Brent Rooker Signs Five-Year Extension to Remain an A

Are there any Oakland Athletics fans reading this? If so, don’t worry, your team is doing its usual nonsense, there’s nothing to see here. You’re lucky they left, don’t feel so bad, those last few years can’t take away all the good times. You can go ahead and skip this one, great article, hooray. Now that that group is gone, and we’re left with Sacramentonians, new A’s fans, more general fans of the sport, and perhaps Vegas residents, let me say this: The A’s signing Brent Rooker to a five-year, $60 million extension is awesome, and I love it.

Rooker was a rare bright spot on a dismal 2023 A’s squad. Then he was downright excellent on the green-shoots-of-hope 2024 team, compiling 5.1 WAR, even with the punishing positional adjustment that comes from DHing, thanks to a scorching .293/.365/.562 batting line. That line is even better than you might think, coming as it did in the cavernous Coliseum, and it didn’t look fluky.

Rooker hits the stuffing out of the ball. He finished eighth in barrels per batted ball in 2024, just ahead of certifiably enormous guys Oneil Cruz, Kyle Schwarber, and Marcell Ozuna. He also elevates the ball more frequently than any of that crew. The two are intertwined, obviously, but any time you’re hitting rockets like the 2024 versions of Schwarber and Ozuna, you’re doing something right. You could hardly do better from scratch if you were trying to come up with an ideal power hitter; a vicious swing (78th-percentile bat speed) that frequently puts the ball in play at profitable launch angles (86th-percentile sweet spot rate) means plenty of barrels (97th percentile) and 39 homers even in a park that suppresses righty power mightily.

Players like this, posting five-win seasons before even hitting arbitration, don’t exactly grow on trees. There were eight of them last year, counting Rooker, and you’ve heard of the other seven: Bobby Witt Jr., Gunnar Henderson, Jarren Duran, Elly De La Cruz, William Contreras, Cal Raleigh, and Jackson Merrill. Now, none of those guys is going to be accepting five-year, $60 million deals anytime soon. But Rooker isn’t your average early-career player.

Rooker went 35th in the 2017 draft, a power-hitting college outfielder with gaudy stats in the SEC. He then spent four years destroying the ball at every level he played. The Twins, who had initially drafted him, couldn’t find a spot for him on the major league roster, and when they made space in 2021, he struggled to a below-average line despite excellent minor league statistics that same year. Whether it was major league jitters or just small-sample randomness, he needed a change of scenery, and he got bundled off to San Diego when the Padres traded Chris Paddack for Taylor Rogers.

Of course, the Padres didn’t have much use for him in the majors either; they could hardly find playing time for all of their established stars as it was. While Rooker mashed away in the minors (a .272/.385/.605 slash line in 273 PA), A.J. Preller found himself in need of a backup catcher, so he flipped Rooker to the Royals for Cam Gallagher. Though he hit even better in Triple-A for Kansas City (.338/.424/.775 in 92 PA), the team DFA’ed him due to a roster crunch. The A’s gamely swooped in, and honestly, why wouldn’t they? Rooker’s minor league stats were shockingly consistent from 2017-22, with wRC+ marks of 158, 124, 139, 142, and 154.

That’s how Rooker ended up playing his first full big league season in 2023 at age 28. He was above average right away, and I mean, duh. His minor league production hadn’t always looked the prettiest – lots of strikeouts, even at the low levels – but if you’re raking at Triple-A, the odds are pretty good that you’ll at least tread water in the bigs. Rooker shed his Quad-A label quite quickly, and truthfully, I don’t think it ever made that much sense; his contact quality has always been big league caliber. He was just the victim of a number of teams making trouble for themselves with roster crunches, and then the Royals – yeah, I’m not exactly sure what happened there.

In any case, that’s all in the past. The future is Rooker headlining in Sacramento and then Las Vegas as the clear best hitter in a sneaky exciting lineup. I think that this extension works on two fronts, one for the player and one for the club, in a way that the best deals do. For Rooker, this is a life-changing amount of money. Counting everything from his signing bonus to the pre-arb bonus pools, Rooker cleared $4.9 million in the first eight years of his professional career. That’s not nothing, but it’s not what you think of professional athletes making. It’s more like a successful software engineer, particularly in the Bay Area. This isn’t quite Brock Purdy playing for the league minimum, but Rooker has made spectacularly little given how good of a player he was in 2024. Sixty million dollars changes everything. Now he’s set for life even if 2024 ends up being the best year of his career — and it probably will be! It was a really good year!

From the team side, this deal does three things. First, it spends a little money this year. Rooker was projected to make $5 million in arbitration this season, but the A’s will pay him $10 million in the first year of his deal. The team is looking to increase its budget for various reasons (revenue sharing covenants, making the team more fun, seeming more like an actual major league franchise, etc.), and spending to retain the team’s best players seems like an excellent way to satisfy that urge.

Second, this is just a good deal from an expected value standpoint. Giving Rooker $36 million over the first three years of the deal, what would have been his arbitration years, is probably a slight overpay; my back-of-the-envelope arb model puts his earnings around $33 million. Two years of free agency after that for $24 million, plus an as-yet-undetailed vesting option for another year, feels about right. if Paul Goldschmidt and Carlos Santana are getting one-year deals in that range, it’s hard to feel bad about Rooker’s odds of getting a bigger deal should he hit free agency. This isn’t a home run extension from the team’s standpoint, but it’s clearly advantageous: paying a borderline All-Star $12 million a year for the rest of his prime years is smart baseball.

Finally, Rooker’s extension ties the team’s DNA together across three disparate eras that will generally make for confusing fandom. He was the best player on the last iteration of the Oakland team, and in a way that recalls the Moneyball-era A’s; walks and dingers from large dudes who are questionable in the field. He’s a delightful ambassador who will be one of the faces of the team in Sacramento, and he’s reportedly a great clubhouse presence as well. When (if?) the team finally decamps to Las Vegas, he’ll still be under contract as a tenured A, someone the team can put on posters and make bobbleheads of while they try to build a new fanbase.

That’s good business, and quite honestly, the A’s seem to be doing a lot of good business this winter. Their new-look pitching staff, headlined by Luis Severino and Jeffrey Springs, will help cushion the shock of moving from one of the toughest parks in the league for hitters to a more reasonable stadium – I think that Sacramento will play as a hitter’s park though not an extreme one, though that assumption is as-yet untested. They’re likely looking into deals for other hitters on the team, and they have more money to spend this offseason to get to their stated goal of $100 million in salary. Their lineup is dotted with young, up-and-coming players to play understudy to Rooker: JJ Bleday and Lawrence Butler had sterling 2024 seasons, and top prospect Jacob Wilson looks set to make his mark in 2025. The newly reasonable offensive environment should help ease Wilson’s transition to the majors after his 28-game 2024 debut, a further plus.

This deal can’t be the only thing the A’s do to work towards the future, but nothing about this winter gives me that impression. It’s also a fitting first step towards signing new offensive players; Rooker counts as a veteran on this team despite his relatively slim service time, and rewarding the veterans with financial security before bringing in outside voices is smart business (and clubhouse management) from my perspective.

It’s weird to be praising the A’s. They’ve gotten a lot of scorn from me in the past few years, and they’ve deserved it. They still do, really. But that doesn’t change what I think about this deal: I love it for both player and team, and I’m cautiously optimistic that the A’s are starting to behave less like a cartoon villain and more like a real major league baseball team. On the field, at least.