Brewers, Cooper Pratt Reportedly Agree to Extension

The Brewers and shortstop prospect Cooper Pratt are reportedly close to terms on an eight-year extension. The deal would guarantee Pratt $50.75 million over the life of the deal, and there are also two club options worth about $15 million apiece. As it’s a major league contract, Pratt must be added to Milwaukee’s 40-man roster. A corresponding move to make the terms work has not yet been announced.

While extensions for prospects who have yet to debut are becoming more common, Pratt’s is a little unusual. These tend to either be large deals to consensus top prospects, often with the carrot of a ticket to the Opening Day roster as a sort of signing bonus, or smaller sums for enticing but flawed farmhands. The eight-year, $82 million extension Milwaukee inked with Jackson Chourio prior to the 2024 season is a good example of the former (as is the eight-year, $95 million pact the Mariners reportedly just struck with Colt Emerson), while the six-year, $25 million pacts Seattle signed with Evan White and Philadelphia with Scott Kingery cover the latter. Pratt’s deal doesn’t fit cleanly in either category. It’s a pretty good chunk of change for a player who evaluators generally don’t see as a future star, and it’s also not a pay-for-play deal, as Pratt will likely remain at Triple-A after signing.

Pratt was taken in the sixth round of the 2023 draft from Magnolia Heights High School in Mississippi. Eric ranked him 25th on the Draft Board that year, but his $1.35 signing bonus was commensurate with more of a second-round talent. As you’d expect for a prospect in consideration for this kind of contract, he’s performed well in pro ball. After a successful cameo on the complex in his draft season, Pratt notched a 132 wRC+ at Low-A as a 19-year-old, with strong contact skills and a low walk rate. He spent all of 2025 at Double-A, where he played a clean shortstop and hit .238/.343/.348, good for a 107 wRC+. He also dropped his strikeout rate to 15.2%, impressive for a 20-year-old at that level.

Still, I was a little surprised at the terms of the deal and think Pratt did pretty well for himself; I bounced it off Eric and he’s of a similar mind. We like Pratt and ranked him 10th (45 FV) in Milwaukee’s very deep system this winter, but we wrote him up as more of a second-division guy or solid utility infielder than a frontline regular. We both see a quality defender. Eric wrote: “For an athlete his size, he has good range and actions, and the arm strength to make accurate off-platform throws. It’d be too much to call him a Gold Glove-caliber talent, but he should be above average there at peak.”

We’re less sold on his upside at the plate. For a big guy (Pratt is listed at 6-foot-4 and 210 pounds), he’s neither hitting for much power nor producing the kind of exit velocities that suggest he will. And while he’s made a ton of contact, we’re a little worried about the mechanics of his swing and how his chase rate explodes with two strikes. To quote our report again:

“Pratt’s swing has an intermission; he loads his hands and they come to a dead stop before he fires them toward the ball. It requires a ton of effort, and he sometimes loses sight of the baseball in order to swing hard. These are the traits of a hitter who we worry will be late against big league fastballs… Pratt’s chase rate explodes with two strikes, as he goes from having a slightly below-average 26% mark to a rather concerning 47% rate (56% against secondary pitches). Every hitter’s chase rate takes a leap with two strikes (it’s strategically sound to expand your zone in that situation), but that’s a big jump and suggests that some of Pratt’s early-count takes are premeditated.”

Overall, it’s the evaluation of a player we expect to help, and Pratt may well have a couple 2-3 WAR seasons during his peak. Heck, given the Brewers ability to extract the best out of so many of their homegrown players, it wouldn’t shock us if we’re light on the player and he does wind up becoming a true everyday presence. Still, we peg him as more of a 1.5ish WAR guy annually, which makes a $50 million outlay, even over an eight-year timespan, a pretty aggressive commitment to a player with no major league experience.

It’s not that the back of the envelope math doesn’t make sense. If you fix the value of a win at $9 million — it’s obviously more complicated than that, but let’s keep it simple here — and assume that Pratt accrues an average of 1.5 WAR per year over the span of the deal, that’s $135 million of production for around $80 million (before any escalators). Milwaukee stands to recoup plenty of surplus value even if you want to turn down the dials on the $/WAR equation, and the team is only on the hook for a little more than $6 million per year if Pratt falls short of this projection. It does seem like an unusual amount of downside risk for one of the few true small-market teams to take, however. Sad as it is for this prospect writer to say, most of the guys we cover inevitably fall short of their forecast. Six million dollars isn’t a major expenditure these days, even for Milwaukee, but the dead money will sting more for the Brewers than it would for most other clubs in the league if Pratt’s skills don’t translate.

The opportunity cost is tricky to evaluate. It’s not clear that the Brewers are any better off than if they had opted to take matters year-to-year. As it stands, Pratt was only due to make a couple million between now and his arb years, which likely would have started in 2030. Had he played well, an extension surely would’ve cost significantly more, though it would have also come with additional security. That we’re in the final year of the current collective bargaining agreement adds a wrinkle: Pratt’s pre-arb and early-arb salaries will likely be a little more expensive than what early-career players have earned this cycle, to say nothing of how the arbitration structure might change in the next CBA. Perhaps cost certainty had its own appeal in this case.

One other interesting dynamic to follow is how this winds up affecting Milwaukee’s other premium shortstop prospects. Jesús Made, Luis Peña, and Jett Williams were all Top 100 guys for us this year, and each had at least a shot to play short in Milwaukee. The club’s first-round pick last year, Brady Ebel, is also a shortstop. If Pratt becomes the player Milwaukee seems to think he is, the org’s top farmhands may well need to work in at other positions sooner rather than later. It’s possible that none of them are shortstops at the end of the day: Made has put on 25 pounds and looks likely to slide over to third, Peña is error prone, and Williams likely fits better at second or in center anyway. Whatever their chances of becoming the Brewers’ starting shortstop were yesterday, though, those odds have dipped a little today.

Perhaps the Brewers were reading the writing on the wall a bit. If, internally, they don’t buy any of those three as long-term shortstops, Pratt is suddenly the only upper-level player who projects there long term. Ebell is too far away and the current option, Joey Ortiz, just had a miserable season at the plate in 2025. Nailing down the position for the long haul could have been a tertiary motivation for Milwaukee.

As is usually the case, you can see the logic for both player and club here. The Brewers extend a player they see as a future regular at a premium position, making a significant but manageable financial commitment in exchange for cost certainty and the chance at a fair bit of surplus value. Pratt, for his part, has secured the financial component of the American Dream at the ripe age of 21. To whatever extent he had any underlying financial anxieties, those are presumably long gone, and he can turn his full attention to the diamond. Sometimes peace of mind is the most valuable thing of all.