Don’t Freak Out, but Four Guys Accepted the Qualifying Offer

After Josh Naylor signed the first major free agent deal of the offseason over the weekend, four more big names came off the board Tuesday afternoon. Of the 13 free agents who were presented with qualifying offers, four accepted: Brandon Woodruff, Trent Grisham, Gleyber Torres, and Shota Imanaga will all return to their previous teams on one-year contracts worth $22.025 million.

Bo Bichette, Dylan Cease, Edwin Díaz, Framber Valdez, Kyle Schwarber, Kyle Tucker, Michael King, Ranger Suárez, and Zac Gallen all declined their qualifying offers and will hit the open market, carrying draft pick penalties to be determined by MLB’s inscrutable compensation system.

If you’re thinking this is a bumper crop of QO acceptance, you’d be right. In the first 14 years of the qualifying offer system, 144 offers were extended to pending free agents, and only 14 accepted. This year, nearly one in four qualified free agents decided to bank the offer and walk away, rather than face one more multiple-choice question from Regis Philbin.

Having four players accept the qualifying offer is unprecedented; the previous record, three, was set in 2015 and never matched until now. Given that we’re heading into the last year of the collective bargaining agreement — and, by all indications, toward a lockout next winter — there’s an obvious temptation to read this as a bellwether for the labor market this winter, and for the tenor of next year’s negotiations.

Personally, I would be circumspect about drawing conclusions from the qualifying offer market. Taking the $22 million and change that comes with a qualifying offer might indicate what these players (and/or their agents) think about the robustness of this winter’s free agent market, but if they were so sure we were headed for a 2004-05 NHL lockout-type event, I don’t know why they’d be taking the risk of a one-year deal.

I don’t want to discount the larger market forces entirely, but the most obvious explanation for these four players taking the qualifying offer is that each of them has reason to doubt whether a richer long-term deal is coming down the pipeline. I’ll deal with each briefly.

Woodruff is the most obvious case. The Brewers’ longtime ace was already non-tendered after the 2023 season, when he blew out his shoulder. Woodruff re-signed on a two-year, $17.5 million deal with a $20 million mutual option for 2026; this would allow him to complete the multi-year rehab process on the club’s dime, while giving Milwaukee first dibs on the former Mississippi State star once he returned to fitness.

Woodruff finally got back into the rotation in July, and he was dynamite. In 12 starts, he posted a 3.20 ERA, a 3.17 FIP, and career bests in both strikeout rate and walk rate. But he suffered a lat strain in mid-September that cost him a chance to play in the postseason (leaving Milwaukee with a rotation of Freddy Peralta, followed by as many Aaron Ashby opener games as it took for Peralta to recharge). Even before that, Woodruff’s fastball was down two and a half ticks from where it was in 2023, and three miles an hour from where it was in 2022, his last fully healthy season.

Woodruff turns 33 in February; he’s three years and two significant injuries removed from his most recent 100-inning season. I doubt anyone was going to fork over the kind of money Woodruff could reasonably command if he had a stronger track record of health. At the same time, he’s already got a $10 million option buyout in the bank. Why not take another $22 million to stay with the only organization he’s ever known, which just so happened to have the best record in the National League last year? If it works out, he’ll go back on the market with a clean bill of health and no draft picks attached.

The other pitcher on the list, Imanaga, has had to navigate a contractual labyrinth of his own. I was stunned when the Cubs turned down Imanaga’s three-year, $57 million team option a few weeks ago. The left-hander had had his share of issues with the home run over his brief MLB career, especially in 2025. But he never walks anyone, and healthy left-handed arms aren’t exactly springing up from the very living earth these days. (Imanaga spent eight weeks on the IL with a hamstring issue, but I said “arm” just now for a reason.) The Cubs could’ve had that for three years at a $19 million AAV. Which sounds like a lot, but the Tigers — not the Dodgers or Mets, a team for which money is real — just paid Alex Cobb $15 million not to pitch at all. The open market is treacherous, friends.

Imanaga then turned down his own $15 million player option for 2026, at which point the Cubs tagged him with the qualifying offer. That further reduced Imanaga’s free agent leverage while essentially increasing the value of his player option by half.

I really was gobsmacked that the Cubs would risk letting a good starting pitcher go like that, but now that the whole situation has played out, it seems like the Cubs have shot the moon here.

I like Imanaga. I think the Cubs need him, and at $20 million or thereabouts, he’s a bargain. At the same time, I understand why they might have concerns about committing to him for several years. By turning down the option and qualifying Imanaga, they gave him more up front — about $2 million more this season in real money and about $3 million against the competitive balance tax — but they avoid committing to him through his age-34 season.

At the same time, Imanaga’s posting fee includes an escalator clause, standard among deals like this, that obliges Chicago to pay 15% of all exercised options and bonuses on top of the original posting fee. (Thanks to the immensely learned Jon Becker for his help tracking this down.) Let’s do the math real quick: 15% of $57 million is $8.55 million. Even if the QO counted toward the posting fee, which I don’t think it does, the Cubs would save about $5.25 million in posting fees.

So Imanaga gets more money up front — a lot more than he’d be entitled to under his player option — and if he was ticked off about losing the two team option years, he’s not too ticked off to take the qualifying offer. The Yokohama DeNA BayStars are definitely getting screwed, but what are they going to do about it?

And the only way the Cubs come out of this looking foolish is if Imanaga goes out and has a monster 2026 season. Like, contends for the Cy Young Award and walks into $35 million a year on his next deal when the Cubs could’ve had him for $19 million. And even then, I feel like the Cubs would be OK with that, because a world in which Imanaga pitches that well is probably one in which the Cubs win a lot of games.

As for the position players, I wrote up Grisham for our Top 50 Free Agents list, and wasn’t sure what to make of him. Because he was really good for the Yankees in 2025, and he accomplished this by being a completely different player than he was early in his career. A speed-and-defense guy for years, Grisham hit 34 home runs and was barely passable in center.

All of our contract predictions for Grisham came in somewhere around three years and $54 million, which is the neighborhood of contract where the QO makes a difference. You’re already outbidding the market for a guy with some serious questions; do you want to lose two high draft picks and $1 million in international bonus pool money too?

Discretion is probably the better part of valor here for Grisham. He can continue to play for a winning team, in a park that could not be a better fit for his swing, and score a million runs hitting in front of Aaron Judge. And as one of the younger players in this free agent class, Grisham can afford to take a do-over. If he does all this again next year, he’ll make that $18 million AAV look like peanuts, especially if the Gold Glove-quality center field defense comes back. If not, well, there was serious downside possibility for a player like this in what might be a bear market.

Torres has a lot in common with Grisham; he had a good year in close-to-ideal circumstances, but while his offensive skills are extensive, the overall profile doesn’t play as well in a corner outfield spot as it would up the middle. And with every one-year deal Torres takes — remember, he got skunked in 2024-25 and settled for a $15 million prove-it deal with the Tigers — the day of defensive reckoning comes closer.

I think there’s less upside to Torres taking the qualifying offer than the other three — I don’t see him putting together a 2026 season that’d bring in a nine-figure contract unless something truly wild happens — but he hit the market with no strings attached last season and didn’t do this well.

So while it’s unusual for anyone to accept a qualifying offer, and unprecedented for four players to do it on the same day, I get it. Every one of them has a reason to take $22 million now, rather than risk it on the open market, especially given the upcoming labor uncertainty. And double-especially, considering that each of them had been saddled with the millstone of draft pick and international bonus pool compensation.

More than that, I think it’s a product of teams being a little looser with the QO. It’s not just a formality for stars, it’s a legitimate market-rate offer for players who are either merely above average or have a history of injury. If you’re going to sign a one-year prove-it deal anyway, why waste the whole offseason waiting for it to come?