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Why Is The MLB Non-Tender Deadline At Midnight?

Folks, it's 12:17 AM as I write this. Now, that's nothing new for me - I'm a degenerate night owl, and I'm often up until one or two in the morning. But why is it that, until about 10 minutes ago, many of the key bloggers associated with the Pirates (and, I suspect, most other teams) glued to Twitter, waiting for news?

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The MLB deadline for offering contracts to arbitration-eligible players was at midnight Tuesday morning, which meant that teams waited until minutes before the deadline to announce who they planned to offer a contract and who they planned to non-tender.

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People, this isn't good. Not all bloggers and certainly not all Twitter users can handle the late-night hours. So when @GerritCole popped in at 11:05 PM to write the following, a lot of people believed it was the real Gerrit Cole.

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Considering quitting baseball to smoke weed. F*** it

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Why are baseball teams forced to make decisions at an hour when many people are gullible enough to believe that Gerrit Cole had taken to Twitter to pull a Ricky Williams on us all? And why are members of the media forced to stay up until 1:00 AM chronicling those decisions? Just move the deadline to earlier in the day. One would think that would be an easy decision.

Photographs by dizfunk used in background montage under Creative Commons. Thank you.