What does a Brayan Bello extension look like?

This thread is a year early.

I posted this a few months ago, and I still stand by it.

Obviously would love to get Bello on the Whitlock deal, but my feeling is that Whitlock was a bit of a perfect storm: a Rule 5 pick with not much pedigree, combined with a Bogaertsian team-first personality.

Bello has a longer history as a top prospect, so he strikes me as more likely to bet on himself. If I had to guess, he’d need a little more than Whitlock.

The Braves offer a perfect example in 24yo Spencer Strider. After an outstanding rookie season (131IP, 202K, 45BB, 0.99WHIP, 2.67ERA) resulting in runner-up to the NL ROY, they signed Strider to a 6/$75M extension with a team option for year 7.

Bello will need to continue to show something in 2023 at which point the Sox will need to act quickly.

So what makes you think they will start extending guys under control for 5+ years? The objective is not to keep players until they are 40. It’s to keep them while they are cheap and try to resign them, if we can’t we should have another player ready to come up and fill the void or a guy who’s 1-2 years away and sign fillers to help you win a championship. Not trade your farm for 1-2 guys. That’s what we’re working towards but it takes a little while to build. Especially when our farm was so depleted.

You can sign guys earlier on with the hope to be paying for their later arb years and first couple of years after that at a discounted price.

Look at the Michael Harris II contract: His later arb years they will be paying 9-10 million, and they also bought out a couple of free agent years for 10-20 million. 

Obviously there's risk to these types of deal(less of a guarantee they pan out), but the average AAV is low enough where having the contract be a bust won't kill the team. Similar to how the Evan White Mariners extension has not worked out so far, but it is not hampering the teams payroll. 

If the team extends Bello, I'd imagine it would be a 6-7 year deal with team options after. They most likely wouldn't be paying him the years of regression. 

I can't imagine the Red Sox won't go down this route, considering the success the Braves have had with it so far.

My view of it is basically this: if you want to screw it up and ensure that Bello or Casas (or other special players climbing up the ladder) reject your offer and entrench themselves into waiting until FA, by all means lowball them with the Whitlock deal or the White deal in this new market in an attempt to save a few million in AAV that works out to 1-2% of your total CBT (enough to get you a fringy reliever?).

I'm going the other way. If you really feel that the player has legit above-average-to-all-star potential and a realistic shot at reaching it (and I suppose some who voted for "Lock him up!" do), I'd much rather overpay on a long-term deal at the $6-8m AAV level for a guy in his 20s than at the $25m+ AAV level for a guy in his 30s. I also want to buy out his entire 20s, understanding that the AAV will climb the longer the deal is. If he checks all my boxes, I want to lock him up and throw away the key.

Also, as FA prices rise so does the cost of WAR, so an $8m AAV is becoming much less than a WAR per season. It's a much easier bar to reach (or pill to swallow if he doesn't work out). And if he really does blossom, I'm happy to pay for 0.8 WAR and get 4-5, even if I could've been paying for 0.4 WAR if my lowball offer had worked. To me, the risk of the lowball offer being rejected is far outweighed by the reward of locking him up.

I think he'd be dumb to take anything now. but I also thought all the Braves guys were dumb.  I guess, as my colleague told his 7th grader, who is an emerging pitcher, "if anyone ever offers you $100m to throw a ball, take it." Put me down for 8/$100m, with escalators for innings and Cy Young votes.