Boston Red Sox avoid arbitration with deals for eligible players
By Sean Penney
The Boston Red Sox have reached an agreement on one-year deals for the 2019 season with several eligible players to avoid arbitration.
The Boston Red Sox avoided arbitration with several eligible players by agreeing to deals prior to Friday’s 1:00 p.m. ET deadline.
Not everyone waited until the last minute. Tyler Thornburg signed a one-year deal at the end of November. Heath Hembree and Steven Wright followed more recently with similar deals.
That left nine arbitration-eligible players for the team to address heading into deadline day. If the sides are unable to come to an agreement in time, an arbitration panel is tasked with determining if the player will be paid what they asked for or what the team was offering.
The Red Sox rarely let it get to that point but we saw last year a case where they were forced to go to arbitration with a star player. It didn’t pan out for the team that time and they shouldn’t be eager to go down that path again.
We’re a couple hours past the deadline at the time of this writing and deals have yet to be announced for some of the arbitration-eligible players. News continues to leak out well after the deadline, so this doesn’t necessarily mean the Red Sox are heading for a hearing with several players.
We’ll continue to add updates as the news unfolds. For now, let’s take a look at each of the deals we know about, how they compare to the projections forecast by MLB Trade Rumors, and what this means for their role with the team heading into next season.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated following a report from Alex Speier of the Boston Globe that the remaining arbitration-eligible players have all settled on one-year agreements for next season.