Today is non-tender day

Welcome to non-tender day, everybody. Yes, today is the deadline for teams
to decide whether to tender
contracts to unsigned players on their 40-man roster.

It’s usually done
with a player between three and six years of service time coming off injury or a team simply doesn’t feel the player is worth a
new contract. However, this winter we have a number of teams (I’m looking at you, Padres and Reds) who would
prefer not to keep a productive player because of a considerable jump in salary.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve profiled a few of the most likely non-tenders (Kelly Shoppach, Garrett Atkins, Kelly Johnson) and
even though Shoppach was recently traded to the Rays, as a result, his new teammate Dioner
Navarro is now one of the more likely names on the chopping block.

Here are some
other non-tender candidates of note, complete with ’09 stats:

Kevin Correia (Padres) – 12-11, 3.98 ERA

Jack Cust (Athletics) – .240/.356/.417 with 25 home runs and 70 RBI

Chien-Ming Wang (Yankees) – 1-6, 9.64 ERA

John Buck (Royals) – .247/.299/.484 with eight home runs and 36 RBI

Jonny Gomes (Reds) – .267/.338/.541 with 20 home runs and 51 RBI

D.J. Carrasco (White Sox) – 3.76 ERA and 1.41 WHIP in 93 1/3 innings

See any good fits for your team? Keep it here throughout the day for the non-tenders as they roll in.

Over the weekend an Instagram post emerged of a concession worker at Comerica Park in Detroit spitting on pizza crust before covering it with sauce and then, presumably, serving it to a customer. It’s pretty gross, so you probably don’t want to see it. But if you just can’t help yourself, here you go.

If you DO NOT want to go to that link, know that the employee was identified and arrested and could face charges. He has also been fired and Detroit Sportservice, the concession company which runs things at Comerica, shut down that stand. The guy who took the video was suspended for an unrelated uniform violation. There’s a minor dustup emerging between him and the company, as he claims that he tried to tell people about the spitting coworker and was ignored, but the story makes that seem fairly implausible. It sounds to me anyway like the concession company handled it about as well as they could under the circumstances.

In other news, many ballparks allow you to bring in your own food subject to certain restrictions. I can’t say I’ve ever had a bad experience with ballpark food, but if that sort of thing worries you, perhaps you should investigate the rules for brown-bagging it in to the old ball game.

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