OOTP Brewers: Extension Season

The OOTP Brewers’ season has reached a classic lull in activity. The early rush of figuring out which parts on the team fit and which needed to be replaced has hit pause; the starting rotation has stabilized, injured hitters are returning, and a few trades shored up the team’s weakest points. The draft, the next big event on the calendar, has passed as well, and all of our draft picks look likely to sign. With more than a month remaining before the trade deadline, we’ve hit a bit of a transaction dead zone.

Games are still being played during this period, of course. On that front, the team is chugging merrily along; after taking two out of three games from the Reds, we stand at 41-30, three games ahead of a surprising Pittsburgh team:

Our run differential continues to creep in the right direction, even after starting in the basement. Christian Yelich and Brock Holt are still mashing; Yelich sits at 4.9 WAR despite missing the last series with a mild shoulder strain (seriously mild — he suffered it while throwing the ball and will be back to full strength by tomorrow). Holt is still crushing, despite legitimate questions about how real his start was; he had a 122 wRC+ in April, peaked at 163 in May, and is sitting at a totally acceptable 112 for June.

Those are the boring facts of the situation: the team’s doing well, and there’s not much reason for us to tinker with it. Honestly, though, that’s boring. We aren’t running the Brewers so that we can clap politely from the GM’s excellent seats while we watch the team motor through the NL Central. We’re here to leave our mark, at least a little bit; we don’t need to finish the year with our five best players gone and Gleyber Torres playing second base, or anything like that, but it would be nice to make a change or two.

To that end, it’s time to revisit a discussion from earlier this year. Someone deserves an extension, and it’s up to us to decide who that should be. The cast of characters has grown slightly; previously, we were deciding between Keston Hiura, Brandon Woodruff, and Josh Hader. After trading for Kevin Gausman, we can add him to the group — again, he might not be an extension candidate in real life, but OOTP believes in him. We have enough money for an extension, or maybe two — ownership has allocated $16.9 million in yearly extension salaries. Let’s take a quick look through and decide who we should try to lock up.

Keston Hiura

Hiura is early in his career for an extension, but he’s a star at only 23; locking him down would be delightful. He’ll be a free agent after the 2025 season, so an extension would largely be about achieving cost certainty during his arbitration years, with some option years tacked onto the end for good measure.

Because he’s so far away from hitting the market, one of OOTP’s most useful features doesn’t apply. Players will give you their extension demands unprompted, letting you know if it’s even worth engaging without having to go through the long process of coming up with an exact offer. As an example, pulling up Brock Holt lets us know that he wants a three-year deal worth $21 million. That’s more than we want to pay for a 32-year-old utility player, so we can skip the hard decisions around what exact offer to make; nothing we find reasonable is likely to be accepted.

Hiura is so early in his career that this tool isn’t very useful. He’s still receiving the league minimum, so the extension he wants is in fact just a raise for 2021. We can work out a deal — perhaps something like the Paul DeJong extension, $26 million over six years with two team option years, with a bump for inflation and talent — but we’ll be flying blind. That’s not a good reason not to engage with Hiura, but if we find a bargain deal elsewhere, it might be a reason to put him on the back burner.

Talent-wise — well, yeah, he’s good. The game sees him as a current 55 and potential 75, a middle-of-the-order bat for years to come. I’m not exactly sure what to say aside from noting that yes, it would be great to have Hiura on the team for years to come. The free agency years won’t happen soon, but they’re real value for the team nonetheless. Signing Hiura to an extension that guarantees his financial future and gives the team cost certainty is a very real-world front office move.

Brandon Woodruff

Woodruff is a trickier case than Hiura. They share a roughly similar timeline — Woodruff will be a free agent one year earlier than Hiura, but he’s also eligible for an extra year of arbitration as a Super Two qualifier. This means he’ll enter arbitration after this year, which makes his baseline cost higher.

In addition, Woodruff is nearly four years older. In his first year of free agency, he’ll be 32; options on free agent years aren’t quite the coup that they’d be with Hiura. In addition, pitchers break; guaranteeing a pitcher contract is an inherently riskier proposition. That’s not to say it can’t make sense, and indeed, pitchers know they’re fragile — they’re often incentivized to accept a deal for the same reason teams are hesitant to offer them. There’s certainly a happy medium available.

In Woodruff’s case, however, I don’t think it makes all that much sense. All four remaining years of control are arbitration years, which means that the contract just comes down to an expectation of what Woodruff would win in arbitration, accounting for risk of injury. His initial ask is for a one-year extension that would buy out next year’s arbitration salary for $4.15 million. That’s not a king’s ransom, but it is more than Josh Hader won last year in his first year of Super Two eligibility. There’s likely not a huge discount available for us as a team here, and with a 27-year-old pitcher, I think that’s reason enough to look elsewhere.

Josh Hader

Speaking of Hader, he’s another possibility. He’s a year younger than Woodruff and projects to reach free agency a year sooner; an extension would only cover three years of arbitration. He’s also off to a rough start in 2020; through 29.2 innings, he has a 5.46 ERA and a ghastly 6.08 FIP, driven by nine home runs and a 15% walk rate.

That might eat into his arbitration salary this year, and he seems to know it — ask Hader about an extension, and he suggests a one-year pact worth $5.5 million, which feels reasonable for a player of Hader’s skills; that’s Dylan Bundy or Jon Gray money, and while they’re starters, Hader is an All Star-level closer; he and Corey Knebel are a key feature of our team, and that type of production isn’t generally available in free agency.

That doesn’t mean that Hader is a no-doubt extension candidate; we could always go through the arbitration process as normal and retain his services that way. Team options are less valuable on relievers, anyway — the shelf life of a good reliever is simply shorter than that of a starter. Leaving Hader’s contract alone and settling in arbitration every year is a viable alternative to a long-term contract.

Kevin Gausman

I know, I know. The other three guys are stars, and Gausman is a journeyman with a 7.77 ERA and 7.01 FIP in his first four starts for the Brewers. He’s already making $9 million this year, and he’s not likely to sign for cheap; he’ll be a free agent at the end of this year, and in our make-believe universe, the owners aren’t crying poverty and implying free agency is headed for a cold winter.

Take a look at Gausman’s underlying ratings, and he looks like a solid number two starter:

Three plus pitches, mild platoon splits, and no true weak points; that’s an excellent total package, and at only 29, he’s hardly on his last legs. Getting this performance again would be a huge boon to the team’s 2021 playoff chances; aside from Holt, who feels like a nice but not necessary piece, the rest of the core will be back in 2021. Of the four extension candidates, only Gausman can change our fortunes in 2021.

For some context on how helpful Gausman would be, here are Woodruff’s ratings:

Considered this way, Gausman is nearly identical to Woodruff in skill level. He doesn’t throw as hard, but makes up for it with better movement and control. A second Brandon Woodruff for 2021; who wouldn’t want that?

Let’s go and see what he wants, shall we?

Oh. Oh my. Yeah, that’s not happening. That’s not to say we can’t sign him to an extension, merely that it will be more of a negotiation than an immediate mutual agreement. I’d be happy to sign him for four years at $12 million per, and potentially even a bit higher than that. The new years of team control are huge for a team in our competitive position; more wins in 2021 and 2022 are exactly what we want.

But Gausman’s extension carries more risk than any of the others. These aren’t option years; they’re guaranteed. They’re not cheap; even if they’re a discount on open market rates, you can only carry so many contracts — add Gausman to the mix, and maybe we don’t have room for a free agent that would otherwise have fallen into our laps, Yasmani Grandal-style.

Choosing Time

All four choices seem pretty good to me. I would happily squeeze a few extra years out of Hiura, Woodruff, or Hader — none of those contracts could truly backfire. And I’d be perfectly happy to work something out with Gausman if it costs us less than the Dallas Keuchel and Madison Bumgarner contracts; in-game Gausman is better and younger than those two, even if he doesn’t quite have the performance to back it up yet. But it’s not about what I want. What do you want?

The player who wins this vote won’t automatically get a contract extension, of course. We’ll still have to negotiate it, and that will be trickier in some cases than others. But I’ll put the highest priority on extending the winner of this poll, starting tomorrow on FanGraphs Live, when we can hash out the exact contract details.