Yesterday the Orioles signed their top prospect Samuel Basallo to an 8 year 67 million dollar guaranteed extension, with a team option and escalators that can get the deal up to 9 years 88.5 million.
This extension is a major departure for how the Orioles have done things during Mike Elias’ tenure in fact since he took over in 2018 the Orioles are the only team to not have extended one of their players to a long term deal and now they’ve handed out the largest pre-arb extension for a catcher in the history of baseball.
So it’s a big deal! This contract means a lot, not just to Basallo who has now guaranteed himself generational wealth but also to Elias and the other players who are part of this core.
So let’s talk about all the interested parties.
Samuel Basallo
I’ll start with Basallo because it’s his day and his accomplishment.
Basallo is a special hitter. When you look at his Prospect Savant page he is in the 95th percentile or better in all the most important offensive stats, xwOBA, xSLG, 50th% EV, 90% EV, Barrel %, and hard hit % he’s among the best of the best and that’s while being on average 6 years younger than the other players in triple A.
He has elite bat speed and he manages to walk the tightrope of swinging very hard while not striking out at a rate that makes him a bad hitter. It’s not like Basallo is Luis Arraez, he’ll still strike out a fair amount but if he can maintain the 23% K rate he had in the minors this year in the majors he’ll be a great hitter and if he can improve on it in over the next few years he’ll basically be Yordan Alvarez.
The age thing is an important factor too, Basallo just turned 21 two weeks ago, he’s younger than Adley was when he was drafted, so when you think about everything he has shown that he can do you have to factor in that that is a player that is still developing and should continue getting better over the first 4-5 years of this contract.
The idea of having a player who could potentially be one of the best hitters in baseball on the team for 9 years is very exciting but maybe the most important part of this extension is that Basallo is a shining example for the Orioles international scouting and development.
Before Basallo, the Orioles international scouts and evaluators could talk about all their resources and strategies for helping young prospects get to the big leagues but there was nobody they could point to and say we did that.
When you are competing with all the other teams for the best prospects in the Dominican Republic I imagine it’ll be nice for the Orioles to be able to say “Samuel Basallo signed with us and we helped turn him into a top prospect and then we gave him a big contract the week he made it to the big leagues and we could do the same for you!” rather than “You could be the first person we’ve signed to make it to the big leagues!”
So whether Samuel Basallo is a perennial MVP candidate at catcher or just a pretty good DH he’s already done a lot for the Orioles by being their proof of concept for their international scouting and development.
Mike Elias
If you’ve read any of my past blogs you know that I am not very high on Mike Elias but that’s not going to stop me from acknowledging that he did a good job here.
According to Basallo’s MASN interview the contract talks started almost immediately once he was called up and they found a number they could agree on very quickly.
They clearly identified Basallo as someone that they were confident enough in that they were willing to offer the extension before he had proved anything which is something I’m not sure that they’ve been willing to do in the past. This is key because if they had chosen to wait and see how he did the rest of the season he might have gone on a tear and then priced himself out.
What they got was a mutually beneficial deal. Basallo gets the security of knowing that no matter how good he is at baseball for the rest of his life he’s going to earn at least 67 million dollars while still having the opportunity to hit free agency at an age where he could cash out big again and the Orioles get potentially 3 very valuable free agent years at a cost controlled amount. If Basallo is a bust or just ok the amount they’ve agreed to pay him isn’t so much that they’ll wreck the payroll and if he’s awesome they’ll get incredible value.
If I can allow myself to be nitpicky I was a little disappointed they didn’t get this up to a 10 year deal. Several of these super early extensions like Roman Anthony and Jackson Chourio have gotten to that 10 year mark so after I finished celebrating the fact that the Orioles had extended someone I did think “Huh, a year shorter than Roman.”
I’d be interested to know who wanted to keep the deal shorter. Was it Basallo’s people wanting to cash in on the free agency at a younger age or was it Mike Elias worried about getting stuck paying Basallo for 10 years if he doesn’t pan out, but alas I wasn’t in the room where it happened.
Like I said I am nitpicking here and I’d much rather them sign Basallo to a 9 year deal than not sign him to anything because they couldn’t agree on how much he would get paid in year 10 so I’ll leave it alone.
The part of this extension where Elias deserves to most credit is how he transformed the Orioles international scouting. When Elias was hired in 2018 the Orioles had no real presence in the Dominican Republic, they were purposefully not participating in that part of amateur scouting.
It’s not like the Dominican Republic has just been discovered either; the Orioles were decades behind other teams when it came to international scouting. Perhaps Elias’ single greatest accomplishment as GM of the Orioles for which he’ll be known for once he’s gone is how he changed that.
With the news that Basallo had signed his extension the story of how he joined the Orioles organization re circulated a little bit and just do a small recap, Basallo was originally going to sign with the Yankees but they lost some of their bonus pool money when they signed Gerrit Cole and the Orioles swooped in and scooped him up.
This just flatly doesn’t happen if Elias isn’t hired in 2018, so he deserves credit not only for getting the deal signed but for getting the Orioles in a position where they could even sign a 16 year old Samuel Basallo.
Since I’m just bathing the Orioles front office in compliments today, the big question for me is; Am I ready to stop calling for them to be fired?
I haven’t been shy in several of my past blogs about wanting these guys fired. I won’t run through my entire list of grievances but long story short my stance was that they did a good job with the rebuild but that rebuilding and contending are different and they didn’t have what it takes to run a contending team.
The adjective I used pretty regularly was scared. I tried not to call them dumb (I might have called them dumb once or twice) because my real gripe was that they were too cautious and too risk averse to make the kind of all-in move that propels a team from being a good regular season team to being a World Series contender.
More than anything there was a passage from Evan Drellich’s book Winning Fixes Everything that talked about how it was Elias and Sig Mejdal’s dream to have a “sustainable pipeline” of young cost controlled talent were you drafted them, developed them, squeezed all the baseball you could out of them and then let them walk in free agency when they were no longer “cost effective assets”. I was worried that my favorite baseball team was going to be run like failed startup who was just acquired by a private equity firm where they specialize in making the good part of a company worse, charging more and then turning a profit while the customer base grows less and less satisfied.
When there is a book about you wanting to never pay anyone and then you go 7 years without extending anyone I don’t think it’s unreasonable for fans to arrive at the conclusion that these guys aren’t going to pay anyone and we’ll just have to get used to watching all our favorite players leave in free agency or get flipped at the trade deadline.
So the fact that they finally extended someone is a relief because it shows that they aren’t philosophically against the idea of offering extensions and maybe hints that the reason that more of these extensions haven’t been signed might have more to do with the players turning them down than the front office not offering them.
It’s definitely a step in the direction but it’s not like last week I wanted them fired and now that they managed to sign Samuel Basallo to a team friendly extension I’m going to start tweeting “Walk with Elias” every morning when I wake up.
In regards to my opinion on the front office, this extension is a potential building block. If they follow this extension with a really good offseason where they make some impact signings and a gutsy trade or two then I’ll be willing to say that this front office has learned from their mistakes, evolved and has improved at their contending team skills.
If this offseason is the same as always with a bunch of 1 year deals and on the first day of Spring Training they’re talking about how getting Bradish and Rodriguez back is like signing two big free agents then I’m going to view it like they finally found someone to accept a sub 100 million dollar extension and other than that they’re the same guys.
I hope that this is the beginning of something new with this front office. I’d much rather write about the great successes of the Orioles front office than the same old shortcomings.
Adley Rutschman
A very natural secondary reaction to the Basallo news was to think about what this means for Adley Rutschman. For fans of other teams it may very well have been their initial reaction. I broke the Basallo news to my Fantasy Baseball group chat and the first text I got back was “The Adley era is over” from an Astros fan in the chat.
I have to disagree with this nameless Astros fan, I don’t think the Basallo extension means that the Orioles are done with Adley Rutschman.
Starting in the immediate term, I am almost certain Adley will be on the Orioles next year. I don’t think the team is “over him” and I don’t expect the Orioles to try to trade him this offseason while his value is so low. (Now if a team wants to hand over a top of the rotation starter in exchange for 2 years of Adley I think that’s something you have to consider but there’s no way you’re going around trying to swap Adley for a couple of prospects.)
Basallo is not a lock to stick at catcher so I would expect that the plan is for Adley and Basallo to split time at catcher and DH in 2026 with Adley still catching most of the games while the team evaluates if Basallo is a long term fit behind the dish or if he’s destined for a 1B/DH.
Adley Rutschman’s long term future with the team is less certain. The question is, is Adley Rutschman the player we saw the first two and half years of his career or is he the guy we’ve seen for the last year and half.
If he’s the guy from the first two a half years then that’s your primary catcher of the future.
If he’s the guy from the last year and half then I’m not sure they’d give him the qualifying offer.
I believe that injuries are to blame for the recent under performance so my take is that if he’s healthy he’s the guy from the first two and half years and that the talent we saw those first seasons is still very much in there. However, at a certain point if you are so frequently injured that you don’t play up to your talent level over the course of multiple seasons then you might as well not have that talent.
Him being injured right now and possibly out for the rest of the season makes this even more difficult. In my 10 Reasons To Keep Watching the 2025 Orioles blog I had Adley as my number 1 reason because I thought if he could play well in the last few months of the season he could renew the front office’s faith in him and possibly work on an extension in the offseason.
Without the opportunity to play much for the rest of this season that means that 2026 is a massive prove it year for Adley Rutschman.
Here is the issue with that if you are the Orioles. If he proves it and has a 5 WAR season and looks like his old self and is giving interviews about finally being healthy again then he’ll pretty much instantly recoup all of his value just a year away from free agency and remain difficult to sign. If he has another dud then I wouldn’t blame the front office for not being confident enough in his body to offer him any sort of deal.
So we’ve reached a point where it feels all but guaranteed that Adley will reach free agency after the 2027 season and once we’re there anything can happen.
It’s a bummer because if he does end up going somewhere else it feels like a lock that he’ll be awesome there. It’ll be like watching Kyle Stowers go off on the Marlins but 10X worse.
Besides how the franchise feels about Adley there was also some speculation about how he must be feeling. In fact I saw all sorts of comments along the lines of wondering if the Orioles other top prospects would feel slighted by this extension like Basallo had jumped the line or something.
I’m not in their heads but I feel pretty confident saying that isn’t something to be overly concerned with. I imagine most if not all the Orioles young players have been offered and turned down something like what Samuel Basallo signed.
However I do think how Adley is feeling is interesting to think about. From the moment he was drafted he was supposed to be the franchise savior and now all of the sudden he’s in a prolonged slump, on the IL, and there’s a shiny new catcher getting standing ovations from the crowd at Camden Yards.
Like I said I’m sure he’s turned down much more expensive extension offers than what Basallo got so I’m not trying to say that the Orioles have done him wrong or anything but I’m sure most of the time since he debuted he figured he’d be an Orioles as long as he wanted to be and if he left it would be because he wanted to and now might be the first time it occurs to him that they might move on from him.
I’d imagine he’s frustrated with how the last two seasons have gone, from all the reports he worked really hard through the slump last year with Cody Asche (useless) and it was evident the first time he went on the IL this year he didn’t enjoy that at all.
I wonder what kind of internal messaging there was, if any. Did they talk to him and assure him he’s still part of their plans or did he learn about this from an Andy Kostka tweet.
Adley seems pretty laid back so I’m not worried about him causing any headaches and everyone in baseball is very professional these days so even if this was eating him up I doubt we’d ever hear about it., but you do wonder how this could impact his mental state.
Will he put more pressure on himself to prove he’s the better catcher? Will this help relax him since the attention is elsewhere? Is he going to do a Rocky style offseason workout plan to get into the best shape of his life? Will the weight lifting from the Rocky style training program result in an injury? Will he start the year on the IL with Tyler O’Neill because they both tore their quads doing a squat off?
There’s a lot to consider.
What’s next?
Seeing the Orioles sign someone to an extension has only made me hungry to see more extensions so my question is who’s next.
It’s actually a pretty short list because the Boras clients are most likely out. I won’t say it’s a zero percent chance because agents have to pass on offers to their clients and I’d like to think there’s a number where one of those Boras guys would say Scott I’ve gotta take this one. But I don’t see Elias as the type to overpay to the point where he could get a Boras client to pass on free agency so I’m crossing off the Boras guys.
That’s Gunnar, Westburg, Holliday, Rodriguez and I’ll also include Enrique Bradfield just for fun.
Here is a quick run through of the non Boras clients that I think the O’s would at least consider extending.
Adley Rustchman
I already did a whole thing on Adley but just to make sure my stance is clear I think Adley is very good and I would try to extend him this offseason but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s not in a negotiating mood after this season and I also wouldn’t blame the front office for being concerned too concerned about the injuries to want to sign him to long term deal.
Colton Cowser
Another guy who I think is better than the year he’s having. He also might not want to negotiate right now while he has a sub .700 OPS but as we’ve seen from Adley, having to negotiate after 2 bad years is worse than having to negotiate after 1 bad year.
Cowser has more holes in his game than some of the other top prospects, I think the inability to hit offspeed stuff and the resulting strikeouts are really concerning but he’s a good defender at a premium position, a clubhouse guy and hit 24 bombs in his rookie year.
I’d extend Cowser at the right price.
Coby Mayo
Mayo is a tough one. He really has not shown me nearly enough for me to feel like this is someone we should be confident will be good for the next 8 years, you’d basically be paying him off how good he was in Triple A last season.
However that is how the below market extensions go, you offer money to someone that can’t be certain they’ll ever make that much and they take it and you hope they become good enough that it’s a bargain.
I’d like to see Coby prove a little more and I’m sure he’d like to prove a little more.
Ryan Mountcastle
I don’t think this is a big priority right now considering Mansolino has already mentally non tendered him but Mounty’s been playing well since coming off the IL and if there’s an unforeseen trade shakeup in the offseason and suddenly some of the other people crowding the DH/ 1B position are gone maybe they could work something out.
Trevor Rogers
I maybe should have led with this one since it probably makes the most sense. Rogers has pitched better than anyone could have ever imagined he’d pitch this season and he has no record of being healthy for an extended period of time. Because of his injuries he’s set to make a paltry sum in arb next year. Wouldn’t he rather lock up some money before he has a chance to get hurt in his contract year?
On the flip side if he maybe he pitches to a 1.50 ERA next year and signed a 300 million dollar deal IDK I we can’t rule anything out with Trevor now.
In all seriousness Rogers should be motivated to cash out on his excellent 2025 season and the Orioles should be motivated to lock down a starting pitcher and get some cost certainty in the rotation.
Kyle Bradish
I’m sure Bradish would like to comeback and prove he’s an ace and then get paid accordingly and paying someone while they’re out with Tommy John sounds crazy so this probably doesn’t line up in the immediate future.
Dylan Beavers
If the O’s just offered him the exact same contract as Basallo do you think he’d take it?
Dean Kremer
Similar to Mounty this doesn’t seem like a current priority but Dean has been the orgs most reliable pitcher for the last 4 seasons and it feels like we should be interested in rewarding that. SP4s/SP5s don’t break the bank in free agency. Why not lock down a guy who can give you 180 innings a year at a 4 ERA?
The Dishwasher 
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