Here’s what a Bobby Witt Jr. extension might look like

Witt is gonna make a ton of money. How much?

Through June of this year, Bobby Witt Jr. had been a productive big league player but nothing like the generationally talented franchise cornerstone that he had been billed as since the Royals drafted him in 2019.

But since the calendar turned to July, the sea parted and Major League Baseball has witnessed the ceiling of the talented young shortstop. Witt has decisively been the best position player in baseball over his last 40 games, where he has hit .345/.379/.673 with 12 home runs. And he’s not doing it through some lucky bounces or by sacrificing a part of his game; as Hunter Samuels pointed out on Twitter, Witt has increased his power ouptut while simultaneously lowering his strikeout rate.

Last offseason, there were a lot of discussions about who, if anyone, the Royals should sign to a long-term extension. At the time, I wrote that the conditions weren’t right to extend Kansas City’s young hitters. To recap: both the team and the player must feel that they are getting a fair result out of an extension that buys out years of free agency years. If there’s not enough incentive on either side, extensions don’t happen. That’s where we were last year. There wasn’t a number that would make sense for the Royals to offer and for Witt to sign.

One of the things I didn’t explicitly discuss in my article from last year is the extent that comparables—comps, in the biz—impact contract valuations and discussions. Just like in the real estate business, comps are there to help guide teams and player agents towards the completion of a deal. If comps aren’t there, it becomes exponentially more difficult to get parties to agree on anything.

Witt’s 2023 campaign has changed that. He’s lifted his wRC+ to 120 on the year, has improved his defense significantly by every publicly available defensive metric, and continues to be one of the best base runners and base stealers in the league. Overall, Witt has reached the 5.0 WAR mark per Fangraphs’ version of Wins Above Replacement. He is 23. He has arrived.

While there aren’t a whole lot of comps for the type of player Witt was last year—a 23-year-old who had been a fine but not great player—there are plenty of extension comps for him now. This year, Witt is cementing himself as a perennial All-Star and a potential future MVP candidate. Those are the players that teams salivate over, and those are the players that teams clamor to pay millions and millions of dollars for. Here are some of the most notable extensions for players with less than five years of service time over the last decade:

So, what would an extension for Witt look like? First of all: it’s going to be expensive, with a minimum commitment on the Royals’ end of at least $200 million. On this list, only Wander Franco and Buster Posey signed for less than $200 million. Neither are ideal comps for Witt. In Wander’s case, he was a signing out of Latin America and had barely played a few months of baseball before inking the deal. In Posey’s case, he was 26 and signed his deal in 2013 when baseball payrolls were much lower.

Could the Royals offer Witt a smaller extension that buys out two years of free agency as opposed to five or more? Probably not. As it stands, Witt will reach free agency for his age-28 season. Most players do not reach free agency in their age-28 seasons, and so there is very little incentive for Witt to sign a deal to delay his free agency when he could just, say, take the Corey Seager route. Seager signed a $325 million contract with the Rangers that started in his age-28 season after making $25 million in arbitration over the previous three years.

Let’s summarize what we know real quick:

• Witt will likely only sign a mega deal. It makes no sense for Witt’s camp to give up a few years of free agency when reaching free agency so young is so valuable.
• Any extension must last until at least Witt’s mid-30s. We’re looking at an 11-year deal at minimum, with a realistic upper end at 14 years.
• The AAV for an extension will probably be around $25 million. Average annual value based on comps. For an 11-year deal, that’s $275 million; for a 14-year deal, that’s $350 million.

There are really two routes the Royals could take when it comes to what an extension for Witt would look like. One route is the Fernando Tatis Jr. route. This is the most simplistic route. As part of the contract, Tatis got a no-trade clause (and other fun perks) but there are no opt-outs or club options to be found—just a lot of money over a lot of years. In Tatis’ case, that’s $341 million over 14 years.

The other route is the more likely route for a small market team like the Royals to take, which is to follow the blueprint that the Mariners and Julio Rodriguez took in his extension.

Lookout Landing has a great deep dive into the choose-your-own-adventure nature of Rodriguez’s contract, which is...extraordinarily complicated. But to distill it down, there are two options at the heart of its complexity. The first is a club option for the 2029 season. The second is a player option for the 2030 season, which is only available if the Mariners decline their club option.

Seattle structured the contract such that they could have their cake and eat it, too. At its minimum—if the Mariners decline their team option and Rodriguez picks up his player option—the deal will be 12 years and $210 million, much less than what the Padres are on the hook for in the Tatis deal. But if the Mariners pick up their team option, Rodriguez could earn double the minimum contract amount with performance bonuses. Of course, in that scenario, Rodriguez would be an MVP-level player, and you probably won’t see Seattle complaining about having him on the roster.

Both approaches have their benefits. For a small market club, a complicated structure a la Rodriguez minimizes risk if the player runs into injury issues, as being on the hook for $200 million or so is a big difference from being on the hook for $300 million or so. But a simpler extension a la Tatis does put a ceiling on how much the team owes the player if they end up with a Hall of Fame career.

Based off how early Witt will hit free agency, $300 million in total is probably the floor if the Royals want to use a simpler extension roadmap. There are a near infinite amount of combinations if Kansas City wants to go the Rodriguez route. And if the Royals really did want to secure two years of free agency, offering Witt a player opt-out like Giancarlo Stanton had could be the move.

But the nagging question: do the Royals want to extend Witt? And could they afford it?

Fortunately, we know that the Royals want to extend Witt, because owner John Sherman wants to extend Witt, as GM JJ Picollo told reporters last year.

“It’s loosely been discussed,” Picollo said. “There’s got to be a lot of creativity in that. It is something (chairman and CEO) John Sherman has asked our department if that’s something we’d be interested in, and we are, but it’s in the very I would say infantile stages. We have a long way to go to get deeper into those discussions.”

Regardless of the quality of the team when an extension is offered to a player like Witt, it almost always makes sense to secure such a player for the long haul. That’s because Witt is very likely to produce surplus value—IE, more on-field value than could be acquired via free agency. And, well, players with Witt’s skillset are rare. Those players get snapped up by large market teams in free agency if they ever hit it. If you’ve got the chance to secure one for the long haul, you should probably do it.

It also behooves Sherman to extend Witt for another reason: to convince the Royals fans that ownership legitimately cares about the on-field product. That’s because the ownership group has an objectively awful track record as stewards of the franchise so far. They have presided over one of the worst stretches of Royals history, failing to realize that change needed to happen in the baseball operations department until it was too late. At the same time, they have refused to put any significant capital into the team, cutting a $96 million Opening Day payroll in 2019 to $92 million this year.

That’s not all. Looming over all of this is the new stadium project. We know that Sherman and the Royals are going to ask the residents of Jackson or Clay County to hand over hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds as a contribution towards the Royals’ new shiny downtown (or downtown-ish, for the Clay County site) stadium.

Whether or not the public should give Sherman and the Royals money is beside the point: to get that money, the Royals need the public to vote to do so. If the Royals extend Witt for a gigantic extension unprecedented in franchise history, that will go a long, long way towards convincing voters to continue that 3/8 cent sales tax.

The good thing about a Witt extension is that the Royals don’t need a new ballpark village to afford it. They can afford it right now. Heck, the Royals are already paying Salvador Perez $20 million a year right now and nobody on the team is crying poor. Yes, eventually Witt’s long-term extension will not be worth it. But by then, hopefully the next Witt is leading the team, and Witt can take the Salvy mantle of veteran leader. And hopefully, Witt will have led the Royals to another few playoff adventures of his own.