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.
Davy Andrews is a Brooklyn-based musician and a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @davyandrewsdavy.bsky.social.
Waiting for the first A’s pitcher extension – maybe Lopez?
I legitimately have zero idea who Lopez is.
He did look decent last year, but I wouldn’t be running to lock up a 28 year old with 115 career innings who projects for 1.5ish war
The name “Lopez” at the position “pitcher” in the context of the A’s has no meaning to me. I assumed that Lopez was a real pitcher, but if someone had popped on to say “maybe they will extend MacDonald” or “maybe they will extend Garcia” I would have assumed the same.
I’m pretty comfortable saying that no team should ever extend a 28-year-old pitcher with less than one season of service time. I’m more comfortable saying that if such a pitcher exists, it is not Lopez.
Who?
Maybe Kurtz has been approached and is just less interested, but he seems like the one where there is actually a lot of risk/reward. Another stellar season and you’re just not getting any extra years out of him without absolutely breaking the bank. But obviously if you give him $200m-plus now, and he turns out to be more good than great, that’s a much more real downside risk than Wilson or some of these others, where you just aren’t risking much in the way of dollars.
Fuck John Fisher
I have been a regular on this site for ten years and, while I love the debates about any and all things basebally, I can’t get away from the bleeping defensive metrics fiasco. “In other words, fWAR saw Wilson as an All-Star, while WARP saw him as below average.” This much I know. I understand that each of the various systems value the various skills differently and you get to pick whether you prefer range, or arm strength, or steadiness but why can’t all the computers put a composite together that actually is consistent. The only thing consistent is consistent confusion. I can’t avoid reading about OAA or DRS or FRV but until there is something that even faintly resembles similarity I will continue to use my eyes to tell me that Augustin Ramirez should never, ever get behind the plate again.
This franchise lost their request to trademark the Athletics name in Las Vegas so this thread title could just as easily be Jacob Wilson Agrees To Seven-Year Extension With (Insert City Here) (Insert Name Here)
I would assume they’ll just end up being the Las Vegas A’s.
That news story did take me aback though. I mean, they’ve been the Athletics for 125 years, wouldn’t that carry some precedence into the trademarking procedures?
If any owner has some Saul Goodman proxy on his payroll I’d think it’d be Fisher.
Obviously it’s a shame that he didn’t do it in Oakland, but John Fisher does seem to be putting his money where his mouth is. When the A’s get to Las Vegas, they’re going to be good and have a core in place to be good for a while. That’s the right way to handle this type of situation, messy and undesirably as it may be.
I am not crazy about Wilson in general but this is exactly what a team in that 70-79 win range should be doing: Extending as many positive contributors as possible so they overlap with the next wave of prospects.
Kind of interesting that Wilson and Arraez signed so close together.
From 2021-23 Arraez had 1699 PA of 132 AVG+ | 33 K+ with a 90 BB+ and 64 ISO+ shaking out to a 123 wRC+.
Of course we know the last couple years haven’t gone quite as well for Luis at 1347 PA of 123 AVG+ | 17 K+ with an accompanying 51 BB+ | 57 ISO+ shaking out to a 107 wRC+.
2025 Jacob Wilson with 523 PA of 128 AVG+ | 33 K+ along with a 62 BB+ | 83 ISO+ shook out to a 121 wRC+ not far off from prime Arraez.
At least Jacob is starting out a little higher on the defensive spectrum anyway (even if he doesn’t appear to be long for SS).
As an A’s fan I’m highly aware of their homelessness.
But I can’t say I enjoy sportswriters making witless allusions to that fact in the headline. It’s just dumb.
As for Wilson’s defense, you’d be wasting one of his undeniable strengths – his strong and accurate arm – by moving him to 2b.
Longenhagen has already opined that LDV isn’t going to move Jacob off SS, so i think the A’s are going to let him play short.
There’s some feeling among A’s fans that Wilson has not entirely recovered from the injuries he had in the minors which affected his range last year. Previously scouting reports considered him to be a better than average defender.
Also, Wilson was hitting closer to .330 when he got injured and played with a broken arm for several weeks which dropped his numbers.
He hunts for pitches he can drive (down and in) so I think he’ll establish himself as a 15 HR guy who hits .320+ and plays up the middle. And that’s a good 3.5-4.0 fWAR kinda player.
I wasn’t a huge fan of his profile coming up but watching his game I realize that he’s one of those generational contact guys like Ichiro or Gwynn or Carew.
He can drive the ball.
He’ll win a batting title during his career. Probably more than one.
I think your estimation is the “90% result” which is fine, its possible. There’s nobody today who is a .320 hitter. That’s probably more of a “career year” outcome. It might also be that the average started to come down once pitchers and defenses had more data on his tendencies. He’s going to have to show he can adapt and improve.
Aaron Judge is a .320 hitter.
But he is Aaron Judge.