Yes but no. It’s complicated.
The baseball world has been not-so-patiently waiting for the so-called Boras Four to sign contracts. After Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto signed their deals in December, it seemed everything else would fall into place around baseball. But the holidays came and went and the new year came and went and January came and went. Matt Chapman, Blake Snell, Jordan Montgomery, and Cody Bellinger remained unsigned.
They made it to Spring Training without deals. Pitchers and catchers from all 30 teams reported, then position players did. The Boras Four stayed put.
The ice finally started to crack on Sunday when Bellinger — one of the more polarizing free agents in recent history — re-signed with the Chicago Cubs.
But it wasn’t the contract anyone expected. At the start of the free agency period, the four best contract projection websites — ESPN, The Athletic, Fangraphs, and MLB Trade Rumors — pegged Bellinger for a deal ranging from seven years and $147 million to 12 years and $264 million.
I always like to give a “you don’t need to read what I write” disclaimer early in the article, so you can opt out before wasting too much time. So here’s that disclaimer: I wrote of MLBTR’s 12-year, $264 million projection that, “I lean towards them being the most accurate.” They were not. No one was even close to accurate.
It seems that after a poor 2021 and 2022, teams were not quite buying Bellinger’s bounce-back in 2023. Presumably the single-season rebound, the poor underlying hitting metrics, and the qualifying offer all worked together and suppressed his value, leading Bellinger to sign a pillow contract with the one team that wouldn’t have to give up a draft pick to sign him.
And so he landed on a truly funky contract: three years and $80 million, with opt-outs after both the first and second years. It’s a contract that benefits both teams, but holy heck does it feature a wonky risk-to-reward ratio for the Cubs. The best-case scenario — the thing Chicago will be hoping and praying happens — is that Bellinger only plays one more season for them. In order to chase that reward, the Cubbies are willing to take on the risk of paying him $52.5 million in 2025 and 2026 if he’s no longer good … and he has a very extensive and recent history of being pretty bad.
Mind you, every free agent — especially one with a roller coaster of recent performance — comes with a whole lot of risk. But when the reward is just one season of that player — and not even a compensatory draft pick if he signs elsewhere next offseason — it’s a tougher pill to swallow.
The semi-surprising contract was, less surprisingly, met by a chorus of angry San Francisco Giants fans. Opt-outs didn’t scare the team from Michael Conforto and Mitch Haniger and Ross Stripling but it kept them from a 28-year old former MVP?
The risk is obviously significantly stronger with Bellinger, because of the money he can opt into and the draft pick that the Giants would lose; that wasn’t the case with Conforto, Haniger, or Stripling. More importantly, the risk for Bellinger is much higher with San Francisco.
Even if Bellinger prefers the city of San Francisco to Chicago (unlikely) or thinks the Giants are in better position to succeed than the Cubs are (nearly impossible), there’s no denying that Wrigley Field is a better place to hit than Oracle Park … a fact that’s tripled for left-handed hitters, and quadrupled for left-handed hitters that don’t have extreme power.
I’m of the opinion that ballpark doesn’t matter as much in free agency as we make it out to be, but it’s different when we’re talking about the 13-year deal that Carlos Correa agreed to and the glorified one-year, reset-your-value contract that Bellinger ultimately decided to seek. The whole point of the deal (in addition to, you know, making more money in a year than I’ll make in my life) is to put up shiny numbers for the second year in a row and chase that 12-year, $264 million deal next year, when the sample size of a return to form is larger.
The Giants would have to pay a pretty penny to convince Bellinger to pursue that strategy at a ballpark designed to make left-handed hitters question their life choices. And that’s before getting to the fact that San Francisco doesn’t have a spot in center field to play Bellinger, thus confining him to auditioning lesser defensive positions.
There’s a temptation when a player signs a contract to ask, “the Giants couldn’t match that?” as if they could have waved a wand and a pen and signed Bellinger to the same three-year, $80 million deal.
They could not have. Three years, $90 million? Also no. Three years, $100 million? Honestly, I’m guessing it’s an easy, easy no.
The Giants could have signed Bellinger. That 12-year, $264 million deep water fish that he was looking for was ripe for the picking, and it — or a modified version of it — will be next year, too. Maybe something in between — say, a six-year, $165 million deal with opt-outs after the second and fourth years — also might have done the trick.
But nothing remotely close to what the Cubs gave Bellinger would have worked. And by the time you get to more realistic deals, they lose any and all appeal quickly.
There’s also, of course, the matter of the remaining free agents. The Giants remain in on Matt Chapman and Blake Snell and, to a lesser extent, Jordan Montgomery. For now, not signing Bellinger looks like the right move. But if they also don’t sign Chapman, Snell, or Montgomery, then it’s time to circle back to the most important of proverbs: scared money does not, in fact, make money.
The Giants could not have signed Bellinger to that contract, and they should not have signed him to a modified version that he would have accepted. But they can and they should sign someone else. And if they don’t, Bellinger will look like another missed opportunity that could have been avoided with less frugality.