Phillies Re-Extend Cristopher Sánchez

Cristopher Sánchez wasn’t going anywhere for awhile. He’s now not going anywhere for even longer. With Ranger Suarez in Boston, Zack Wheeler recovering from thoracic outlet surgery, and Aaron Nola looking his age, the 29-year-old left-hander is the ace of a Phillies starting rotation that led baseball in WAR in both 2025 and 2023 and hasn’t finished below fourth this decade. On Sunday, the Philadelphia signed Sánchez to a contract extension that will keep him around through the 2032 season, with a club option for 2033, when he’ll be 36. The move also comes less than two weeks after the team inked Jesús Luzardo to his own five-year, $135 million extension. Clearly, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski would like to maintain the status quo.

Robert Murray of FanSided broke the news of the deal. Matt Gelb of The Athletic reported that the contract is worth a guaranteed $107 million, and Francys Romero of Beisbol FR reported that it included more than $13 million in incentives. The club option for 2033, if it’s picked up, would add another $32.5 million. This may well sound familiar. In June 2024, the Phillies signed Sánchez to a four-year extension that contained two more club options for 2029 and 2030. Those first four years bought out all of his arbitration years for $22.5 million. If picked up, the two club options (along with Cy Young incentives) could have increased the maximum value to $56.6 million.

We’ll get back into the mechanics of the deal and what they mean soon. We’re not going to spend more than a few paragraphs on why the Phillies decided Sánchez was worth all this. That part should be obvious. Sánchez is quite simply one of the best pitchers in the world. He finished 10th in the National League Cy Young voting in 2024 and second in 2025. He has a career ERA of 3.24 and a FIP of 3.15. By any standard, the lefty found an entirely new level in 2025, running a career-high 26% strikeout rate. His 2.55 FIP was nearly half a run better than his previous career best, and his 63 DRA- was nearly 20 points lower than his previous best.

Over the past two seasons – his only two full seasons as a starter – Sánchez has a 2.89 ERA and a 2.76 FIP. Among pitchers, his 11.1 WAR ranks second only to Tarik Skubal’s 12.6. He ranks third in innings behind Skubal and Logan Webb. Among starters with at least 200 innings, he ranks fourth in FIP behind Chris Sale, Paul Skenes, and Skubal. Despite playing in a homer-friendly park, Sánchez has the lowest HR/9 among all starters (again, minimum 200 IP). He won’t turn 30 until January. He’s made more than 30 starts in each of the last two seasons, and he’s hit the IL just once in the past three years, missing a few weeks with a triceps strain in 2023.

As for how he does it, Sánchez is a 6-foot-6 lefty with great extension, so his 95.3-mph fastball plays at 96.4 mph. The only left-handed starter with a higher effective velocity in 2025 was Skubal. Although Sánchez tends to stride a bit toward first base, giving him a deceptive crossbody delivery, it’s somehow one of the easiest 95-mph fastballs you’ll ever see. He comes out of a lower arm slot, throwing a sinker, a changeup, and a gyro slider, all three of which grade out as plus. (Last year, he came into spring training with the intention of adding a new, unspecified pitch, but it never materialized.) The slider gets more use against lefties and the changeup against righties. The sinker he throws to everyone. He keeps the ball down and runs a roughly league-average zone rate, inviting hitters to either whiff or beat the ball into the ground. They can’t help but oblige.

Quite simply, Sánchez does just about everything you want a pitcher to do. He induces chases and misses bats, which allows him to rack up strikeouts and avoid walks. His biggest fault is that he has tended to allow hard contact at roughly the same rate as the league average for much of his career (though he was much better than league average in 2024). Because he has one of the league’s highest groundball rates, however, little of that hard contact turns into damage. Sánchez has posted one of the lowest home run rates in the game for years, but Statcast thinks he deserves to have given up even fewer homers (no doubt because he plays at cozy Citizen’s Bank Park). Also, across four career postseason starts (19 1/3 innings), he has a 2.79 ERA.

“We kind of assumed years four and five were a no-brainer as far as we were going to pick those up,” Dombrowski told reporters on Sunday. “So we couldn’t even imagine a scenario in which we wouldn’t. Now we start talking beyond that. And we thought that somebody of Cristopher’s stature, we’d rather get this done now, while he’s still at the age that makes sense for us.” Making the same assumption (and ignoring the various incentive clauses), Sánchez’s old deal would have paid him roughly $44.4 million from 2026 to 2030. The new deal tacks on two more years at $30 million, plus that team option for 2033 of $32.5 million.

It’s worth noting the things this deal didn’t do. It didn’t defer any money. It didn’t restructure the payouts so that Sánchez would be paid more earlier in the contract. These moves would have eased the burden Sánchez will put on the payroll once he’s well into his decline years, but they’re also of a piece with the team’s previous extensions for Wheeler and Nola, which run through their age-37 seasons. The Phillies are making a statement here, and they’re clearly willing to overpay at the back end of a contract in order to lock down a premium starter for today – or in this case, for five years from today. If Sánchez remains a bona fide star in his mid-30s, he’ll still be underpaid even at $30 million a year, but that’s an awfully tall if. We’re about to find out how those first two deals will end up. It’s certainly possible that they’ll get ugly. Wheeler has stayed an elite arm through his age-35 season, but it remains to be seen what he’ll look like when he returns from a major surgery. Nola imploded to the tune of 6.01 ERA in 2025 (though the underlying metrics weren’t as bad), and he’ll be making just under $24.5 million for five more seasons.

The main difference between those two pitchers and Sánchez is his lack of track record, and we can throw two more names on the pile. As Michael Baumann noted, the Astros and Royals handed out similar early extensions to Jose Altuve and Salvador Perez, but they were already face-of-the-franchise-type players at the time of their deals. Sánchez had more than his fair share of struggles in the minors, arriving in Philadelphia in a trade with the Rays for Curtis Mead. He debuted at age 24 in 2021, then spent half the 2022 season in the majors, mostly as a reliever. He was never supposed to be a star, but he willed himself into the role. Even now, he’s only got two years (two and a half if you’re generous) of elite performance under his belt. The Phillies could have had five more years of Sánchez at rock-bottom prices. The existing deal would have run through his age-33 season. He may well be a completely different pitcher by the time this deal actually kicks in, but they clearly believe that he’s a good bet to remain a star.