Can Extensions Go Too Far?

On Wednesday, the Detroit Tigers signed rookie shortstop Kevin McGonigle to an eight-year, $150 million contract extension, keeping him under team control through 2034. When McGonigle was going through the draft process, quite a few observers — including me — saw a heady, left-handed-hitting second baseman with average size but a polished, punchy bat, noted that he is from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and thought, “Maybe he’ll be the next Chase Utley.”

As big as the hype around McGonigle has become, that’s still a lofty comp. Utley played 16 years in the majors, made six All-Star teams, produced 61.5 WAR (including five straight seven-win seasons), and appeared in three World Series, winning one. If McGonigle ends up doing all that, I think everyone walks away happy. But after just 17 major league games, McGonigle guaranteed that he would out-earn his childhood hero, who pocketed a mere $125.6 million across his decorated career.

McGonigle’s contract set a new record for guaranteed money given to a player with less than 100 days’ service time. That venerable record, once held by Konnor Griffin of the Pirates, lasted all of eight days. Griffin’s nine-year, $140 million deal comes on the heels of eight-year extensions for Cooper Pratt of the Brewers and Colt Emerson of the Mariners, neither of whom has set foot in the big leagues yet.

This is a trend now.

I was able to butt in and steal some research by Jon Becker and Ben Clemens for an article Ben’s working on. They found 29 instances of players receiving a contract extension that lasted into free agency before they’d played a full season in the majors, not counting players coming over from the major leagues in Asia. Evan Longoria famously broke the seal on that contract structure in 2008.

Six of those deals — the four I’ve already mentioned, plus Roman Anthony’s and Samuel Basallo’s — were signed in the past year. A total of 18 of those contracts started in 2020 or later; 23 kicked in since 2018.

And it’s more than just brand-new major leaguers who are making long-term commitments. Pete Crow-Armstrong, Jackson Merrill, Maikel Garcia, Jacob Wilson — actually, something like half the Athletics’ starting lineup decided to commit to play for the A’s longer than the A’s themselves have committed to play anywhere. Bobby Witt Jr., Corbin Carroll, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Julio Rodríguez are all signed until the Rapture. Nico Hoerner and Jesús Luzardo signed free agency-minus-one extensions during spring training, taking a big bite out of next year’s class.

The thing is, it’s not just next year’s free agent class that’s suffered attrition. One of the fun things you can do on our site is head over to the Projections tab and get ZiPS figures for almost 3,000 players, not just for 2026, but for 2027 and 2028, as well.

There are 141 players — position players and pitchers — who are projected to compile at least 7.0 WAR by the end of 2028. That’s not a huge number; it comes out to 2.33 WAR per season, which isn’t even All-Star-level performance. But projections systems being inherently conservative, I thought it was a good cutoff level for anyone who might be considered an impact player.

Of those 141 players, only 10 can become free agents after this season. Another 14 can become free agents after 2028. And while that group includes stars like Tarik Skubal, Bo Bichette, and Kyle Tucker, it also includes guys like Kris Bubic, Bryson Stott, and Gleyber Torres.

That’s not a very densely populated market of stars, by any stretch of the imagination. The best players in baseball are, for the most part, staying where they are until the end of the decade.

Whether that’s a good thing for baseball is a complicated question.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that some stability is good. In the NBA, for example, maximum-salary contracts can last no more than four seasons, and superstars can force trades almost at will. The Ringer keeps an updated ranking of the top 100 players in the NBA; quibble where you will, but all the superstars are on it. Only 47 of the top 100 players are with their original team, and 20 of those 47 one-club men have less than four seasons of NBA experience, and are therefore not eligible for free agency.

Pro basketball is driven by national discourse (as opposed to local, team-focused coverage) and superstar personality to a far, far, far greater extent than is baseball. Chaotic teambuilding works for the NBA in a way it does not, and could not, work for MLB. But as a casual NBA fan, I still sometimes forget who Brandon Ingram plays for, or I’ll find that Jrue Holiday played a whole season in Portland when I wasn’t paying attention.

I don’t think we want Skubal or Paul Skenes to change teams as frequently as Kevin Durant has, but too much stability is no better. I’m sympathetic to fans who are sick of the Dodgers signing all the good free agents, and the last thing I want to insinuate is that it’d be better for baseball if Griffin or McGonigle were shunted to a big-market team on one of the coasts at the earliest opportunity.

But unless your team won the World Series last year, you’re probably disappointed in how that team is constructed. In fact, I can present more than a few Dodgers fans as evidence that no team is ever good enough to keep its fans from asking for more pitching depth or an extra right-handed power bat. Each team tries to fill the holes in its roster from within, but that’s not always possible. And quality players — especially stars — are hard to pry loose in the trade market.

A robust free agent class, then, represents hope. And not just for teams with money to spend; a weak top-of-market only dilutes the talent pool for teams with lower payrolls. If every player worth signing has been locked up since he was a rookie, the free agent market will become a last resort for teams seeking to improve.

You know who else wants a busy free agent market? Major League Baseball, the commercial institution. Free agency drives attention all offseason; sometimes it drives attention during the season. I lost track of how many Juan Soto or Shohei Ohtani free agent pieces I read and/or wrote months or even years out from when they actually hit the market. And remember when Ohtani made everyone wait five days too long before he signed with the Dodgers in 2023? Some MLB executives and newsbreakers got so bored wandering around the Opryland in Nashville that they were ready to blow up the whole system on the spot.

This isn’t a situation unique to baseball. To bring the NBA back in: What’s the biggest off-field news story of the past 20 years in American team sports?

If there are no top-line free agents, what will we talk about all winter, every winter? Clearly, there’s a happy middle ground.

There’s one unknown variable in this puzzle that prevents me from drawing a definitive conclusion about whether these extensions are good or bad for baseball. This trend is still new enough that almost every player who signed one of these pre-arbitration extensions is relatively young, or on a team that’s either good now or could be good in the near future.

In other words, we don’t know what happens when a 21-year-old rookie hitches his wagon to a team that ends up finishing last five years in a row. For example: Let’s say Crow-Armstrong turns into a perennial MVP, but the Cubs go in the tank a year or two down the line. Does he demand a trade? If so, do the Cubs oblige him or do they force him to stick around? If they do trade him, what does the market look like?

If every worthwhile young player signs a pre-arbitration extension, we could end up with something like the transfer market of European soccer. It’s pretty rare for elite soccer players to leave their club as free agents; mostly, stars just keep signing contract extensions, and when it’s time to move on, the club sells them for a ton of money and uses that cash to buy replacements. In fact, when a player runs down his contract and leaves without allowing the club to sell him, fans can get really upset.

I have no idea if that’s going to happen here (one complicating factor: players are not fungible, like money), but it’s one way to bring player movement back if baseball goes fully extension-mad.

Regardless of whether these extensions are good for baseball, I don’t see how they’re going to get legislated out of the sport.

These extensions are overwhelmingly team-friendly, at least for now. For a so-called small-market team like the Royals or Pirates, which suddenly finds itself in possession of a young shortstop who looks like a future Hall of Famer, extensions could be the difference between competitiveness and irrelevance.

I’m not exaggerating. In 2024, the Royals not only made the playoffs, they won a round and were quite competitive in a four-game ALDS loss to the Yankees. Yes, the Royals had a good rotation and their bullpen got hot at the right time, but they mostly have Witt to thank. He put up a truly astounding 10.5 WAR that year, and apart from him, the Royals had, like, 1 1/4 other good position players. (This was pre-Maikel Garcia breakout, and Vinnie Pasquantino broke his thumb down the stretch. Things were so bleak I started talking myself into Michael Massey maybe being an OK no. 2 hitter.)

Witt is either going to be a Royals lifer, or if he does leave, it’ll be for the kind of prospect haul that jumpstarts the franchise. That’s the hope, I presume, for Jackson Chourio in Milwaukee, and Griffin in Pittsburgh. I can’t envision a world in which teams would voluntarily give up their ability to lock up their players on under-market contracts. Especially because any limit on contract length would also hamper the ability of big-market teams (the Phillies and Blue Jays especially love to do this) to spread out the financial impact of a massive free agent deal over a decade or more; it has the same practical impact as salary deferral, but without making your accounting department work overtime.

I do think we’re going to find the limits of these extensions, sooner or later. In the 2010s, in the wake of the Longoria deal, pre-arbitration extensions had a big moment, though maybe not for players as early in their careers as we’re seeing now. Some teams strained the limits of plausible deniability in tying promotion to the player signing an extension.

Longoria massively outplayed his deal, and so did Ronald Acuña Jr. Even when the player in question didn’t quite meet expectations, as in the cases of Matt Moore, Eloy Jiménez, or Jon Singleton, the cost was low enough it didn’t hurt the team too badly. But around 2020, we saw a few teams get out over their skis.

In my experience, across time and across sports, teams that pay top dollar for top talent usually don’t get burned. They might end up spending a lot of money, but real disasters are fairly rare. Teams that shop in the second and third tier, however, don’t fare as well. If you try to get 80% of the player for 50% of the cost, you’ll often end up with those percentages reversed, or worse.

The same is true of free agent extensions. The Braves hitched their wagon to Acuña and made out like bandits. But there were a few cases around the same time of teams investing heavily in players who didn’t even end up being major league-quality: David Bote with the Cubs, Scott Kingery with the Phillies, Evan White with the Mariners.

We’re already seeing some of that with this generation of extensions. The Kristian Campbell contract, for instance, looked like a mistake within a couple months. And the more popular these extensions become, the more likely it is that one team will end up touching the stove. This trend might not end up getting regulated by the league, but it will probably end up self-regulating in the market.

The players, in the meantime, are no more eager to change these structures than the teams. I’m sure they’d love to shorten the onramp to free agency. Six years of team control might’ve reflected the aging curve in baseball (or at least the perceived aging curve) in the 1990s, but it doesn’t now, and that imbalance is the source of most of the problems surrounding free agency in this league. Changing that — by reducing team control, or eliminating service time as a consideration by going to age-based free agency — would require a truly cataclysmic shift in baseball’s economic system. It’s not something the MLBPA can get in the next CBA just by asking harder.

Failing that, I do think there’s a general case to be made that these extensions are taking money out of the players’ hands on aggregate. If I were in McGonigle’s or Griffin’s shoes, I would not have signed a contract extension. I think Griffin, in particular, was nuts to lock in with the Pirates for nine years.

I mentioned this in my post about Griffin’s call-up (which came while the extension was merely a rumor), but contract value records get broken in one of two circumstances. First, a talent so unique he breaks the curve (i.e. Mike Trout or Ohtani). Second, an elite player hits free agency at age 25 or 26: Alex Rodriguez, Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, Soto.

Griffin is still only 19. He turns 20 next week, and maybe if he doesn’t sign the extension, the Pirates keep him in the minor leagues long enough to keep him below a year of service time, and he doesn’t gain a year of service by finishing in the top two in Rookie of the Year voting. Even in that worst-case scenario, Griffin would be hitting free agency at 25 after the 2031 season.

The difference in value from a 25-year-old free agent, when compared to an equivalently talented 28- or 30-year-old free agent, is massive. All things being equal, it’s three extra years of peak performance, for which teams are usually willing to pay a premium of tens of millions of dollars. I mean, consider Soto’s 15-year, $765 million contract versus Aaron Judge’s nine-year, $360 million deal.

Griffin is selling those three peak years back to the Pirates for 40 cents on the dollar. If he hits free agency at age 28, he’ll still be able to make a truly unwholesome sum, but not nearly as much as if he’d rung the bell at the first opportunity.

And it’s not like he’s destitute now. By virtue of his meteoric rise through the minors, Griffin is less than two years removed from a signing bonus of more than $6.5 million, which he received as the ninth-overall pick in 2024. He’d make $780,000 as a rookie on the minimum salary, and by 2029, he’d start taking in multi-million-dollar salaries as he hits arbitration.

All of that could be imperiled, of course, by a freak injury or a bout of amnesia that causes him to forget how to run the bases, but barring something out of Looney Tunes, Griffin would — at the very minimum — be able to trade on his connection to the sport as a coach or a talking head, even if he were somehow unable to play. The odds of him ever having to work an office job were just about nil before he made his MLB debut.

With that said, I can’t look a 19-year-old in the face and tell him not to take $140 million in guaranteed money. There’s a point at which money stops being able to buy you stuff that makes you happy — this is why all billionaires are freaks and weirdos — and I’m pretty sure that point comes before the $100 million mark. This isn’t the Ozzie Albies deal, or even the Acuña deal, which keeps him under team control until he’s 31. Griffin is live-off-the-interest rich forever, and when this contract is up, he can make sure his grandkids can be live-off-the-interest rich, too.

Remember a couple years ago, when a bunch of big-name pitchers got Tommy John surgery all at once, and we had a public panic about how something needed to be done about elbow injuries?

Elbow injuries come from throwing max effort all the time. Teams weren’t going to ask their pitchers to stop doing that, because pitchers who don’t throw max effort get shelled. Best to use up that elbow ligament while it works, and when it snaps, you call up another fastball-slider guy from the minors. The pitchers themselves couldn’t stop throwing max-effort, because throwing max-effort is not only the best way to win (here, the incentives of team and player are aligned), it’s the way you get paid. Nobody wants to max out at Double-A with a healthy UCL.

So we have something that is universally acknowledged to be a problem, and apart from a pretty cynical attempt by some players to drum up opposition to the pitch clock, no real impetus for change from anyone with the capacity to enforce it.

Sometimes, when all parties act in their rational self-interest, they end up pursuing the same course of action, even if it’s not best for the group as a whole. Absent some external intervention over the objection of both players and teams, nothing’s going to change on the elbow injury front. We’ll just keep throwing maximum spin until medical science comes up with a pill you can take that fixes your UCL in 60 minutes.

This extension trend is like that. The teams like it, because they can use the long road to free agency as leverage in order to get their top prospects to sign away their prime years. The players like it, because they can get $150 million after three weeks in the majors, or $95 million without playing in the majors at all.

In terms of what it means for competitive balance, the health of the sport, the fans… there are positives and negatives. But even if it were an unalloyed negative, we don’t get a say. The free market does what it will.