Thinking about a Bobby Witt Jr Contract Extension
After the final out of the Royals/Dodgers game on June 30th, Bobby Witt Jr’s batting line stood at .244/.288/.415. As of the final out of the Royals/Mariners game on 8/15, his batting line now stands at .277/.318/.496.
Is the current line an extraordinary one? Not really. It’s good for a 118 wRC+, 18% above league average. Is it better than the 87 wRC+ he had when the calendar page turned to July? Absolutely. It’s markedly better. Between that 87 wRC+ and 118, Witt Jr smoked a scorching .349/.384/.671, good for a 182 (!!) wRC+. That’s roughly near Ted Williams career wRC+. It’s better than Bonds (Barry), Gehrig (Lou), Trout (Mike), and Mantle’s (Mickey) career mark.
Now to be clear: it’s 165 plate appearances over 37 games. It’s not a tiny sample size, but it’s small enough for there to be some noise in the signal. Hunter Dozier hit .341/.433/.659 over 37 games in 2019. Jorge Soler hit .331/.449/.717 over 37 games later in that same summer. Ryan O’Hearn’s .290/.380/.669 over 37 games in August-September 2018 is nearly the same OPS (1.050) as Witt Jr’s hot stretch this year (1.055).
Of course, hitting is only part of the equation! During this hot stretch, Witt has posted a top 15 speed score, a top 20 weighted stolen base runs, top six in fielding runs, and top five in position adjusted fielding runs. Pretty much has done it all, right in line with the dream scenario of his scouting report coming out of backfields of Colleyville, Texas.
Naturally, the dirt on what a contract extension could look like has been kicked up like the intake vortex of a nuclear bomb (yeah I saw Oppenheimer) recently. It’s probably foolish to just assume BWJ is just going to hit 180+ for the rest of his career and be an 8 WAR player annually. Dan Szymborski at FanGraphs had a nice piece out yesterday that updated Witt Jr’s long term projections after the recent run.
The above projection could turn out to be a bit conservative given that ZiPS isn’t necessarily quick to just buy wholesale on big swings in small samples. But even with some skepticism, a 4-4.5 WAR player will normally cost you a good chunk of change, especially if you pay for it post-breakout like the Royals will need to.
Who am I if not a natural born follower? So in this space, I’ll join in on those very same contract extension ruminations.
One way I thought would be an interesting way to approach this is looking at recent(ish) pre-arbitration extensions for player who signed large deals of $100M or more. Witt isn’t a free agent. What Bryce Harper, Aaron Judge, Trea Turner, Corey Seager, and others of that kind have signed for are irrelevant. Bob doesn’t have a lot of leverage in that he’s a pending free agent. He won’t be eligible for the open market until after the 2027 season, heading into winter of 2028. He won’t even be arbitration eligible until after next season, heading into the 2025 season. He’s got leverage in that he’s a good player, who is young, and is unlikely to wake up tomorrow missing a leg (you never know though…). But it’s not like he has any say in where he plays anytime soon.
I think this brings us to an important part too when we think of pre-arb extensions. If you see the headline of Julio Rodriguez signing a seven-year, $210M extension, that doesn’t mean Julio made $210M more than he otherwise would have. In reality, Rodriguez is a star level player who in all likelihood was going to be tendered a contract by the Mariners over the years of control over him. Cody Bellinger hit .203/.272/.376 over the three years following his MVP win and the Dodgers didn’t non-tender him until his final year of control instead of paying him $18M.
So when we talk about pre-arb extension, we have to think about too how much the player would have naturally made in arbitration over his control years. Anthony Rendon was all too happy to make $37M in his arbitration years while he waited for free agency. Nolan Arenado made $60M in arbitration before he inked his extension in Colorado right before the first game of his final year of team control (and Arenado kept the $26M salary he was set to make in that year). Francisco Lindor signed an extension shortly after being acquired by the Mets prior to the 2021 season and the two sides agreed to just tack on new money starting the following year, allowing Lindor to make almost $51M in arbitration money overall.
Expected arbitration earnings is an important factor in extensions for both sides. On the player side, you don’t want to give away money you are likely to make but also you want to guarantee those arbitration dollars - usually at the cost of giving up year(s) of free agency. On the team side, if you’ve got a bona fide star, you can go out of ahead of massive potential arbitration paydays but again, it won’t come cheap necessarily because you are also getting years of what would be free agency too.
So we need to start with what Witt Jr might make in arbitration. I decided on two paths: a lazy path and a third-party path. For the lazy path, first we just start with the three pre-arb years. That’s simple, it’s just the MLB league minimum for the first three years (which escalates by year). Then I looked at the highest projected arbitration salaries from MLB Trade Rumors for 2023, using each of the three different years of service time (3.x, 4.x, and 5.x) and went with the highest projected figures of each. This ended up being:
ARB1 $5,700,000 (Dylan Cease)
ARB2 $14,500,000 (Pete Alonso)
ARB3 $17,500,000 (Rafael Devers - who would shortly then sign an extension)
I feel comfortable using these because they aren’t record breaking numbers (full clarity: I excluded the Shohei Ohtani $30M projected figure because it was a record), but the above players all have had great careers so far and have various awards and achievements.
Adding up the three minimum salary years and the above three arbitration estimates gets your hypothetical team control year earnings at $40M.
The other way is using the excellent work of Ben Clemens of FanGraphs, who last year modeled a $/WAR framework per arb eligible years.
We can combine the above figures and Dan Szymborski’s long-term projection of Witt Jr to give estimated contract control year earnings.
2024: $760,000 (yearly minimum)
2025 (ARB1): 4.5 WAR * $1.36M = $6.12M
2026 (ARB2): 4.4 WAR * $2.13M = $9.37M
2027 (ARB3): 4.5 WAR * $3.59M = 16.15M
Other than arb two, it’s not that much difference between the MLBTR projected highs. Averaging the two gets us to $5,910,000, $11,935,000, and $16,825,000 in arb1, arb2, and arb3, respectively.
Now let’s look at pre-free agency extensions of ~$100M or more.
What you see above is a few different data points on each extension.
First year - First year the extension took place, not necessarily the year it was signed
Age Season Prior - How old the player was in the season finished prior to signing the extension. This helped equalize mid-year extensions or players whose birthdays were between the prior season end and new season beginning
Years of Service - This is how many years of service the player had completed or was set to complete when the extension was signed. This was a bit tricky, so I made some judgement calls at time to round up or down
Career WAR at extension - The players cumulative career fWAR, typically through the year prior to the extension. For example, Mookie Betts signed in July of 2021, but his career WAR only runs through 2020 for this data point
WAR/600PA - This is simply the career WAR number above, pro-rated to 600 PA (again using the same methodology for WAR but for PA)
Total length - Typically just the total length of the deal, including any bolt on extensions
Total - Total value of the reported extension
Inflation adjusted - For pre-2020 extensions, I used the BLS inflation data to adjust upwards the value of the contract to 2023 dollars. Sports leagues pay don’t just move up in equal to inflation (they typically move up more!), but this was the simplest way to do it. Contracts that were adjusted are highlighted in yellow
Total New Money - This one was tricky. For players who the new money was known (ie: Nolan Arenado), it’s that. For players who the new money was not known, it would be impossible/laborious to project each pre-arb/arb season and payday. Instead, I used the blended MLBTR/Clemens model alongside how many years of team control were left. So for players with less than one year of control for example, they’d have three years of league minimum plus the three years of blended arb. From there, you’d subtract the extension value, and you have the new money estimate
New Money per Year - How much new money was added on an annualized basis
Not all of these are applicable to a possible Witt Jr extension. All due respect to him, he isn’t Mookie Betts, Mike Trout, or Buster Posey (so far yet). The Corbin Carroll figure is a bit over-estimated, given that that proration is just on 115 plate appearances. This year he is on pace for 5.5 WAR in 637 PA. If you acted like his extension was signed this offseason instead, his WAR/600PA over his career would be 5.5 - a more reasonable figure.
On average, the above players were:
Extended after completing their age 24 season
Had three years of service time completed
Accumulated just over 16.5 WAR for their careers
Averaged 5.5 WAR per season
Signed deals of 10 years
Signed deals of $240M, $259M adjusted for inflation
Received $230M in total new money
Averaged $26M a year in new money
If we narrow down to the players whose career WAR/600PA is within +/-0.5 WAR to Witt Jr, we can get closer comparisons.
Remember, some of the deals above and in the original table were pre-breakout, so the team likely got a better deal than had they waited. Wander Franco for instance “only” made $145M in new money because he had only put up 2.4 WAR for his career and 4.68 WAR/600PA. Since then, he’s at 7 WAR and 5.1 WAR/600PA and the Rays would have had to spend a good bit more to extend him today (of course, given what we’ve learned recently he may never get that hypothetical contract).
From here, it’s basically plug and chug at the hypotheticals, the only question is when and the length. For the average, the Royals wouldn’t extend Witt Jr until he had completed three years of service time and was entering his arbitration years.
But let’s just for the purposes of this piece assume he is extended after this year, meaning the Royals buy out four years of team control. Using the MLBTR/Clemens blended arbitration model, Witt Jr would be expected to earn ~$35M in arbitration plus a year at the league minimum. So when we are talking length, that includes those four years of arbitration plus free agency buyout years (ie: eight years is four of team control plus four of free agency).
Those were the closest comparables by length of deal, but they aren’t perfect comparison by total years of team control extended. In Devers case, his 11 year deal is actually only 10 years since it was just tacked on to the year after his final year of control and he kept his previously agreed upon arbitration money intact. In Witt Jr’s case, it would be buying out four years of control and seven of free agency, taking him through his age-33 season, whereas Devers deal takes him through his age-36 season.
From a pay perspective, I think the Austin Riley one is the closest in reality. While Riley is slightly older at signing (25) than Witt Jr (23) and BWJ has more overall value, the Braves paid Riley post-breakout rather than pre. While the Matt Olson deal is the closest in money, Olson is much older at signing (28) and had four years of service time completed.
We could also back out of the team controlled years and just look at the new money, which functionally should be the sorta open market pay. For instance, on a nine year deal, it would be two contracts: 4/$35.4M to buy out the controlled years (ages 23-26), then 5/$198.5M for the free agency years (ages 27-31). Carlos Correa signed a 6/$200M deal with the Twins this past winter at a similar age as Witt Jr would be. But remember, his market was depressed by the reportedly failed physical by TWO teams in the Giants and Mets, both who offered him $315M+ deals (though on longer lengths). The 5/$198M is eye-popping with an AAV of nearly $40M but remember, teams have to pay a premium to buy out free agency years upfront. Otherwise, the player will just collect his arbitration money and enter a true competitive bidding market for his services.
A really crude way to do it here too is just a simple $/WAR modeling, adjusting the $/WAR figure for some sort of inflation. We already have the long-term WAR projections from ZiPS. If we take those, using a starting $/WAR of $8M (roughly what on average teams have paid in free agency to 2+ WAR players), and a project out, we get something like this.
On a simple $/WAR basis, Witt Jr would be owed $340M over 10 years, but no team is going to buyout his pre-arb and arb seasons at well, well above market rates for those seasons and then guarantee him another $193M on top of that. If instead you just pre-guarantee him arb earnings (and you could even give him a modest raise for 2024), that second part of the deal in 6/$193M ends up being $32M AAV and in total pays Witt Jr at an AAV of $23M. That’s roughly in line with the $25M AAV in the +/-0.5 WAR closer comparison table from earlier those players received.
There are a lot of ways to think about contract extensions and that’s without even getting to the baseline question of when and for how long. As exciting as Witt Jr has been this year, I’m not against waiting for an extension after next season. Maybe it costs you more, but the only thing worse than extending post-breakout is extending post-breakout but pre-breakdown. Not that Witt Jr is going to do that, but looking at the ZiPS projections, this is setting up to be a career best season for Bob. It won’t be an outlier like Nicky Lopez’s 6 WAR season was, but we should keep that lesson in mind for single-year breakouts vs a longer and stable trend. Hunter Dozier comes to mind too, as a good wait and see lesson (though the Royals extended him anyways for some reason post-breakdown - so maybe that is the worst thing you can do).