Wil Myers Cashes In on Rare Deal

Wil Myers was always going to be the San Diego Padres’ highest-paid player in 2017, regardless of whether he signed a new contract. In arbitration, Myers had around $4 million coming to him, which is quite a bit more than Yangervis Solarte’s $2.1 million, the Padres’ other highest-paid player. Myers figures to provide a 25% increase on the $12 million already guaranteed to other players on the roster. This, of course, ignores the roughly roughly $35 million to be collected by Jedd Gyorko, Hector Olivera, James Shields, and Melvin Upton Jr. as they play for other teams.

Given the incredible financial flexibility the Padres have, it makes sense for the Padres to lock up their best player for the long term, and it appears they’ve done that, announcing a six-year, $83 million deal with Myers, plus an option. Players just entering arbitration like Wil Myers seldom receive contract extensions that buy out multiple free-agent years, so this one is a bit unusual and costly for San Diego.

Over the last five seasons, there have only been a handful of contract extensions for players who, like Myers, have recorded between three and four years of service time. The biggest was Freddie Freeman‘s eight-year deal for $135 million; the most recent, Dee Gordon’s five-year, $50 million deal last winter. Here’s a list of similar recent extensions, per MLB Trade Rumors, along with the relevant contract terms, age, and career WAR at the time of the deal.

Of all the players who appear here, Dee Gordon is probably most analogous to Myers in terms both of career and last-season wins. Josh Harrison had barely played and only showed he was an MLB-caliber player for one season. Michael Brantley had struggled when Cleveland took a chance on him. Kyle Seager’s stats blow Myers’ out of the water. If you squint, you can some similarities between Myers and Freeman, but Freeman was also two years younger, had played three consecutive healthy seasons, and was coming off a year during which he produced a 150 wRC+ — compared to Myers’ 115 mark. Myers is two years younger than Gordon was, and — this offseason notwithstanding — power usually pays. In this case, however, it paid a lot: having produced slightly inferior numbers to Gordon, Myers nonetheless received $33 million more in guaranteed money while only giving up one more year of free agency.

That’s the player-performance comparison. Accounting for the contract values, as well, one finds that Freeman’s age and performance justified the bigger deal, while Brantley and Harrison’s performances justified smaller guarantees. But look at the Kyle Seager deal for seven years and $100 million. If Myers’ option is picked up, he will have a secured a deal nearly identical to Seager’s with roughly half the track record. When he was extended, Seager had played significantly more at a higher level — Seager had recorded a 115 wRC+ compared to Myers’ 110 and was coming off a season with a 127 wRC+ compared to Myers’s 115 — and also played a good third base, while Myers is over at first. We could say that Seager’s deal is a bargain, but it was regarded as fair at the time.

That leaves us with two options: either (a) there’s something special about Myers that isn’t captured in the numbers, or (b) the market is changing and extensions likely won’t be as cheap as they used to be.

As to the first option, it’s certainly possible that the Padres believe in Myers’ future. His name has been around for quite some time, having previously been regarded as a top prospect. Kansas City using that reputation to trade him, along with Jake Odorizzi, for Wade Davis and James Shields. After a solid debut with the Rays back in 2013, Myers took a big step back in 2014, posting a 76 wRC+ as he struggled to stay healthy. Tampa Bay decided to sell low on Myers after that season, sending him to San Diego in a trade that netted the Rays Steven Souza from the Nationals while San Diego sent a combination of Joe Ross and Trea Turner to Washington.

Myers played well in 2015, but his playing time was again limited by injury, as wrist problems landed him on the disabled list. As he told Eno Sarris in a piece that was published just a week before another wrist injury, these types of injuries are difficult to combat.

Wil Myers has some huge mitts, but he’s not sure that mattered much on the plays where he got injured, and there’s nothing he can do about them. “I was born this way,” he deadpanned. But any wrist injury is a such a big deal, he agreed. Last year? “It wasn’t that fun.” Now that he’s healthy, he’s having fun again.

He would be having less fun just a week later, ultimately managing just 253 plate appearances on the season while splitting his time between center field and first base. He managed to put up decent numbers, recorded a 115 wRC+ during that time, but it was still a disappointing season for the 24-year-old. Last season served as a breakout of sorts for Myers. He duplicated that 115 wRC+ over the course of the season, and more importantly, stayed healthy all year long, compiling nearly 700 plate appearances. He had a monster June, hitting 11 homers over the course of the month, before producing a more ordinary second half. As Corinne Landrey wrote last June in the middle of that surge, Myers excels at hitting the ball to all fields.

It’s this tendency to effectively spray the ball to all fields that led Eno Sarris to identify Myers among 17 other players age 25 and under as having the potential to exhibit a power surge this season. Sarris found that non-pull hitters exhibit more growth during their early 20s than their pull-happy counterparts. As a result, the fact that Myers had underperformed his minor-league power numbers made it easy to identify him as someone who may still be growing into his power. Naturally, the fact that Myers is healthy for the first time in three years is also a relevant factor in his power surge.

Myers’ second half was a bit below average (91 wRC+) and he had some crazy home/road splits, hitting much better at home than the road, but his excellence on the basepaths allowed him to remain at least an average offensive performer. Myers’ 28 steals matched his home-run total on the year, and he was caught on the basepaths just six times. Between his stole-base value and other baserunning exploits, Myers was worth 7.8 runs above average; only Mookie Betts, Jose Ramirez, and Mike Trout posted higher totals last season. Playing first base raises expectations for offensive contributions, but given Myers’ athleticism and big hands, there’s no reason to think he can’t gain a little bit of that value back by playing a plus first base.

While Myers recorded a solid four-win season last year, there’s nothing here to indicate anything particularly special about Wil Myers such that he ought to receive something close to Kyle Seager’s deal or substantively more than Dee Gordon. So let’s address the second option discussed above and examine whether the market is changing.

Steamer projects Myers as a 2.4 WAR player. ZiPS has him at 3.4. If we split the difference, we can see what kind of discount San Diego is getting by signing Myers to a deal through his age-31 season, buying out three years of free agency.

Before we get to the free-agent years, we have to account for the three years of arbitration. While we don’t know what the exact terms would have been, we can estimate what Myers would have gotten through arbitration and apply the rest to the free-agent years. We know that the midpoint for Myers’ arbitration case this year was $3.7 million, so if we start there and give him a 50% raise for the next two years, we end up with a total of $17.6 million. The Padres assume some risk during those years, which are now guaranteed instead of determined on a year-to-year basis. In exchange for their commitment, we can assume a 15% discount. (That’s similar to what the Cardinals received a few years ago when they bought out only Lance Lynn’s three arbitration years.) The result is about $15 million to cover Myers’ arbitration years. That leaves $68 million over the final three seasons for which to account.

If we assign Myers a present-day value of 2.9 WAR, assume a slight increase at age 27 in 2018, steady play over the few years after that, and then a slight decrease at age-31, the final three years of his contract look like this:

In exchange for the six-year guarantee to Myers, the Padres are getting a small discount on the arbitration years and a bigger discount on the free-agent seasons — roughly 25% over his likely value, with the option year coming in at roughly the same cost as the potential value using these projections. This is not to say it was a bad deal for Myers for discounting his free agent seasons. He is actually getting more than most players have in the past.

When I looked at contract extensions from 2008 to 2011, I found that the average discount of a contract off of market value was close to 40%. The Padres are receiving a prospective 25% discount. That still represents an improvement over the open market, but it isn’t nearly what teams have gotten in the past. An option year at age 32 is a benefit to the Padres, but its value seven years from now is up in the air. The number of contract extensions once players reach their third year of service time and can enter into arbitration are uncommon so it could be possible that these types of extensions will continue to be rare and when they do happen they will be expensive. Ender Inciarte and Odubel Herrera — the former a super-2 player, the latter still in his pre-arbitration years — entered into contracts that match up with what we’ve seen previously. This contract for Myers does not.

Myers was guaranteed to get a little under $4 million this season in his first big payday since the $2 million signing bonus he received more than seven years ago. Now, Myers has guaranteed himself 20 times more than that. If Myers hits 30 homers in 2019, he might wish that he could head to free agency at age 28, but we are a few years from that potentiality. If he does hit well, he’s still likely to get a decent contract after his age-31 or age-32 season. If the Padres had done this deal a season ago, they likely could have managed with it half the same guarantee. Once a player gets to arbitration, teams should need to offer serious money to buy out free-agent seasons. That’s what the Padres appear to have done here, and it is what teams should expect going forward.