges get cut. And a lot of those players, while not valuable enough to remain with their previous team or garner a meaningful trade return, can still fill a need elsewhere.

The Yankees needed Jones to make a few spot starts late in the season, but now they don’t have a roster spot for him anymore, so he gets cut. Well, the Guardians think Jones could be really good if they teach him a cutter, so they sign him, and to make room they release Williams because they already have a bunch of outfielders like him. But hey, the Cubs could use a little more speed off the bench, so they sign Williams and cut Smith, because they don’t need five catchers on the 40-man roster. The Rockies sign Smith, because they’re short on catching depth… you get the idea. Economists refer to this phenomenon as “movement toward Pareto optimality;” Trekkies call it The Great Material Continuum.

Every November, including this one, dozens of these guys change teams via free agency, but most of them sign minor league contracts. On rare occasions, a team will be interested enough in a specific depth player to offer a major league deal and jump to the front of the line. Some of these players never play a game for their new team, but others turn into useful big leaguers, so teams keep taking the risk.

Of course, some players might like to get their business done early. Especially those without any illusions of being at the top of anyone’s list. Gibson, Graveman, and d’Arnaud have a habit of signing early; it’s not universal behavior, of course. After the 2022 season, the Phillies cut Gibson loose and he waited out his market… all the way to December 3, when he signed a one-year deal with the Orioles.

These three players are all pretty good big leaguers, verging occasionally into the territory of the very good. But they’re not under any illusion of being market-shapers. Sign early, sit back, and relax. There’s a new Dragon Age game out — that’s a much better use of an offseason than worrying about where you’re going to play next season.

There’s an old Top Gear episode where the boys all go to a classic car auction. James and Jeremy both went in with an idea of what they wanted to buy, but Richard Hammond shocked his cohosts by bidding on — and winning — the very first lot without knowing or caring what it was he was buying.

“I’m doing what I used to do in nightclubs in Yorkshire,” he said. “First girl that’s breathing in and out, I’d go, ‘Hi, love, how ya doing?’ You pulled. That’s it. Job done. Your mates, thinking in a minute Ursula Andress is gonna turn up — and she didn’t — were stuck.”

It’s not the most progressive metaphor, but the logic is pretty compelling. The Braves and Angels both tend to run fairly high payrolls, but under their current heads of baseball operations — Alex Anthopoulos and Perry Minasian, respectively — they usually aren’t in on the bidding at the top of the market. Even when the Braves threw their hat into the ring for Ohtani and Aaron Nola last offseason, they got rejected early and went back to their usual methods.

I don’t know if Anthopoulos and Minasian share a love of Top Gear, but they did work together — first in Toronto and later in Atlanta — for about a decade. It explains why these two teams trade with each other so often, frequently early in the offseason.

The Richard Hammond Car Auction/Yorkshire Nightclub Method has worked out better for the Braves than the Angels. Most things do. But the Angels have had their share of successes by getting their work done early. Tyler Anderson has been decent for them. Even Noah Syndergaard — who was not quite washed when he put on the halo hat for the first time, but was on his way to the laundromat — put in a solid half-season for the Angels, then brought back Mickey Moniak at the trade deadline.

There is a distinct fourth category of early free agent signers: Old Pitchers. Quintana, Lynn, and Wilson fit from this list, but so do Hendricks, Morton, Loup, Gibson (at least the second time), and arguably Smyly, as well as one or both Andersons. They just all fit better somewhere else. It’s possible that these individual players have a preference for singing early or they just happened to get a satisfactory offer within a couple weeks of the World Series. But what they have in common is a lack of incentive to wait out the market.

The teams waiting out the market for Nola or Yoshinobu Yamamoto last year, or Corbin Burnes or Roki Sasaki this year (or Blake Snell both years) are after playoff-quality front-end starters. Sometimes those guys sign early, sometimes not. But they’re not really in competition with a latter-day Lance Lynn or Kyle Gibson. It’s a different niche to fill. And as much as almost everyone has a need for a veteran innings-eater, a pitcher in that role who holds out until February might find himself alone at last call. The same for relievers, even good ones, which might go some way toward explaining why Graveman has tended to sign early.

Grandal, on the other hand, was unique in his free agent class, as the only catcher with All-Star upside. That position is less flexible than outfielders or even shortstops. A guy can either catch, or he can’t, and a catcher can either hit or not, and players who can do both are rare. The closest competition Grandal had in 2019-20 was d’Arnaud, who also didn’t wait around. And while a team that missed out on both could’ve pivoted to signing Austin Romine or Robinson Chirinos, that’s a completely different class of player requiring a different philosophy of team-building.

The fact that free agency is a months-long saga certainly makes the offseason more exciting, and selfishly, having something to talk and write about all winter is good for business. But I empathize with the players and GMs who just want to get this over with. Thanksgiving is coming. Sign your free agent contracts early so you can concentrate on turkey.