An Offer You Can Refuse: A Look at the Qualifying Offer

Baseball free agency allows players to be signed to some of the largest contracts in all of sports. Alex Rodriguez was able to command a contract that had him being paid just shy of $30 million last year, while Clayton Kershaw just signed a contract extension that will give him an annual salary of over $30 million dollars. Talks of money this high have led to certain agreements being made in the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between Major League Baseball executives and the Players' Union. These changes made it so that teams with very high payrolls, such as the Yankees or Dodgers, would not be able to sign all the top players in free agency without giving up some sort of compensation in return to the team that the player is leaving.