On Thursday, the Pittsburgh Pirates announced they were calling up baseball’s consensus top prospect, shortstop and sometime center fielder, Konnor Griffin. The 19-year-old wasn’t promoted for Opening Day due to a combination of factors that had more to do with team control and leverage toward a contract, but his high strikeout rate in spring training provided cover for the Pirates to send him to Triple-A. Apparently, he had some things to learn about hitting upper level pitching, and needed five
games for the Indianapolis Indians to really get ready for major league pitching. Yes, that’s sarcasm. Not coincidentally, it was announced today that Griffin and the Pirates were close to finalizing a nine-year, $140 million extension offer. We’ll see if those are the final terms of the deal, but Red Sox outfielder Roman Anthony’s eight-year, $130 million contract signed last August set a pretty good range for a similar deal to Griffin.
Of course, there’s another elite prospect already tearing it up in the major leagues who is in line for a long-term extension offer. Jeff Passan reported in his Griffin article that sources had told him the Tigers and Kevin McGonigle had had some discussions about a long-term deal as well. Frankly, it’s about as slim as that kind of report can be, offering zero specifics. The actual story could be as little as a preliminary conversation with McGonigle’s representation, or it might not have even gotten that far. Still, we’ve been talking about an extension as well, and everyone knows McGonigle is the type of prospect you want to quickly offer a fair long-term deal to, betting on him as a long-time franchise player and trying to mitigate the cost of his potential free agent years by locking them up now until he’s in his early 30’s. However, as we’ll explore further on, there are some serious complicating factors that make this a lot more difficult decision for the Tigers than for the Pirates.
Griffin and McGonigle have been ranked 1-2 by just about every national prospect site of note. There’s certainly a good argument for Griffin based on a little more power potential and likely better defensive abilities at shortstop, but it’s really splitting hairs after watching McGonigle’s upgraded defense this spring and also seeing him post some elite sprint times that upped his secondary tool grades significantly. The one major difference is that Griffin will turn 20 later this month, while McGonigle will turn 22 in August. So there are roughly two less years of likely prime performance in McGonigle’s case. Of course, that just speaks to how precocious a hitter Griffin is at this point.
Teams have been doing more and more of this in recent years, whereas once it was more the province of small market, small payroll teams like the Rays. Those teams wouldn’t compete in free agency, and had to find creative ways of getting maximum value out of their best young players. While the vagaries of pitching injuries makes this much less appealing with a young pitcher, the top positional prospects have been getting these type of offers more and more, and from teams who could otherwise afford them in free agency anyway, but want to try and get a long-term bargain and spread the cost of a such a deal out over the 8-10 year terms this sort of deal usually is designed to cover.
There’s a theory that the added push to lock top young players up long-term is related to expectations for the new CBA to be negotiated next winter. The owners want a salary cap and floor system. The players union does not, and with Tony Clark gone and former lead negotiator Bruce Meyer now running the union, and a substantially bulked up war chest, reportedly at $400 million per Passan, they may still be in position to make a stand and either prevent the cap they have always opposed, or at least force the league and franchises to open up their books to ensure that the players share of revenue is protected in such a system. Expectations for an ugly, protracted fight over this are already quite high.
The players have been leaking their share of revenue for most of the century. Some reports had their share at 56 percent back in 2002, and now, while assessments vary since only the Braves are a publicly owned franchise, most estimates fall between 40-45 percent of total league revenue. The players union peaked under the leadership of Donald Fehr from 1985 when the former MLBPA general counsel took over as acting director, to 2009, when he passed the reins to handpicked successor and former general counsel, Michael Weiner. Weiner died in 2013 at only 51 years of age of a brain tumor. His deputy, Tony Clark, took over as the first former player to head the union.
It would be fair to suggest that things have not gone the union’s way without an actual specialist in labor law in charge. Some think that the move to a more qualified leader in Meyer will help the MLBPA to push back, but that certainly remains to be seen. What is pretty clear to everyone is that this next CBA is going to be a battle as bad, and likely worse, than the last CBA fight during the 2021-2022 offseason that kept players locked out into March before a deal was agreed upon.
The theory is that teams are trying to lock up their young talent in the expectation that currently signed deals may be exempt to one degree or another, from any proposed salary cap. Obviously they can’t just tell the Dodgers to ditch $100 million or more in player salaries to comply starting next year, as an example.
This brings us back to young Mr. McGonigle. He isn’t represented by Scott Boras as far as I can tell, though the only information available publicly states that he does have professional representation, so this isn’t a situation like Colt Keith’s, where his mother negotiated a long-term deal for her son. But since he’s not a Boras client, an extension is at least a reasonable possibility.
Parameters for the terms of such a deal seem pretty simple to develop based on Anthony and Griffin’s deals. Anthony is only a few months older, so a term of eight or nine years seems most likely. The average annual value of Anthony’s deal is $16,250,000. The reported nine year, $140 million deal to Griffin would average $15,555,555. So we can guess that McGonigle can reasonably expect to get Anthony’s deal, and because these things build on each other as precedent’s, probably a little more.
The Pirates presumably held Griffin’s major league debut as a bargaining chip to get him and his representation to compromise somewhat on a deal. The Tigers didn’t mess around, promoting McGonigle immediately. There are plenty of other reasons why this would be a pretty dangerous move for the Tigers right now.
After their offseason spending spree, the Tigers are now roughly $2.5M from surpassing the luxury tax threshold. Digging through the whole CBA is beyond my pay grade, but former Tigers executive Mike Smith pointed out on X that breaching the luxury tax threshold would cost the Tigers their competitive balance round pick in 2027, a cut of their international bonus pool for the next signing period, as well as pushing back any compensation picks from players like Tarik Skubal and Casey Mize rejecting a qualifying offer this offseason.
Those are some pretty steep penalties. For luxury tax purposes, calculations per player are based on the average annual value of their contract. Based on that, the Tigers can’t just pay McGonigle $2.0M this year and push the rest of the money into the remaining years of such a contract to avoid breaching the threshold. All those picks have quite a bit of value. The actual 20 percent tax on such an overage isn’t really the real concern as it would probably come out to less than $4.0M total. However, as Smith also pointed out, the language in the CBA is pretty tricky on this point as to whether a deal could be signed that begins in 2027, avoiding the luxury tax hit.
Of course, if the Tigers trade for a player at the deadline, they’re pretty likely to go over the threshold anyway by taking on that salary. They may have already accepted that this is likely to happen. By offering McGonigle a deal in that $140M range right now, there is a pretty good chance they’ll be saving themselves a lot more money in the end. Should McGonigle have a good season and prove himself out as a 4 WAR player or more, such an extension next offseason, CBA negotiations willing, might end up costing more like $200 million. So there is a lot going on here under the surface.
My instinct says to just lock him up, and that the threshold is likely unavoidable this year unless they have a rough year and end up selling at the deadline. Kevin McGonigle is pretty likely to only get more expensive. But if there is any way to sign a deal that begins in 2027 and avoid the luxury tax hit and the draft pick and IFA money penalties, that’s obviously the way to go.
