Quick and random baseball-related thoughts to help you get through Friday:
Today is final day for teams to non-tender players who are under contract for '09. Those players will then become free agents for all teams to sign. This year's "non-tender" crop might be better than usual due to the changing economic times. Typically, these are players in the last two years of arbitration (starting to get expensive), and their teams have made an evaluation that their pending raise won't be worth the return in terms of performance.
Today's non-tender deadline is also the last significant off-season transactional deadline date in the offseason of any kind, really. From here until February, of course there will be FA signings and trades, but there won't be any new players added to the available talent pool.
The A's 40-man roster stands at 40 after yesterday's Rule 5 selection. I think the A's deserve a lot of credit for how well they evaluated their own talent - not only did the team not lose any players, but, they didn't go crazy in terms of protecting fringe players, either. The team managed to keep Sellers, Kilby, and Recker...and yet they didn't even have to give up a 40-man roster slot to do it.
