Red Sox, Roman Anthony Agree To Eight-Year Contract Extension

Friends, Red Sox fans, FanGraphs readers, lend me your ears,
I come to analyze the contract extension, not to bemoan it.
The free agency status that teams despise lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their luxury tax penalties.

Here, under leave of Meg and the rest,
For they are honorable editors,
Come ZiPS to speak at Anthony’s signing,
It is my computer, faithful and just to me.

While the Red Sox have quite the mixed record of letting players leave in free agency or trading them before they can sign elsewhere, the organization has been fairly aggressive at signing players with limited service time in order to buy out free agent years in advance. Brayan Bello is signed through 2030, at least if a club option is picked up, and both Kristian Campbell and Ceddanne Rafaela, well short of arbitration status, are under club control into the 2030s. When the Red Sox acquired Garrett Crochet, they didn’t muck around either, making sure he’d be kept in town on a six-year, $170 million contract extension that he signed a few months after the trade.

Now it’s Roman Anthony’s turn. The guaranteed portion of the contract calls for $130 million over eight years, beginning next season, with $125 million total in salary through the 2023 campaign and a $5 million buyout on a $30 million club option for 2034. If the Red Sox pick up the option, the total value of the deal would be nine years and $155 million. There is also a Halloween bucket full of various incentives that could net Anthony a maximum $230 million over the next nine years. However, that high-end figure will be quite hard to meet. As MassLive’s Chris Cotillo points out, for Anthony to earn that $230 million maximum, he would have to finish top two in the Rookie of the Year voting this season, make the All-Star team in all eight seasons of the extension and also in the option year, and win the next nine MVP awards — one for every year of the extension, plus the option season. Nobody has ever won nine MVPs; Barry Bonds has the most, with seven. So, in order to hit every incentive in his new contract, Anthony would have to become, without exaggeration, the best baseball player ever. If, in the pretty-much-impossible event that this happens, the Red Sox would be getting literally the greatest of all time for less money than the Angels are paying Anthony Rendon.

Suffice it to say, even without the incentives, this is a healthy chunk of change for a player with two months of major league experience. Like Evan Longoria, who signed his extension with even less big league service nearly 20 (!) years ago, Anthony comes with an extremely polished game that doesn’t require a lot of speculation. He already has phenomenal discipline at the plate, and after swinging at just 19% of out-of-zone pitches in Triple-A this year, he’s only swung at 20% since being promoted. Those are numbers that neither Joey Votto, nor Juan Soto would be completely embarrassed to have, and that’s a really high bar.

There is some risk to young players with great discipline, as there’s a trap that can result in passivity taking over, resulting in the plate discipline becoming not the means to an end, but the end itself. This has waylaid the careers of players such as Jeremy Hermida and Ben Grieve. It’s true that Anthony swings at relatively few pitches in the strike zone, but when he gets what he wants, he really goes after it, with an average exit velocity of 94 mph (95 mph in the minors this year) and a 56.9% Statcast hard-hit rate. He’s more than a “hit ball go long” guy, in that he also plays more-than-adequate defense in a corner outfield position, and while there are some teammates who would obliterate him in a footrace, he’s decently quick.

All told, he’s hit .276/.392/.417 in the majors so far, for 1.5 WAR in 47 games, numbers that would cause any team in baseball to happily welcome him to its active roster. There are certainly areas of his game where you can hope for improvement — a 74% contact rate — but he’s been a valuable member of the Red Sox. Anthony has one of the largest ZiPS projection differences, with the full version of ZiPS being significantly more aggressive than the simpler in-season model that pops up here every morning. But hey, I promised you the projection, so let’s crank that one out.

Through 2033, ZiPS suggests Anthony would be worth a contract of eight years for $135 million, breaking down into just under $3 million during his pre-arb seasons, $35 million during arbitration, and $97 million in the two free agent seasons. So the actual total guaranteed value that Anthony got is almost exactly what the computer thinks he deserves. However, the contract ZiPS spit out assumes Anthony wouldn’t have finished in the top two of the Rookie of the Year voting, which would have — before the extension — made him eligible for free agency a year early; in that event, to buy out an additional year of free agency, ZiPS would offer him an eight-year, $176 million extension.

That said, I’m not sure that Anthony is all that likely to place first or second in the voting, considering his later debut and low home run total. While this has been a weak season for rookies generally, Anthony would need to get more support than all but one of the following to finish second: Nick Kurtz, Jacob Wilson, Will Warren, Noah Cameron, and teammate Carlos Narváez. I’m not put off by Anthony’s fewer plate appearances and lower Triple Crown stats, and I dig his high OBP and solid WAR, but even the average modern sportswriter is less statnerdy than me. (Plus, I’m an NL voter.)

Since announcing the extension, Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow and others have tried to frame the Anthony deal as the alternative to the Devers one, as if the team were using the money it saved by trading Devers to pay Anthony what it would take to keep him around for longer. However, I’m not sure I buy this as an either/or proposition, as even the unattainable maximum value of Anthony’s extension is less than what Boston would have owed Devers if not for the trade. Besides, the Red Sox probably could have found a way to extend Anthony without getting rid of Devers if they really wanted to do so. Nevertheless, the team’s long-term commitment to Anthony should dull the pain of the Devers trade for Boston fans, especially if the team continues its surge and makes a deep October run. And now that the Red Sox have Roman Anthony, the rest of the AL East better find an Octavian.