NEWSLETTER
At The Athletic, Tim Britton endeavored to project free agent contracts based on historical comps, which tends to be the best way to do it (if you can find appropriate comps, of course). We discussed the pitcher projections here, and the positional projections are now out, too.
Obviously your eye will go immediately to Cody Bellinger, whose projected contract remains in the relatively reasonable range: six years and $162 million. Like I’ve said before, I don’t see any reason why Bellinger and Scott Boras won’t be shooting for a deal that starts with a ‘2’, but I just don’t know if they’ll get there (unless there’s a team desperate enough to drive down the AAV that they go to 10+ years).
To be sure, a $27 million AAV on Bellinger is actually pretty darn high, relative to other center field comps who didn’t show the floor that Bellinger did in 2021 and 2022. But (1) Bellinger is younger than other CFs who hit free agency at age-30, (2) Bellinger at least has a plausible health explanation for those two years, and (3) inflation. Bellinger’s deal would be in the very general range of guys like Brandon Nimmo, Jacoby Ellsbury, and George Springer.
That is all to say, I could see Bellinger’s deal landing in that range when all is said and done, though we know his camp may wait things out a bit. The Cubs will stay in touch.
The other big name, of course, is Shohei Ohtani, who gets an EXTENSIVE write-up in the piece. Projection: 12 years and $520 million, which was in part based on a “reasonable” projection of eight years and $360 million, and knowing that some team was going to get “unreasonable” on top of that.
Other projections of note:
