Who Lands the Next Huge Extension?

A new trend has begun in Major League Baseball: locking up your young core players to long deals. The first big extension to a young stud came back in 2008. After not only being on the big league roster for a week the Rays signed Evan Longoria to a 6 year deal, with three options, keeping him around until 2016. Philadelphia got the ball rolling last year with a 5 year $125 million extension to Ryan Howard (at the time he already had two years left on his contract so it locked him up through 2016 with an option in 2017). Then this year the Rockies made a big splash when they inked Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez to long term deals (Tulo: 6 years (on top of his remaining 3 year deal) $120 million; Car-Go: 7 year $80.5 million). In just the last couple weeks things kept rolling as the Red Sox finally inked Adrian Gonzalez to a 7 year deal worth $154 million; and, after a great start, the Brewers signed Ryan Braun through 2020. You'll notice that most of these players were under 30 when they signed their deals, with Longo being the youngest at 23 and Howard being the oldest at 30.

The thing is teams are getting smart. Despite how much talent you have it's not worth anything if you don't have anyone to build around. Also, you'll notice a lot of these contracts are located in smaller markets. Those teams are realizing they can't compete with free agency and need to act now to keep their players around. It isn't enough to go year-to-year anymore in arbitration and then try to lock the player up. To build a successful core teams are now having to lock players up sooner and sooner. It's smart team building and payroll structuring. Going into the future the question becomes: who's next? So, as long as I can keep coming up with candidates, every now and then I'm going to start posting stories about who the next mega-extension candidate could, and should, be. The first could be just around the corner.

Side Note: as you will notice none of these candidates will be pitchers. Even though we have seen some bigger/longer extensions to pitchers (Felix Hernandez, Josh Johnson, Jon Lester) they still don't seem as common as the big contracts going to position players. That's because with the increased risk that comes with pitchers teams are much happier to go year-to-year for a while to make sure they know that the player's are healthy with sturdy arms.