Jackson Merrill Gets Rich as Heck

During the offseason, I examined Jackson Merrill’s excellent rookie season and concluded that his next big developmental step would have to involve getting on base more. A week into his sophomore season, we don’t know if Merrill is going to walk more. But if he does, he’ll have plenty of walkin’ around money.

Yeah, I feel good about that little bit of wordplay. Let’s move on.

On Wednesday morning, the Padres announced that they’d signed their precocious young outfielder to a nine-year contract extension. The contract is worth $135 million and kicks in next year, leaving his $809,500 salary intact for 2025, but incentives and an option for 2035 could push the total value of the deal to $204 million.

Appropriately enough for the only American major league sports teams named after religious clerics, the Padres are making plans on a cosmic scale. They are now tied for second in the league with the Yankees in payroll commitments for 2028. They have five players signed through 2030 — Merrill, Manny Machado, Xander Bogaerts, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Jake Cronenworth — and four signed through 2033. Only a handful of teams on the entire planet have been willing and able to commit to even a single player that long.

Contracts of this length are even more of a baseball thing than it appears, because Chelsea’s chairman is Todd Boehly, the billionaire minority owner of the Dodgers. His major innovation since buying the team has been signing players to ludicrously long contracts in order to amortize the value of the deal over a longer period of time — baseball fans know this little bit of bookkeeping tomfoolery as “business as usual.”

Anyway, we’re not here to talk about the Dodgers, let alone soccer.

At the time of the extension, Merrill was hitting .400/.435/.600 in 23 plate appearances so far in 2025. Among players with at least 20 plate appearances through Tuesday, Merrill was second on the team in wRC+ (189), and no. 1 in slugging percentage. Suffice it to say, he’s been a major contributor to San Diego’s white-hot start.

Though I imagine that Padres president of baseball operations A.J. Preller would’ve offered the same contract if Merrill had hit only .100 over the past week. His first season in the majors could not have gone much better, with Merrill posting a five-win rookie season and his team making the playoffs. Merrill had already expressed a desire to be a one-club man. I say age 21 is a little young to be making too many irrevocable decisions, but the heart wants what the heart wants.

And the feeling is mutual. Preller told reporters on Wednesday that he had floated the idea of an extension for Merrill two years ago. That’s not too far back on the Padres’ cosmic timeline, but remember that Merrill started the 2023 season in High-A ball.

I’m quite interested to see the kind of player Merrill develops into, because there’s still a lot of uncertainty here. Remember, he hit .292 with 24 homers as a center fielder last year, despite starting the season at age 20 and having literally zero competitive-game experience in center field before Opening Day.

To put Merrill’s age into context, the current SEC leader in home runs and batting average is Ryland Zaborowski of the University of Georgia. Zaborowski is more than 11 months older than Merrill, who’s got a full season of major league experience under his belt.

Merrill could mature into more patience and power as he ages and go from an All-Star to a superstar. He could also run into problems if he continues to walk only 5% of the time. I have no idea which direction he’ll go in. Regardless, this contract is a bargain for the Padres if Merrill improves not one iota for the rest of his career, and it’ll be more than livable even if he regresses significantly.

From Merrill’s perspective, it’s complicated. There’s a strain of nominally pro-player logic that says young stars like Merrill ought to always play their way through arbitration and ring the bell in free agency as early as possible. Generally, I think that’s right, especially when said stars have banked at least a few million in arbitration.

But while Merrill took in a $1.8 million signing bonus when he got drafted 27th overall in 2021, and his pre-arbitration salary is more than what you or I will ever make, he woke up on Wednesday with no guarantee for his future and arbitration still two years away. One bad injury, or even an extended slump — it’s rare, but it happens — and he could end up working the sales floor at Chevrolet of Anne Arundel County by age 25.

Now, he’s guaranteed $135 million. Even after taxes and agents’ fees and paying off his parents’ mortgage and all that, he’s going to be rich for the rest of his life. Getting that security before his 22nd birthday is probably worth leaving another $100 million on the table. And that $135 million is just a starting point. The incentive structure is simpler than Julio Rodríguez’s inscrutable seven-to-12-year contract, but it’s still a little unorthodox. Starting next year, every time Merrill reaches 500 plate appearances in a season, his base salary goes up $1 million for the last five years of the contract. So that’s an extra $5 million each time Merrill qualifies for the batting title between 2026 and 2029, an extra $4 million if he does it in 2030, $3 million if he does it in 2031, and so on.

Moreover, the $30 million club option for 2035 gets converted to a player option if Merrill finishes in the top five in MVP voting. Given that he’s got a ninth-place finish on his CV in one season in the majors, that seems like quite a reachable goal.

So let’s say Merrill goes nuts and makes this contract another Ronald Acuña Jr. deal. In that case, he’ll hit free agency after his age-31 season, with somewhere around $165 million already banked. Who knows what free agency will look like that far in the future — maybe Rob Manfred will tank a whole season with a lockout in order to break the union and force through a salary cap, the way the NHL did in 2004-05 — but barring something unprecedented, it feels like a 31-year-old center fielder with a long track record of 5-WAR seasons could punch in for another nine-figure contract.

To be honest, this is the road most traveled for a player in Merrill’s position. This is the week of extensions, with the Red Sox signing Garrett Crochet through 2031 and the Diamondbacks giving Ketel Marte a Jose Altuve-style make-good contract that supersedes his existing deal and keeps him in… whatever color the D-backs are playing in by that point… into the 2030s.

But on the same day Merrill and the Padres tied themselves together in practical perpetuity, the Red Sox signed their own hot youngster, Kristian Campbell, to an eight-year, $60 million contract with two club-option years. A year ago, they signed rookie Ceddanne Rafaela for eight years and $50 million, with one club option. There’s the deal Rodríguez signed with the Mariners near the end of his rookie season — I mocked the terms earlier, but we’ve got it down as 12 years and $209.3 million on RosterResource.

In other words, we’ve got plenty of precedent to work from. Merrill is younger and more experienced than Campbell is and Rafaela was when they signed their extensions. Time will tell on this, but based on what we know now he’s better than Campbell and way better than Rafaela, so considering what they got from Boston, I’d say that nine years and $135 million, plus incentives, is about right for Merrill.

Rodríguez’s extension with Seattle, in its simplest form, calls for $17.4 million per year. Rodríguez hasn’t flipped the switch and become right-handed Ken Griffey Jr. just yet, but he was better as a rookie than Merrill was — though not by all that much, according to the numbers — and probably had more upside. Plus there’s a premium for Rodríguez being the face of the franchise in a way that Merrill will never have to be so long as Tatis and Machado are still around. Anyway, if Rodríguez got $17.4 million a year, $15 million a year for Merrill once again seems about right.

The best like-for-like comparison I can think of, in terms of contract, is probably the extension Corbin Carroll got from the Diamondbacks. He was eight months older than Merrill when he signed, and had 38 days of service time instead of a whole season, but his off-the-charts athleticism gives him a higher upside than Merrill, and again, face of the franchise tax.

Carroll got $111 million over eight years, plus a club option, two seasons ago. Merrill’s contract is richer, with better incentives and a more player-friendly option, but it’s also a year longer and takes away two more seasons of free agency, even if 2035 gets flipped to a player option.

All of this is to say that this is in line with what it costs to lock up a player like Merrill for this long at this stage of his career. Both parties seem thrilled, and that’s a relief. Because if either Merrill or the Padres are having doubts, too bad — they’re stuck with each other for a long, long time.