It does not take much to remember a time when the non-tender deadline was not a major event on the offseason calendar. Just rewind to, say, 2016, and you’ll be back in an era where the deadline appeared functionally the same each winter. There would be a few dozen players at most who would not receive a contract. The majority of this group would be easily predictable: injured pitchers, one-dimensional depth-chart fillers, unlucky guys from teams with a positional backlog.
Over the last several seasons, however, clubs have been opting to non-tender more and more players. The pandemic has only exacerbated the trend: Wednesday’s deadline brought a record-high 59 non-tenders, a list that includes plenty of expected players alongside more surprising names like Adam Duvall from the Braves and David Dahl from the Rockies.