Apparently not wanting to be left out of the flurry of contract extensions handed out over the last two weeks, the Seattle Mariners signed a big one of their own, locking up infield prospect Colt Emerson to an eight-year contract that guarantees him $95 million over the next eight years. This includes a $1 million salary for 2026, meaning that the contract goes through the end of the 2033 season, with the Mariners holding a 2034 club option that could staple another $25 million onto the back of the contract. Emerson’s deal also includes a no-trade clause and bonuses for All-Star selections and Silver Slugger and MVP awards, de rigueur in deals such as this.

Emerson, who doesn’t turn 21 until July, is widely considered Seattle’s top prospect by most sources, whether you prefer our prospect team, Keith Law over at The Athletic, old friend Kiley McDaniel at ESPN, Baseball Prospectus, Baseball America, or mean ol’ ZiPS. That’s no small feat to pull off when you’re in the same organization that has high-end pitching arms like Ryan Sloan and Kade Anderson.

While Emerson doesn’t have one mind-blowing tool that absolutely obliterates the cognitive pathways of watchers, he’s very accomplished at basically everything he does. He’s not going to regularly blast Stantonian shots, but he’ll hit his fair share of home runs, ZiPS thinks 15-20 a year if he played home games at a neutral site rather than T-Mobile Park. Emerson is willing to draw walks, but he still retains a fundamental aggression at the plate; that’s a good thing, as being too passive is a frequent pitfall for prospects who take a good amount of free passes. There’s no whiff problem hiding in his advanced stats, either. He’s not a burner on the basepaths like Trea Turner or Bobby Witt Jr., but at the same time, he’s not me with a belly full of Cool Ranch Doritos, a 32-ounce deli container of beer, and a hamstring that hasn’t gotten a whole lot of use since the Clinton administration. It doesn’t seem like there are any serious concerns about his sticking at shortstop, and the coordinate-based method that ZiPS uses for minor leaguers sees him as a solid B+ defender at the position. Let’s crank out those projections. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t believe in love at first sight? The Orioles do. Back in December, Baltimore traded a draft pick and four prospects — including two top-40 picks from their 2025 draft class — to Tampa Bay for right-handed pitcher Shane Baz. And on Friday, roughly 48 hours before Baz threw his first competitive pitch in orange and black, they signed him to a five-year, $68 million contract extension that will keep him in Maryland through 2030. It’s the richest contract the Orioles have ever given to a pitcher.

Baz did OK in his first Orioles start, by the way. The Twins scored four runs in 5 1/3 innings, and Baz allowed at least one hard-hit batted ball (i.e. 95 mph exit velo) on each of the four pitch types he threw. That included his changeup, which he only broke out four times and which only generated one swing. Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago, the Cubs roster was light on long-term commitments. Only Alex Bregman and Dansby Swanson held guaranteed contracts that extended past 2027, and only two others – Phil Maton and Shelby Miller – even had guaranteed years in 2027. But as it turns out, Chicago payroll commitments abhor a vacuum. On Tuesday, Pete Crow-Armstrong signed a six-year extension. On Thursday, Nico Hoerner followed suit with a six-year pact of his own, as Michael Cerami first reported. The deal starts in 2027 and is worth $141 million, with minor deferrals that drop the total present value to the mid-130s.

If you don’t catch many Cubs games, it’s easy to overlook Hoerner. His offensive game is most notable for its lack of extremes. He doesn’t walk much. He doesn’t strike out much. He doesn’t hit for a ton of power. He’s not excessively swing happy like so many contact hitters. He doesn’t pound the ball into the ground, but he equally doesn’t sell out to lift and pull. He’s produced low-power, solid-OBP seasons for four years running, and they’ve been almost metronomically consistent: his seasonal wRC+ marks of 108, 103, 102, and 109 work out to a 105 average.

That’s the 105th-best batting line among hitters over that span. That doesn’t sound particularly impressive. Hoerner is wedged between Jake Cronenworth and Mike Yastrzemski, solidly in nice-but-forgettable territory. He’s 57th in OBP over that span, which is a little bit more exciting, but truthfully, he is not a star at the plate.

The fun starts when you get into the rest of his game. Over that same time frame, from 2022-2025, Hoerner is the sixth-best baserunner in the majors. The guys in front of him – Corbin Carroll, Bobby Witt Jr., Trea Turner, Jarren Duran, and Elly De La Cruz – are famed for their exploits on the bases. Hoerner is the slowest of that group by a fair margin, but he makes up for it with excellent instincts and great reads. He’s fifth in the bigs in steals during that span, and his 85% success rate is better than everyone in front of him on the list. When he gets on base, he’s a threat to steal, and yet he almost never gets thrown out. Read the rest of this entry »

Late last night, Jeff Passan of ESPN reported that the Cubs and star center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong had reached an agreement on a long-term contract extension. That deal, worth $115 million over six years, keeps one of baseball’s most popular young stars in the fold through 2032.

This extension, the largest ever for a player with so little service time, begins in 2027, buys out two of Crow-Armstrong’s free agent years, and includes escalators that could increase the value to $133 million. But shockingly, (and to the immense relief of those of us who are still parsing the inscrutable Julio Rodríguez extension), it does not include any option years. Whatever happens, Crow-Armstrong can still hit free agency after his age-30 season. Read the rest of this entry »

Cristopher Sánchez wasn’t going anywhere for awhile. He’s now not going anywhere for even longer. With Ranger Suarez in Boston, Zack Wheeler recovering from thoracic outlet surgery, and Aaron Nola looking his age, the 29-year-old left-hander is the ace of a Phillies starting rotation that led baseball in WAR in both 2025 and 2023 and hasn’t finished below fourth this decade. On Sunday, the Philadelphia signed Sánchez to a contract extension that will keep him around through the 2032 season, with a club option for 2033, when he’ll be 36. The move also comes less than two weeks after the team inked Jesús Luzardo to his own five-year, $135 million extension. Clearly, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski would like to maintain the status quo.

Robert Murray of FanSided broke the news of the deal. Matt Gelb of The Athletic reported that the contract is worth a guaranteed $107 million, and Francys Romero of Beisbol FR reported that it included more than $13 million in incentives. The club option for 2033, if it’s picked up, would add another $32.5 million. This may well sound familiar. In June 2024, the Phillies signed Sánchez to a four-year extension that contained two more club options for 2029 and 2030. Those first four years bought out all of his arbitration years for $22.5 million. If picked up, the two club options (along with Cy Young incentives) could have increased the maximum value to $56.6 million.

We’ll get back into the mechanics of the deal and what they mean soon. We’re not going to spend more than a few paragraphs on why the Phillies decided Sánchez was worth all this. That part should be obvious. Sánchez is quite simply one of the best pitchers in the world. He finished 10th in the National League Cy Young voting in 2024 and second in 2025. He has a career ERA of 3.24 and a FIP of 3.15. By any standard, the lefty found an entirely new level in 2025, running a career-high 26% strikeout rate. His 2.55 FIP was nearly half a run better than his previous career best, and his 63 DRA- was nearly 20 points lower than his previous best. Read the rest of this entry »

With Ranger Suarez now a Red Sock, Zack Wheeler rehabbing from thoracic outlet surgery, and Aaron Nola trying to rebound from a career-worst season, the Phillies rotation has its share of uncertainty as the 2026 regular season approaches. On Monday, the team did its best to bolster that unit for the longer term, agreeing to a five-year, $135 million extension with lefty Jesús Luzardo.

The 28-year-old Luzardo is coming off an impressive first season with the Phillies, who acquired him (along with catching prospect Paul McIntosh) from the Marlins in December 2024 in exchange for two prospects, shortstop Starlyn Caba and outfielder Emaarion Boyd. After making just 12 starts for Miami in 2024 due to elbow tightness and a stress reaction in his lower back, Luzardo made a full complement of 32 starts last year while setting career highs with 183.2 innings and 5.3 WAR, both second on the team behind Cristopher Sánchez. Both his 2.90 FIP and 3.33 xERA — each of which ranked fourth in the National League — make better cases for the quality of his pitching than his 3.92 ERA; in fact, the gap between his ERA and FIP was the third-highest among all qualifiers:

Strangely enough, all 10 of those pitchers hail from the NL; José Soriano, who had the largest gap in the American League at 0.53 runs (4.26 ERA, 3.73 FIP), ranked 11th among qualifiers, just below the cutoff in the table above. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, Chris Sale no longer has to do what he does under the cloud of a one-year contract. On Tuesday, the Braves announced they’d signed their soon-to-be 37-year-old ace to a one-year contract extension with a team option for 2028. The deal represents a huge raise. Sale is making $18 million this year – the team option year at the end of the two-year extension he signed back in 2024 – and the new extension will pay him $27 million in 2027. If the Braves pick up the 2028 option, they’ll pay him $30 million. No word of a buyout for that final year has been reported, and the announcement included no mention of a 1% donation to the Atlanta Braves Foundation.

Even though the Braves are not getting the kind of discount you associate with a contract extension, this seems like a no-brainer for them. Yes, they’re paying ace prices for the age-37 (and possibly age-38) season of a pitcher whose injury history includes a Tommy John surgery and five variations on the word “fracture.” But Sale really is an ace, and his performance has showed no signs of dropping off. Since he arrived in Atlanta in 2024 (and for the sake of Red Sox fans, I won’t mention how he got there), Sale has a 25-8 record with a 2.46 ERA and 2.33 FIP. He’s struck out nearly a third of the batters he’s faced, and he won the Cy Young award in his first season with the team. In 2025, his four-seamer averaged 94.8 mph. That’s above average, especially for a left-handed starter, and especially for someone with a funky sidearm delivery, and especially when you factor in the bump in effective velocity due to the above-average extension from his 6-foot-6 frame. That’s a lot of especiallys making Sale’s velocity play up, and it’s reassuring to know that it has looked pretty stable in recent years.

Read the rest of this entry »

Life is moving fast for Jacob Wilson. The 23-year-old shortstop got married in December, and on Friday, he agreed to a seven-year, $70 million contract extension to stay in West Sacramento. (Well, he’ll be in West Sacramento for two seasons, anyway, and then after that it’s a bit unclear where he’ll be staying, but wherever it is, it’ll be with the Athletics.) Wilson was under team control for five more seasons, but the deal, first reported by ESPN’s Jeff Passan, adds two more years to that total, with a team option for an eighth. If the A’s exercise that option, Wilson will reach free agency for the first time after the 2033 season, when he’ll be 31.

Wilson is coming off an eye-opening rookie campaign. Despite missing a month during the summer after a pitch fractured his forearm, he put up 3.5 WAR, a 121 wRC+ and a .311 batting average. He earned an All-Star nod and picked up an MVP vote, and had he given in to what must have eventually been very strong temptation to poison teammate Nick Kurtz, he could have even taken first place in the Rookie of the Year voting. However, that doesn’t mean he’s a four-win player going forward.

It’s not impossible that Wilson could keep running a batting line that’s 20% better than the league average, but it would be foolish to go into the 2026 season with that expectation. He’s cut from the same cloth as Luis Arraez and Steven Kwan, a pure contact hitter who swings slow and squares the ball up, eschewing both power and patience. Like many hitters who can hit anything, he tends to swing at everything. As a result, he never walks or strikes out, which means he really needs the ball to find grass. In 2025, it did just that. Wilson’s .311 batting average was 34 points above his expected mark, which tied him for the biggest gap among all qualified players. Read the rest of this entry »

One day, José Ramírez will get old. One day, he’ll dodder out to the grass in front of the pitcher’s mound on the arm of an adorable grandchild and lollipop the ball into the dirt in front of home plate to the warm cheers of the Cleveland faithful. That’s sure to happen at some indeterminate point in the future. This weekend, however, the Guardians expressed their belief that Ramírez’s inevitable decline is a long way off, inking the 33-year-old future Hall of Famer to a seven-year contract extension that will keep him in the fold through the 2032 season. When the extension expires, Ramírez will be 40.

We’ll break down all the numbers and the dollars, but the biggest story here is the most obvious one. This is great news for anybody who loves Ramírez, the Guardians, or baseball. Ramírez has full no-trade rights, and there’s every reason to expect him to stay for the rest of his career. It’s time to talk about statues and plaques and how nice it is that we’ll never have to know just how wrong it would feel to see him in a jersey that doesn’t say Cleveland on it. This is the third extension Ramírez has signed. The first came in 2016, and it bought out his arbitration years plus two option years. The second came in 2022, and, like this one, it bought out the final three years of the previous extension. Ramírez wanted to stay in Cleveland, and with those first two extensions, he forfeited tens of millions of dollars on the open market to do so.

This extension is slightly more complicated, and the details matter quite a bit. Ramírez was already signed though the 2028 season as part of the previous seven-year extension, so it’s not as if there was a pressing need to get this done. He was owed $69 million over the next three years. This deal reworks his compensation over that period and adds four more years. Over the next seven seasons, Ramírez will earn $25 million per year, with $10 million per year deferred. (Each of those deferrals lasts 10 years, and then pays out $1 million per year for 10 years. So he’ll get $1 million in 2036, $2 million in 2037, and so on until he gets his final $1 million payment in 2051.) The deal also came with perks like increased bonuses for awards and high finishes in the MVP voting, an extra hotel room on road trips, and use of a private jet to and from the All-Star Game plus one extra time per year. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not just the park. The A’s put on a power show in 2025, clobbering 219 homers, getting results up and down the lineup. Nick Kurtz led the way with a superlative rookie season, but he wasn’t alone; Brent Rooker socked 30 bombs, Lawrence Butler added 21 of his own, and Tyler Soderstrom split the difference with 25. Rooker and Butler signed extensions before the season. Kurtz is going to be around forever. Add Soderstrom to that group, too: Over the holidays, he and the A’s agreed to a seven-year, $86 million contract extension, as Jeff Passan first reported.

Soderstrom’s route to stardom is emblematic of this A’s team. He’s always hit well, but figuring out how to plug him into the lineup hasn’t been straightforward. Three years ago, he was a top 25 global prospect as a catcher. Huge, easy power combined with an ability to play the toughest position on the diamond were the selling points. But as he worked through the upper minors and debuted in Oakland, a clear weakness emerged: Soderstrom couldn’t actually catch all that well, and Shea Langeliers, another catching prospect, was an obstacle to everyday playing time behind the dish. After catching 123.2 big league innings that were both statistically and aesthetically ugly enough for the team to pull the plug, Soderstrom was left in search of a position.

In 2024, an early-season minor league stint to work on his defense combined with a mid-season injury meant Soderstrom barely played first base, the new position the A’s selected for him. But between drafting Kurtz and making Rooker a full-time DH, that position didn’t promise much long-term stability. Soderstrom went into 2025 trying to learn left field while also attempting to improve on a lackluster career batting line. A former catcher playing the outfield and maybe not even hitting well? His career was surely on thin ice. Read the rest of this entry »