James: I think the pitchers were mostly waiting for the Japanese market to finish doing business. Snell and Montgomery can now set their prices accordingly. As for guys like Chapman, they too needed to wait for the bigger contracts to land before their market would open up. Though, in the case of Chapman, this is a bad market year for him and he likely would have been better off taking an extension with Atlanta when it was available.
Justin: Maybe the massive contract Ohtani got might have something to do with it as well?