The Milwaukee Brewers’ Yasmani Grandal deal—reportedly one year for $18.25 million—is a smart move that makes a good team even better. It’s also a fairly damning indictment of baseball’s current free agent market.
Grandal was the best free agent catcher available and maybe the best catcher in baseball. (J.T. Realmuto, who may or may not be traded soon, is his strongest challenger to those titles.) The Dodgers extended him a qualifying offer—$17.9 million is this year’s figure—which he rejected, as had been expected. Why wouldn’t Grandal reject the qualifying offer? It seemed unlikely, if not unthinkable, that he wouldn’t be weighing multi-year contracts.