José Ramírez Is a Forever Guardian

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.

It’s possible that the looming end of the Collective Bargaining Agreement could have factored in here, specifically because some parties have grumbled that deferred money should be outlawed in the next CBA. Because salaries continue to rise, $25 million ($20.8 million average annual value for CBT purposes, thanks to the deferrals) for an aging third baseman won’t look quite so onerous in 2032 as it would today. Moreover, those deferrals also reduce the up-front money Ramírez will make over these next three seasons from $69 million to $45 million. From a front office perspective, this seems like the biggest motivator to make the extension happen. The reduced AAV will hopefully free the Guardians to improve the roster for the next three years, while their perennial MVP candidate is still in the tail-end of his prime. If that’s the plan, the sentiment behind it is certainly understandable.

The Guardians have missed the playoffs just three times since Ramírez’s emergence as a star 10 years ago. They made it just twice over the previous 14 seasons. First under Terry Francona and now under Stephen Vogt, they’ve managed to string together a succession of successful seasons on a tight budget thanks to a weak AL Central, a robust pitching pipeline, the timely emergence of useful role players, and the gloriously consistent performance of Ramírez. But that last factor is a huge one. Without him and his average of 5.6 WAR per year, no amount of budgetary finagling and pitch development magic would have been enough to keep this team a winner. It’s not just that Ramírez owns six of the top-10 position player seasons for the Guardians over the past 10 years. It’s also that all 10 of his seasons are in the top 25.

It certainly feels like Ramírez has been doing this forever. He signed in 2009 at age 17, debuted in 2013 at age 20, and blossomed into a star in 2016 at age 23. He’s now spent 10 years as one of the best players in the game, failing to receive an MVP vote just once in that time period. He never dropped below 3.0 WAR in a season; even in 2020, he somehow put up an astonishing 3.1 WAR over 58 games. He’s a seven-time All-Star and a six-time Silver Slugger. Since 2013, his 52.7 Baserunning Runs trail only Billy Hamilton and Trea Turner. Although he’s never won a Gold Glove, he led all American League third basemen in Defensive Runs Saved in 2021, and he’s finished in the top three in Fielding Run Value three times. This is the kind of player you hold onto, and in 2025, Ramírez did what he always does. He put up 6.3 WAR with a 133 wRC+, 30 home runs, 44 stolen bases, and excellent defense.

Still, we’re not talking about that much of a discount over the next three seasons. The Guardians have to set those deferred $30 million aside within two years. Even by their miserly standards, the reduction in AAV is a small one. Moreover, Ramírez turned 33 in September. The Guardians could have had three years – probably three decline years – to decide what kind of player they thought Ramírez would be in his late 30s and what to offer him for those years. We normally talk about extensions for young players as trade-offs: Players give up the right to go out and make top dollar when they eventually hit the open market in exchange for some security right now. This move is almost the reverse. The Guardians are willing to pay more for Ramírez’s decline years in order to lock him up and to reduce the effective amount they pay right now.

When you look through Ramírez’s Baseball Reference page for the most similar third basemen, you find Nolan Arenado and Scott Rolen, whose last four-win campaigns came in their age-31 seasons. Evan Longoria recorded his at 30, as did David Wright (though spinal stenosis limited him to just one healthy season past that point). On the good side of the ledger, Chipper Jones notched his at 36, and Aramis Ramirez at age 34. But even those encouraging examples only last for so long. Since 1980, a third baseman in his age-37 season or older has put up 3.0 WAR or more just six times. In fact, over that period, we’ve only seen 21 seasons of at least 2.0 WAR from that cohort.

That’s pretty scary. Even if Ramírez moves further down the defensive spectrum to first base at some point, we’ve seen even fewer two-win seasons from first basemen. Nonetheless, it would be foolish to count Ramírez out here. He just put up the fourth-best age-32 season of all time from a third baseman — behind George Brett in 1985 (8.3), Mike Schmidt in 1982 (7.2), and Buddy Bell in 1984 (6.5) — and like most of the players on those two small lists of third basemen who have aged gracefully, he’s bound for Cooperstown.

It’s also encouraging that the only number that portends an imminent decline is the one in the age column. Ramírez is a switch-hitter who’s great from both sides of the plate. His elite contact skills and squared-up rate show no signs of erosion. After running excellent chase rates earlier in his career, he’s gotten less choosy in recent years, but it hasn’t hurt his ability to post solid walk rates and extremely low strikeout rates. Although he’s never had particularly high exit velocities or hard-hit rates, he’s one of the game’s leading lifter-pullers, yanking home runs into either corner. Even so, his max exit velocity is still well above average, as is his sprint speed. He’s also missed a grand total of 31 games over the past six years. That includes the 2022 season, when Ramírez fought through what the Guardians assumed would be a season-ending thumb injury and still somehow produced 6.0 WAR and a 140 wRC+. Whenever he starts to decline, he’ll be doing so from a high level in just about every phase of the game.

Knowing all that, we asked Dan Szymborski to run ZiPS projections for the length of Ramírez’s new deal. As you’d expect, ZiPS thinks Ramírez’s decline will start right now, and it sees him as below average for the final three years of the deal. However, as decline phases go, this is an awfully generous projection.

Before we break down those numbers, let me tell you what ZiPS thinks of them. ZiPS would have offered Ramírez seven years and $171 million on the open market. That’s not all that far from the $175 million he’s set to make, but it’s quite a bit more than the $145.6 million net present value we’re left with once we factor in all the deferrals, according to our resident contract expert Jon Becker. The important distinction here, however, is that Ramírez wasn’t a free agent. The Guardians have gone way against type here. They’re saving some money now, but they’re paying Ramírez handsomely for his decline years because they want him around. That’s not hard to understand when you look more closely at the table.

ZiPS thinks Ramírez will be right around average at the plate in his age-37 season, and not all that far below it in the final two years of the deal. It sees him as an All-Star for two more years and an above-average regular for a year after that. Put it together, and that’s 14.3 WAR over the next seven years. Add it to Ramírez’s current total of 57.7, and it puts him at 72.0 career WAR, just behind Nap Lajoie (74.9) and Tris Speaker (72.2) for the most in franchise history. As Dan pointed out, by the time Ramírez retires, he will be the greatest ballplayer anyone in Cleveland has ever seen, and maybe just the greatest ballplayer Cleveland has ever seen, full stop.

For that reason, the decline phase is a conversation for another day. We have seven years to think and talk about it. Maybe this extension will hurt the Guardians in its final few seasons, but it’s hard to imagine they won’t be glad to have kept Ramírez around for those years in the long run. In that sense, this is money well spent. In April, he’ll break Terry Turner’s franchise record of 1,619 games played. He already owns the records for plate appearances and extra-base hits, and by the time he retires, he should have just about all of the other milestones. He’s now got seven years to accumulate the requisite 52 homers, 88 doubles, 135 RBI, 379 hits, and 193 total bases. Even the 165 stolen bases he needs to equal Kenny Lofton don’t seem all that farfetched for a player who just put up back-to-back 40-steal seasons. Let’s focus on the statue.