'File-and-Trial' is Dead, and William Contreras Drove the Nail Into Its Coffin

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Brewers struck what is very technically not a one-year deal with their star catcher Saturday. It's the inflection point in a curve bending away from a hard line, turning us toward the next fight between teams and players in their arbitration-eligible seasons.

Image courtesy of © Katie Stratman-Imagn Images

The Milwaukee Brewers and catcher William Contreras agreed on a one-year deal with a mutual option for 2026 Saturday, avoiding an impending arbitration hearing.

The terms of this deal give Contreras the better side of the negotiation, since the $6.1 million he will make in total (if the Brewers turn down their club option and re-enter the arbitration process with him next season) is above the midpoint between the figures at which each side filed last month. That's almost certainly what will happen, too, because $12 million would be a ground-breaking, precedent-altering payday for a catcher in their second year of arbitration eligibility, two years from free agency.

The two catchers most comparable to Contreras who have gotten that far recently are J.T. Realmuto and William's brother, Willson Contreras. Realmuto, though, made just $2.9 million in his first season of arbitration eligibility and $5.9 million in his second. The elder Contreras got $4.5 million in his first trip through that system, and $6.65 million his second time. Neither guy even surpassed $10 million in their third and final years of eligibility, though Realmuto did file for $12.4 million before losing a hearing against the Phillies in 2020.

Arguably, William Contreras is more comparable to Will Smith of the Dodgers, who had agreed to an $8.55-million deal for his second season of eligibility before replacing it with a long-term deal. Still, the odds that he'll make $12 million in 2026 are slim and none. The option is purely dressing, a chance to disguise this one-year deal as one that gives the team some kind of value, too. It doesn't. This saves the organization some face, but no one should or will be fooled by it.

Twenty years ago, you started to hear about the concept of "file-and-go". It was a hardline position adopted, first, by Atlanta and a few other front offices, whereby if a player and the club didn't agree on a salary before the deadline to file proposed arbitration figures, the team would halt negotiations and go to the resulting hearing. The goal was to force players to accede to more team-friendly terms, on the theory that the team's front office would prepare a good enough case to win most arbitration hearings and thus that the player would be motivated to avoid having one.

Relatively quickly, the name drifted to "file-and-trial", and virtually the entire league employed the strategy. For a long time, that was the way of things, even as arbitration salaries did tick upward. Eventually, though, exigencies began to erode the edifice. Teams don't like going to hearings much more than players do, after all, and some of them found that players with whom they had good relationships and hopes of long-term deals were using the deadline for exchanging arbitration numbers to their own advantage, rather than caving to the club.

Thus, we began to see workaround deals. Even after filing numbers, teams and players would strike a deal—but it would always have a second year attached to it, sometimes in the form of an option. It was a way of delaying a bit of the payment for that season to the following year, since the options were often declined and buyouts generally paid, while also avoiding a hearing and sticking to the letter of the unwritten file-and-trial rule.

With each such deal, though, the strength and value of file-and-trial diminished. It was always in trouble, anyway, because in a league starved for expansion, really good players—the ones worth keeping around through arbitration seasons—have increasing leverage. When the latest collective bargaining agreement created a pre-arbitration bonus pool system, that only became more true. Contreras made over $2.8 million in his pre-arbitration seasons in performance bonuses alone, which made it impossible for the Brewers to hold much over his head during this negotiation. Adding his salary and the bonus he earned in 2024 together, Contreras made roughly $2.5 million last year, which is one reason why he was able to set such a high asking price in arbitration. Having made more than $5 million total before getting here, he didn't need to be bullied by the Brewers in this case, so they had to scramble.

Earlier this week, the Padres agreed to a one-year deal with a mutual option for 2026 with Michael King, paying him less in total than the midpoint between the two. That tells you that the Padres knew they had King beat, if a hearing did take place, and that King's representatives knew it, too. The Padres needed cost certainty and to structure the deal in a way that delayed some of their payments, though, so they agreed to a pact that gives them a financial break in an unusual way. This is one year after the Brewers struck a deal that left them with a club option on Devin Williams this fall, akin to the Contreras one—it was always likely to be declined, and having the option in the contract was just a way to present the deal to everyone as something other than an exception to file-and-trial.

We're now well past any illusions. File-and-trial is dead. Some teams will claim it's still real, but contracts like these are all over the place now, and they fundamentally compromise the idea of the approach. We'll see even more of these in the future. Eventually (and probably fairly soon), most teams will even drop the facade and admit that the filing deadline ahead of potential hearings is just a procedural thing.

Teams will find plenty of compensation for this, of course. As the last several years' worth of Februaries have told us, the league is overstuffed with good players right now. That's a problem for the players and a boon to front offices. It will become the new cudgel, and we'll see more and more players non-tendered each winter, unless they're willing to sign on terms the team likes before the November non-tender deadline.

That, obviously, is no threat to a player like Contreras, and elite talents like him will continue to get richer fast. It will be bad news for lower classes of player, though, who don't especially want to be tossed into overcrowded free-agent pools before getting a chance to showcase their skills for longer. Brendan Rodgers, Ramón Laureano, Kyle Finnegan and Colin Poche are among guys non-tendered in November who are still available right now, and are likely to sign deals that make them long for the money they would have gotten even at the lower end of their projected arbitration ranges for this season. There are more good players than there are roster spots to accommodate them, so while teams will continue to feel inflationary pressure on the salaries of stars even before they reach free agency, they'll turn that around and hold the feet of average and lesser players to the fire to make back what they lose.

Nonetheless, this is a big moment. Contreras's contract permanently puts the lie to the notion of file-and-trial, and should be remembered as the deal that made it obvious how obsolete that framework has become. For the Brewers, it wasn't worth going to a hearing and fracturing a relationship with Contreras, let alone risking a loss that would have cost them another $500,000 in flexibility for this season. The league is overdue to admit that that's the case more often than not.

View full article