No, I’m not crazy, please hear me out. I’m not going to tell you why Freddy Galvis is worth a salary of nearly $20M next year, because he’s not. I’m going to tell you why a bloated one-year contract for a presumptive “stop-gap” who fills a short-term need makes sense for the team and its payroll.
For the unfamilar, the “Qualifying Offer” (QO) is a feature of MLB’s Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that is intended to help small-market teams retain good players. A “Qualifying Offer” is a one-year contract that is no less than the average of the league’s top 125 highest paid players, which comes out somewhere north of $17M for the 2018-2019 offseason.