Ever since Adley Rutschman first debuted Orioles fans have been hopeful that he’d be extended soon and as more and more of the Orioles prospects have come up and performed well the list of guys to extend keeps getting longer and longer and yet not one member of the Orioles core has been extended.
So naturally every time it is announced that another team has locked up their franchise player for a decade, Orioles fans in unison shake their fist in the air and curse Mike Elias’ name.
For me it looks like this:
When you look at the teams that are regularly deep in the playoffs you’ll see teams that have multiple players signed to long term deals. Conversely the teams that avoid those deals like the plague are regularly on the outside looking in on those exciting series played in late October.
That’s why it is so frustrating that the Orioles won’t commit to anyone. The Orioles only have 37 million dollars in guaranteed contracts for 2026 and about 20 million of that are from team options that can be easily avoided if the front office deems necessary. So more than any other team in the league the Orioles brand is “we are not committed to anyone long term.”
I have to believe that it is bad for team morale that there is no long term commitment to anyone on the roster. Players know when they play for a cheap organization and when year after year nobody is rewarded for playing well with a contract they’ll notice that too.
When you listen to the comments that Jackson Merrill and Kristian Campbell made at their press conferences after signing their extensions it was clear that a big factor was that the organization had already committed to other players and coaches that they liked and wanted to play with.
Anyway not all extensions are created equal there are pre-arb extensions, arb extensions and just normal extensions so let’s look at all the extensions signed since the calendar flipped over to 2025
Pre Arb Extensions
With a pre arb extension you are buying out a bunch of cost controlled years so when you see crazy numbers like Kristian Campbell’s 8 years 60 million and it looks like highway robbery but in reality Cambell was looking at 3 years of making less than a million dollars and then 3 more years gradually increasing his salary through the arbitration process which can be stressful and arduous and still keeps your salary suppressed well below your true value.
At best over those 6 years Campbell was going to make less than 40 million dollars and that’s assuming everything goes REALLY well through those arbitration years with his new contract. Instead Campbell sacrifices 2 years and guarantees himself 60 million dollars.
He gets more money now and more certainty in the future and the Red Sox get a good player under contract for 8 years and if he’s an all star they’ve got a steal of a deal and if he’s just ok they’ll still feel good about it.
Campbell is potentially leaving a lot of money on the table but if the Sox pick up the club options (which they’ll do if he’s an above average player) then that would mean he earned 100 million in his first 10 seasons and that’s not a trivial amount of money to make playing baseball.
It takes a unique situation for a pre arb extension to be worth it, the team has to strongly feel that a player is going to be good enough 4+ years in the future that they don’t mind committing to him but most players that you can feel that certain about know how good they are and want to wait to get the big payday in free agency.
Jackson Merrill – 9 years, 135 million, 21 million dollar club option for 2035
Kristian Campbell – 8 years, 60 million, 19 million dollar club options for 2033 and a 21 million dollar option for 2034
Brandon Pfaddt – 5 years, 45 million, 21 million dollar club option for for 2031
Tanner Bibee – 5 year, 48 million, 21 million dollar club option for 2030
Lawrence Butler – 7 years, 65 million, 20 million dollar club option for 2032
Arb Extensions
Arb extensions are tricky for a different reason. At this point the players are so close to free agency that they can taste it. If they can wait just a couple more years they’ll be able to court every team in the league in free agency, so the numbers you’ll see on these extensions will have higher AAVs and shorter years than the pre arb extensions.
Garrett Crochet – 6 years, 170 million, with an opt out after 2030 and an injury clause for a 15 million dollar club option if he spends more than 120 days on the IL
Vlad Guerrero Jr: 15 years, 500 million (this came out as I was writing this so there could be more details to come on this one)
Cal Raleigh – 6 years, 105 million
Alejandro Kirk – 5 years, 58 million
Geraldo Perdomo – 4 years, 45 million, 15 million dollar club option for 2030
Brent Rooker – 5 years, 60 million
Normal Extension
These extensions are rare not because they’re not beneficial but because a lot of extensions are a pretty clear win for one party over the other and so it’s rare for mid-extension for both sides to agree that they should keep this thing going.
Usually it will involve a player who is underpaid getting a pay bump either in AAV or years which is what we got with Marte here.
Ketel Marte – 6 years, 116 million, 11.5 million dollar player option
The Orioles have players that would fit into all three of these kinds of extension options but they haven’t extended anyone.
Now it is easy for me to just yell Extend! Extend! Extend! everyday but there’s always a reason why these things are difficult and we don’t know what the players are asking for, what David Rubenstein is budgeting, or most importantly, what MIke Elias is interested in doing.
So let’s look at the three sides and try to examine what is causing the hold up on these extensions. We’ll start with the players’ side.
The Players
Scott Boras
I’ll start with the elephant in the room that is Scott Boras. Scott Boras is the agent you hire when you intend to get every penny you’re worth and more. Boras is known for regularly speaking out against arb and pre arb extensions as something that is disadvantageous to the players and overly beneficial to the team so even though agents work for the players you can trust that at every turn Scott Boras is advising his clients to turn down every extension offer that comes their way and the fact that a player has Scott Boras as their agent signals that the player is onboard with that strategy.
Jose Altuve famously had to fire Scott Boras to get his first extension with the Astros done and then rehired Boras back when he realized how much he got screwed by that contract. I’m sure that’s a great “look at what happens when you don’t listen to me” story that Boras can whip out in a meeting where a player is considering signing a team friendly extension.
In recent years Boras client Juan Soto turned down a 400 million dollar extension offer from the Nationals and this past year signed an absurd 765 million dollar contract with the Mets. So Boras has both a long track record of getting guys paid and he also negotiated the most recent mega deal.
Now the agent does work for the player so if one of the guys that Boras represents wanted to sign with the Orioles or the Orioles made an offer that the player wanted to accept in spite of Boras’ strategy it could still get done. I don’t believe it’s as simple as “Well he’s a Boras client so just give up”.
Even if that were the case however that would only excuse the Orioles from extending a few of their players as Boras does not represent the entire team. Of the guys the Orioles could have interest in extending Boras represents only Henderson, Westburg, Holliday and Rodriguez which admittedly might be 2 or 3 of the guys you’d most like to see extended but it’s not the entirety of the roster.
No Consensus On Value
By this I mean that there are certain players on the Orioles that if they were offered a deal that was more than fair based on what they had done so far might turn it down because they believe that they are better than what they’ve shown.
For example if the Orioles put the Cal Raleigh extension in front of Adley Rutschman and let’s say because Adley is a little younger they added another year and 22 million to it so instead of 6 years 108 million it was 7 years 130 million that would be a more or less fair offer as Raleigh and Rutshman are very similar from a WAR perspective in their careers but I could easily see Adley thinking that he hasn’t shown us the best version of himself yet and turning that down anticipating that if he can put up a 6 WAR season and be by far the best catcher in baseball that he could get 10s of millions more than what he is currently hypothetically getting offered in this scenario.
I could see several Orioles thinking that way. Jordan Westburg made the all star team in his first season as a full time starter. If he can prove he’s a perennial all star at third base in his pre arb years then he would be in line for a massive payday.
Colton Cowser showed that he can play an elite centerfield in spurts last year, if he were to get the chance to prove that over an entire season that would drive his price up.
Jackson Holliday would have to be either stupid or desperate to sign a contract after his disastrous rookie season his price can only go up as he plays more.
This is not a unique challenge facing the Orioles and to some extent every front office that wants to sign a guy to an extension has to convince that player that the deal they are offering is worth passing up on the opportunity to prove that you are worth more.
If Garrett Crochet had put together 2 seasons of Cy Young Caliber pitching he would have been in line for a contract similar to what Gerrit Cole signed in 2019 but whatever the Red Sox said to him in those negotiation they convinced him that taking the money now was better than trying to earn a bigger deal later.
Health
This is similar to the value conversation but there are certain guys that it would be great to extend like Grayson Rodriguez and Kyle Bradish that if they could prove that they can get through a season healthy it would increase their negotiating leverage and if they got through a season healthy and pitching like an ace like they believe they can it would increase their negotiating leverage dramatically.
So these injured pitchers aren’t really incentivized to try to get an extension before they’ve proven they can be healthy and to an extent the Orioles have a right to be skeptical of signing players who have been injured as much as these guys.
It would be interesting to see the Orioles throw some money at Kyle Bradish before he returns just to see if he’d take it though.
Want To
I touched on this earlier but what have the Orioles done to make players want to sign an extension? If you are in talks with the Orioles about signing an extension who can you be certain will be around if you commit long term?
Why would Colton Cowser want to sign an 8 year deal here if in 3-4 years all his friends are going to have left in free agency?
If you are Grayson Rodriguez and you ask Corbin Burnes what it was like to negotiate with the Orioles for a contract and he tells you “they didn’t even make an offer.” How does that make you feel?
Jackson Merrill talked about how he wanted to sign with the Padres because he liked the situation and that’s because when you sign long term with the Padres you know for certain you are going to be teammates with Fernando Tatis Jr, Manny Machado and Xander Bogaerts for the entirety of your contract and whether or not 40 year old Manny is going to be a good player clearly knowing what you are getting into is attractive.
So other teams are offering their young players the chance to lock themselves in next to future Hall of Famers and the Orioles are promising that they will maintain payroll flexibility so they can bring in an entire rotation of washed up pitchers on 1 year deals each year.
I would like to see this trend reversed and I believe that if the Orioles could start with signing ANY one of their young players to an extension it would make it easier to sign more of them but as of right now it doesn’t feel like they have created an environment where a player would approach them for an extension.
David Rubenstein
I know that the start of the David Rubenstein era has been a little disappointing for some people. When he first started talking about there being no financial limit to the team it felt like some long term extensions were imminent but none followed.
This is because David Rubenstein did not appoint himself as GM or even shadow GM of the Orioles and up until this point he has continued to trust Mike Elias’ vision for the team and that vision does not include signing guys to extensions.
It is easy to wish that Rubenstein would come over the top and get on the phone with Adley Rutschman’s agent and just pay whatever the agent asks for but that is a slippery slope that can lead to disastrous consequences.
The example I think of is with the Phoenix Suns and their owner Matt Ishbia. When Ishbia first bought the team one of the first things he wanted to do was trade for Kevin Durant. The GM of the Suns James Jones had been trying to trade for KD but the Nets were asking for an absurdly steep price and Jones couldn’t bring himself to meet it causing the trade talks to stall.
Ishbia stepped in after buying the team and got on the phone with the owner of the Brooklyn Nets and gave him everything they were asking for in exchange for Kevin Durant. Out the door went Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson, Jae Crowder and 5 first round picks.
For the next few months the Suns got to be title contenders and everyone was really excited for them and then they lost in the second round of the playoffs to the Nuggets and they’ve been on a sharp decline ever since. Ishbia continues to try to spend his way out of the hole he created but at this point every trade or signing they make is throwing good money after bad and the Suns today are much further from winning a title than they were when Ishbia bought them despite the fact that Ishbia has done everything in his power to build a winner.
Now the NBA and the MLB are very different leagues but an overzealous new owner can cause a lot of harm and once Rubenstein decides he can overrule Elias once what’s to stop him from doing it again and then before you know it Jordan Westburg has been traded for Aaron Nola and Samuel Basallo has been traded for Dylan Cease and the Orioles have a better rotation but a much worse future because their GM is makes moves based on his twitter mentions.
So even if I am also disappointed that Rubenstein’s group coming in didn’t immediately result in any long term extensions I think it is better to have an owner that defaults to the baseball minds in the front office rather than have an owner that thinks he is a baseball mind just because he bought the team.
That being said I would hope that Rubenstein as a businessman would recognize how valuable it is to have identifiable faces to associate with a brand long term rather than having an ever rotating cast of characters every few years and having the only constant be the GM.
In at least 1 if not 2 interviews he has specifically mentioned Adley and Gunnar as two people who he would like to have around in Baltimore for their entire careers similar to Cal Ripken and Jim Palmer which is very promising to hear but he also has made the caveat of that’s not how baseball works anymore which is less promising.
One of the quotes that worried me the most with Rubenstein was one where he talked about how it’s hard to sign a pitcher to an 8 year deal because “how many pitchers are good at 38” and while that is technically correct it does seem like a word for word explanation that Mike Elias would have shared for not making a real offer to Corbin Burnes. I worry that because Rubenstein defers to Elias on baseball matters he might allow himself to be convinced of things that are not necessarily true. Similar to how Nico Harrison was able to convince the Mavs owners that Luka Doncic was a problem and needed to be traded.
Sorry for all the NBA references.
Anyway Rubenstien has said in many ways that money is not a problem so I and many Orioles fans would like to see that money be used in a way that makes the future of the Orioles secure and exciting.
Mike Elias
Does this blog feel a little negative to you? It’s feeling a little negative to me so before I talk more about Mike Elias’ role in the non existent contract extensions I should start by saying that everything Mike Elias did to get to this point is very impressive. Besides turning around one of the worst on field teams in the league, he led the effort to revamp the Orioles approach to data & analytics, transformed their international scouting and obviously he has a very impressive record in the draft.
After doing so much to take an Orioles team that was on it’s way to becoming Colorado Rockies East and turn them into the team with the most wins in AL East over the last 3 seasons Elias deserves to be given an extended chance to build around this core of players.
That being said, it feels like in his quest to build a sustainable winner he is prioritizing payroll flexibility over winning and is more concerned with never being painted into a corner by a bad contract than making sure this core of players wins a World Series.
To his credit he has been very successful at avoiding that exact kind of mistake.
There are teams that do operate this way. They never sign players to big contracts that might age poorly when a prospect debuts, they play through their first two years of arbitration and then get traded so the team can recoup their value before they leave in free agency and the team turns over it’s players every few years.
The front offices for those teams are hailed as being baseball geniuses and their teams generally win more games than they lose each year but those teams never win the World Series. The actually good teams extend their players and have multiple players on long term deals because that’s how you get good players on your team year after year. You don’t get any bonus points for winning with you hand behind your back and there are no trophies for payroll flexibility.
None of the Orioles young core has walked away in free agency yet so it is a little silly to be pre mad at Elias for not extending Adley or Gunnar when there is still time to do so. However as time passes the window to win while these guys are on cheap pre arb contracts is closing and so far Elias has balked at the chance to be aggressive while this core is absurdly cheap so it feels likely he will balk again when it is time to sign these players. It feels more and more likely that instead of a press conference announcing a Gunnar extension, in a few years we’ll get a media availability where Elias says they where in a lot of talks to sign Gunnar but they ultimately decided the money was better spent elsewhere and now Griff O’Ferrall or whoever gives the Orioles the best shot to win.
I hope I’m wrong and Elias is excited to sign one his own draft picks to a big deal but it feels like if he had to choose between an extension or having the flexibility so that he can sign 6 pitchers to 1 year deals he’ll choose the flexibility. Again I would love to be wrong, please let me be wrong.
The Dishwasher 
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