The Blue Jays have made another contract offer to Vladimir Guerrero Jr., reports Buster Olney of ESPN. No specifics of the offer have been publicly reported but Olney says a gap remains between the two sides.
The will-they-won’t-they between the Jays and Guerrero has been playing out for years now, but with a special focus on the drama this winter. Guerrero is now slated for free agency after the 2025 season, which begins today for the Jays. It’s common for players to set Opening Day as a deadline in contract talks, to avoid distractions during the season. Guerrero initially went a step further and set a deadline of February 18, the opening of Spring Training.
That day came and went without a deal getting done, though Guerrero subsequently said he would keep the door open if the Jays wanted to come back to the table. Reportedly, Guerrero’s asking price was a deal of at least 14 years and worth $500MM. The Jays reportedly did make him an offer in February with a sticker price of $500MM, but with deferrals that would knock the net present value down to the $400-450MM range. Guerrero is said to be open to deferrals generally but would still like the NPV to get to that $500MM line.
In a sense, that $50-100MM gap is not large. For a deal of that length, that’s about $3.5MM to $7MM annually. In an annual baseball budget, that’s what clubs spend on a veteran reliever or a backup catcher. That would appear to be a bridgeable gap. That’s perhaps especially true when looking at the broader picture. Guerrero has been the face of the franchise for many years now. The Jays have tried to sign other marquee players like Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto and Roki Sasaki but without success.
The regime of president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins has seemingly left a large segment of the fanbase discontent. There has been a lot of regular season success in recent years but the Jays have been swept in all of their most recent playoff appearances. Many things went wrong in 2024, which exacerbated the frustration.
Letting Guerrero walk for a relatively small financial gap would likely be unwelcome from a public relations perspective, whereas getting a deal done on Opening Day could theoretically provide a nice boost to fan morale.
The front office seems to view the situation as one that can be resolved. Shapiro recently expressed confidence that a deal would get done, either an extension or later in free agency. That was an unusual bit of candor, since front office types usually duck questions about ongoing negotiations. Atkins made somewhat similar comments yesterday, per Hazel Mae of Sportsnet and Keegan Matheson of MLB.com.
Presumably, this new offer from the Jays has moved closer to Guerrero’s asking price. Though as mentioned, no details have been publicly reported. A deal in this range would be fairly unprecedented, for the Jays or any other club.
As of a few months ago, no player had received a contract with an NPV at $500MM or higher. At the start of the 2024-25 offseason, the largest deal on record was Ohtani’s ten-year, $700MM pact with the Dodgers. Thanks to the heavy deferrals in that deal, Major League Baseball calculated the AAV as $46.06MM with the MLBPA at $43.78MM, meaning the NPV on the deal was roughly $437-460MM. Even those reduced numbers were all records, in terms of largest guarantee and largest AAV ever.
Each of those numbers is now a distant second, thanks to Soto’s deal. He got $765MM over 15 years with no deferrals, meaning his net present value shattered Ohtani’s. The AAV on that is $51MM, which also went notably beyond Ohtani’s deferral-adjusted AAV.
A hypothetical deal worth $500MM over 14 years would be a $35.7MM AAV. That would be well below Soto and Ohtani but still put Guerrero in the top 15 of all contracts by AAV, ahead of players like Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor and Mookie Betts. The total guarantee would be second all-time, when adjusting Ohtani’s down.
Guerrero hasn’t been quite as elite as Ohtani or Soto but still has a strong track record for a player his age. Many top prospects don’t reach the majors until their mid-20s but Guerrero just turned 26 earlier this month, which is a huge part of his earning power. He already has 819 games under his belt with 160 home runs, a .288/.363/.500 batting line and 137 wRC+. He was even better than that in both 2021 and 2024. Though he dipped a bit in the two seasons in between, he hit .323/.396/.544 for a 165 wRC+ last year. He’s not an especially strong defender at first but he has accomplished a lot with the bat already. If he and the Jays can’t work out a new deal, he will be one of the top free agents of next year’s class.
Photo courtesy of Nathan Ray Seebeck, Imagn Images
