Another Day, Another Extension for the Not-Cubs (Corbin Carroll Gets a Huge Deal from the Diamondbacks)
I’m doing the dad thing today at a kid’s birthday party so I can’t really dig in on this right now. But I’ll just say I had a sense of mild perturbance when this alert came across my phone.
Yet another young player is getting a healthy extension from his team, and it is not the Cubs. It would be nice if it were the Cubs one of these times. But today is not that day.
Top prospect Corbin Carroll (*the* top prospect on some lists), who has just 38 days of big league service time, is getting an eight-year, $111 million deal from the Diamondbacks:
Carroll, 22, climbed from Double-A to Triple-A to MLB last year, all after playing just 7 games at High-A in 2021 due to injury. He’s a very, very special player, who combines excellent outfield defense with great speed with solid bat-to-ball skills with surprising power. He’s pretty much everything you’d want in a young star.
More on the deal and its implications at a later time, but the short version is that this is definitely a bet by the Diamondbacks on Carroll becoming a star. If he fulfills his very lofty promise, the later years of this deal – when he would otherwise be hitting his arb years and then free agency – are going to look like a steal. Of course, the tradeoff is that the Diamondbacks are now on the hook for nine figures no matter what happens next. Feels like a risk-risk, win-win.
