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As the offseason enters the last non-baseball playing month, we have now reached the upcoming deadline for teams to sign their arbitration-eligible players. The teams and players have until 10:00 a.m. PST Friday January 11th to either settle on a contract or exchange salary figures.
With the trade of Yasiel Puig and Alex Wood, the Dodgers have eight players that they have to sign by that Friday deadline to avoid a potential arbitration hearing.
Corey Seager and Chris Taylor are entering their arbitration-eligible seasons and will likely receive the most significant bump in their salaries as opposed to the other six players.
Pedro Baez, Yimi Garcia, Kiké Hernández and Joc Pederson will be in their second turn at the potential arbitration hearing invitation. This will be the final go around at the potential exchange of salary figures for Josh Fields.
Tony Cingrani is also one of the eight players tendered a contract and is also entering his final season before free agency. It was reported back on November 30th that he had signed his 2019 contract for $2.65M.
#Dodgers agree with LHP Tony Cingrani on one-year, $2.65 contract, fully guaranteed, source tells The Athletic. Most arbitration deals are not guaranteed.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) November 30, 2018
I will note that there has been no official announcement by the Dodgers since this was reported.
Eric Stephen has written extensively about prior arbitration salary deadlines and as he noted last year, while the January 11th deadline is only for exchanging salary figures and not a cutoff of any negotiations, the Dodgers treat it as such because they are a “file and trial” team.
Like other major league teams who have the same philosophy, once the the Dodgers exchange figures and the deadline passes, the Dodgers will no longer negotiate with the player and will take their chances at the hearing.
Now after saying all this, the Andrew Friedman led Dodgers have had 29 arbitration eligible players and they have signed all of them prior to having to file salary figures. Nearly all of them have signed shortly before on or on the day of deadline.
In the next few days and up to the deadline, we will review the situations for each of the players, including the reportedly signed Tony Cingrani.