Padres Extend Jake Cronenworth for 550 Million Kroners Worth

On Saturday, the Padres announced a seven-year extension with two-time All-Star Jake Cronenworth, a deal that will begin next season and is valued at $80 million over what would have been his final two years of arbitration and first five of free agency. For Cronenworth, a relative late-bloomer (at least among the crowd that goes on to sign $80 million contracts) who didn’t debut in the majors until he was 26 years old, it’s a day he admits he couldn’t have seen coming two or three years ago before distinguishing himself with a solid COVID-shortened rookie season, consecutive 4-WAR campaigns in 2021 and ’22, and a postseason resume that includes the hit that sent the Dodgers home last October.

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It’s also likely the only way that Cronenworth was going to find himself with a deal of this size and length in his career. While a younger player might be hesitant to sign an extension and surrender an opportunity at free agency, Cronenworth is already 29, and this contract buys out five free-agent years he would have been selling at the age of 32. During the last four offseasons, the only players to sign five-plus-year deals at the age of 32 or older have been DJ LeMahieu in 2021 (coming off consecutive top-five MVP finishes) and Freddie Freeman in 2022 (coming off four straight top-ten MVP finishes) — which is to say, it isn’t easy.

For the Padres, it’s the latest in a series of long-term commitments to core members of their current club: Fernando Tatis Jr., Manny Machado, Yu Darvish, Joe Musgrove, Robert Suarez, and now Cronenworth. Despite handing out all those extensions, San Diego has left enough on the books (or maybe just set those books on fire) to bring in Xander Bogaerts, Michael Wacha, Seth Lugo, Matt Carpenter, and familiar face Nick Martinez. It’s a combination of the Braves’ readiness to commit to players within the organization who have proved to be a good fit and the Mets’ willingness to go longer and deeper into their pockets than their market competitors.

How has that worked? In the short term, it’s enough to give the Padres our second-highest odds of winning the World Series and make them the title favorite of our staff. The long term is a question mark, but find me a fan who wouldn’t want to spend a half-decade with the above group, not to mention MVP favorite Juan Soto, whose name you have to assume is at the top of the to-do list on A.J. Preller’s office white board.

Cronenworth fits sensibly into this vision. A two-way prospect at the time he arrived in San Diego from the Rays in 2019, the Padres may not have given too much thought to him as a right-handed pitcher, but his positional versatility in the infield remains a calling card. On a team with an embarrassment of shortstops, he had mostly settled into manning second base until the addition of Bogaerts this winter necessitated a shift to second for the emergent Ha-Seong Kim. No matter for Cronenworth, who slid right over to first, where he’ll have less positional value but still have the chance to contribute in myriad ways. His comfort across the infield, coupled with the durability that has allowed him to play in roughly 95% of Padres games since he reached the big leagues, gives the team some valuable roster flexibility, either by slotting him in on the left side or allowing Kim to hand over second base when needed at short or third, with Carpenter available to man first in the meantime.

Cronenworth is the type of player that does almost everything well, if not much exceptionally so. He brings a patient approach to the plate, where he sat in the 88th percentile in both chase rate and whiff percentage in 2022, leading to above-average strikeout and walk rates. He has a little bit of pop to the pull side, though his slugging percentage dipped to .390 in 2022 after coming in over .450 in each of his first two seasons. He doesn’t make hard contact all that often, though that’s made up some in how much he makes contact in general, ranking 20th in the league with an 84.1% contact rate last year. He’s relatively balanced against pitchers from either side — particularly so last year, when he posted a 109 wRC+ off righties and a 108 mark off lefties — and hits to all fields, ranking in the top 20 in opposite field percentage last season. He’s a valuable baserunner, with both sprint speeds and home-to-first times in the top third of the league, which helps him turn all that contact into hits. And defensively, he’s been strong when favorably positioned (his shortstop defense is passable but below average thanks in part to a weak arm).

A player who is above average at almost everything he does turns out to be quite valuable, though perhaps less recognizably. Since his debut in 2020, Cronenworth’s 9.8 WAR rank 30th in all of baseball, right in between Rafael Devers and Will Smith. Amazingly, he’s one of just seven hitters to qualify in each of the last two years with positive non-zero values in the batting, baserunning, and fielding columns. Cronenworth’s 2022 was a downturn offensively — the aforementioned slugging percentage being the reddest flag of them all — but the fact that he was still worth 4.1 WAR is a testament to everything he can do outside of the batter’s box. That level of well-roundedness makes an investment in his future all the more comfortable.

So about that slugging percentage: a big part of Cronenworth’s issues at the plate last season was his difficulty catching up with four-seamers, particularly those at higher velocities. In 2021, he hit .310 with a .402 wOBA against fastballs at 95 mph or higher; last year, that dropped to .188 and .236, respectively. That wOBA went from 29th out of 203 hitters who saw at least 1,500 pitches in 2021 to 188th out of 214 in 2022. Meanwhile, pitchers were hitting that mark more often: 35.4% of the fastballs he saw in 2022 were 95 or harder (14.3% of all pitches), up from 28.5% the year prior. Cronenworth was coy about a lingering hip injury through a large portion of the season that wasn’t enough to keep him out of games, but it could have contributed to a tougher time driving his swing through the zone to catch up with high heat.

Luckily for San Diego, Cronenworth looked healthy this spring. With all the statistical caveats necessary, he impressed in the Cactus League, posting a .396/.453/.688 batting line with nine extra-base hits in just 48 at-bats, a hopeful sign that some of his slug is back.

ZiPS does expect some level of return to his 2020–21 offensive form: per ZiPS DC, which accounts for playing time and positional use according to teams’ depth charts, Cronenworth is projected to amass 3.2 WAR in 2023, down from ’22 largely because of the positional adjustment of moving from second base to first and a conservative estimate of his baserunning value. At the plate, he’s projected to improve to a .333 wOBA and 119 wRC+. Looking beyond this year, ZiPS projects 3.8 WAR for him in 2024 and 3.3 in ’25 (these values do not factor in the Padres’ depth chart). If Cronenworth lands somewhere in that ballpark, with something like 7 WAR in the first two years of his new contract, he will have come close to justifying its value before even reaching what would have been his free-agent years.

To Cronenworth’s own point, this is a day that neither he nor the Padres saw coming (nor the Rays for that matter, as he has the somewhat rare distinction of being overlooked by Tampa). From a contract perspective, it seems like a win for both sides: the $80 million price tag on the contract is a number he might never have otherwise seen in his career and also a reasonable fraction of the Padres’ budgetary plans for the coming eight years for a player who looks capable of delivering at least 2–3 WAR per season. Based on everything the front office has shared, Cronenworth is exactly the kind of player and person the Padres want to be a part of their first World Series team when that day comes. With each new contract, the odds of that day coming in the near future seem to inch higher.