When the Phillies announced a four-year extension with young left-hander Cristopher Sanchez yesterday, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski revealed to reporters (including Matt Gelb of The Athletic) that the deal isn’t one they would have considered making if Sanchez and his agent, Gene Mato, hadn’t approached him about the possibility of a long-term deal. Even at that point, Dombrowski noted that he had some reservations about negotiating in-season.
“As much as we’d love to have him, during the middle of the season, it’s not normally something that I would like to get into,” Dombrowski said, as relayed by Gelb. “Because it can be a distraction for the player.”
Fortunately, the extension talks didn’t take very long as Gelb notes that it took just one week of negotiations before the sides settled on the four-year, $22.5MM guarantee with two club options that could extend the club’s window of control over Sanchez through the end of the 2030 campaign. The smooth negotiations between Dombrowski and Sanchez’s camp appear to have been crucial in pushing the deal across the finish line given the Phillies’ stated concerns that a protracted negotiation process could become a distraction from the season at hand.
That apparent trepidation with regards to in-season extensions could serve as a clue for how the Phillies will approach left-hander Ranger Suarez, who Gelb notes the Phillies have interest in extending. Suarez is currently slated to hit free agency following the 2025 season, but Gelb notes that talks have yet to progress between the sides and appear likely to wait until after the 2024 campaign has concluded. For his part, Dombrowski noted that the club “love[s]” Suarez and that they “hope that he’s part of the organization for a long time,” but also declined to discuss the state of negotiations with the lefty.
If the Phillies want to extend Suarez, it’s sure to come with a much heftier price tag than the Sanchez extension. Sanchez’s deal is more or less in line with the low end of what pitchers in his service time bracket have received in extensions, just ahead of the $18.8MM guarantee the Red Sox gave to right-hander Garrett Whitlock but a far cry from the $50M+ guarantees afforded to Boston’s Brayan Bello and Cincinnati’s Hunter Greene. Suarez, who will be just one year from free agency this offseason, is in a completely different realm of contract expectations.
The two hurlers to sign extensions with just one year to go before free agency in recent memory are Mariners right-hander Luis Castillo and Blue Jays right-hander Jose Berrios, both of whom did so shortly after being dealt to new teams the previous summer. Castillo signed a $108MM guarantee over five years with Seattle, while Berrios signed in Toronto on a seven-year deal that guaranteed him $131MM. Both hurlers had a much longer track record of success in the starting rotation at the time of their extensions than Suarez, who didn’t become a full-time starting pitcher until the 2022 season.
On the other hand, however, Suarez has undeniably been more dominant than either hurler in the years leading up to the start of extension negotiations. The lefty has pitched to a 2.91 ERA (142 ERA+) with a 3.39 FIP in 478 2/3 innings of work since the start of the 2021 season. That eclipses the work of both Berrios (118 ERA+, 3.78 FIP) and Castillo (132 ERA+, 3.43 FIP) on a rate basis in their final four years before signing, though both Castillo and Berrios had 120+ additional innings of work over that same timeframe. Much of Suarez’s ultimate price tag will surely depend on how he finishes the 2024 campaign; the lefty currently leads all of MLB with an incredible 1.75 ERA through 15 starts this year and figures to find himself in the thick of the Cy Young conversation at year’s end if he can keep anything close to this production up over a full year.
