Jacob Wilson Agrees To Seven-Year Extension With (Insert City Here) Athletics

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.

You can succeed that way; Arraez did so for years. But Kwan’s path of seesawing BABIP variance, one excellent year followed by one average year, seems like a much more likely expectation going forward. Wilson ran a 107 DRC+, and if you throw out the high number and the low number, then our projection models have him with a wRC+ between 107 and 113 in 2026.

We should also note that despite this profile, Wilson hopes to add more power. He hit 13 homers in his slightly abbreviated 2025 season, getting some help from Sutter Health Park, which boosts home run totals. Statcast thought he deserved 9.3 rather than 13. Still, Wilson told Martin Gallegos of MLB.com that his focus this offseason is to add more strength. Should he level up to 20-homer power or should he develop some plate discipline, then we’d be talking about more than just a good but BABIP-dependent bat.

Wilson’s defense another story. Statcast graded him as just below average, but both DRS and DRP saw him as disastrously bad. This is a situation where the differences between the versions of WAR are important. We have Wilson at 3.5 WAR because his actual offensive production was 21% better than the league average and because Statcast thought he cost the A’s just two runs on defense. Baseball Prospectus, though, has him at 1.4 WARP because the batted ball luck masked a DRC+ of 107 and because DRP saw him as literally the worst shortstop in baseball. In other words, fWAR saw Wilson as an All-Star, while WARP saw him as below average. As always, the safe bet is somewhere in the middle. However, the projections see Wilson in a more favorable light because they tend not to trust small-sample defensive metrics too much. If you really don’t believe in his defense, then this is a situation where you probably shouldn’t expect Wilson to live up to his projections.

Wilson doesn’t need to repeat his 2025 season at the plate to keep being a good player or even, if you’re inclined to view things through this lens, to live up to the dollar value of his extension. He’s probably a better fit at third base, and he might end up moving there or to second in a few years, but even if he just puts up a league-average batting line and his defense improves to merely bad, we’re talking about a two-win player. That’s certainly worth $10 million a year.

As for the ceiling, Wilson is just 23, and it’s too early to assume the paint is dry on his skill set. He has just three years of professional baseball under his belt, and that’s overstating the case. He was the sixth overall pick in the 2023 draft, so he only played in a handful of games that year. Then knee and hamstring injuries cost him significant time in 2024. He’s played just 153 games in the majors and only 83 more in the minors. That’s it. He’s made fewer than a thousand professional plate appearances, and the A’s haven’t really asked him to make any adjustments yet. “They kind of just let me hit,” he said in May. “They haven’t tried to change it once here.” Presumably, Wilson will get some instructions from the big league coaching staff if and when he starts to struggle. Whether it’s his power, his plate discipline, or his defense, it’s not hard to imagine him finding some way to improve at least a little bit over the next several years.

The A’s have now handed extensions to Wilson, Tyler Soderstrom, Lawrence Butler, and Brent Rooker. Several factors are feeding into these moves. It looks like they’re trying to finally build the foundations of a decent ballclub, locking up exciting young players in time for their (presumed) debut in Las Vegas in 2028. On the other hand, you don’t have to be a cynic to recognize that part of this push is related to avoiding a grievance from the Players’ Association for not even trying to spend enough to put a decent team on the field. The A’s need to spend, and because Sacramento is such an undesirable destination right now, especially for pitchers – just ask Luis Severino or Pablo López’s teres major – they need to pay above-market rates for free agents. Extending their talented youngsters solves both problems, allowing them to spend money without violating a front office’s sacred sense of efficiency. However, it means that if the A’s are going to keep improving, they’ll need to do so by continuing to develop their own talent, and we currently have their farm system in the bottom half of the league.

We should close by talking about the fun factor. Wilson is still a kid, and he sounds like one. “I am a big believer in video games,” he told Passan this summer. “It’s fast decision-making strategy. I think that gets me ready for the game… I think it really helps me train kind of the decision-making that I have to make six, seven hours later at the baseball field.” Wilson plays a particularly entertaining brand of baseball. He has one of the more eye-catching batting stances in the game, and he’s constantly putting the ball in play. Whether or not he can continue to put up great numbers, he’s the kind of player who inspires you to come out to the ballpark, and the A’s could certainly use more of that.