Spring training is a time for hope. It can come in two forms – fans hope their team will put it all together to make a run at a happier ending to their season than the one before while teams hope their players make it through the gamut unscathed. Injuries are a concern and everyone just wants to make it out alive.
Spring training is also a time for contract extensions. Teams were likely working behind the scenes during the winter to talk to player agents in the hopes that they can get a certain player to extend
their stay on the roster. The focus for many of those talks are on players that are either really close to free agency or really far away. These past few weeks around the game has seen teams trying to make sure their young talent that is further away from reaching free agency would agree to a deal that would make them instantly wealthy for an extended period of time while also securing their future at cheap reasonable rates while assuming a decent amount of risk that the deal will bust out. There has been a deal in Baltimore where the Orioles made sure Shane Baz sticks around while the Brewers and Mariners made sure their shortstop phenoms would spend their best years in their cities before even making a major league debut. Konnor Griffin jumped on the extension train hours before his major league debut, so it seems as though there is a pattern. The suspicion of teams getting ahead of things prior changes to the CBA, but for the most part, it’s just good business on the part of the team.
It makes one wonder if the Phillies would consider doing the same.
Right now, there are three contenders for getting this kind of extension: Justin Crawford, Andrew Painter and Aidan Miller. All three would fall into that category of “signing him now to avoid future expense”, but each would be their own special case. Were the team to sign Miller, it would look as though they were just joining in the young shortstop extension fun. With Crawford and Painter, it would be similar in that they were young players the team wished to make sure didn’t get too expensive, but at different positions, it would have a different shade of extension.
Aidan Miller
It seems that the new cool thing to do is signing your young shortstop that has yet to debut. As mentioned before, Pratt, Emerson and Griffin now have their grandchildren’s children set up for life with generational wealth while also preserving the ability to make even more money later on due to their current youth and end date of the contract. Looking down prospect lists and noticing that others might still do the same (Kevin McGonigle, J.J. Wetherholt, Jesus Made to name a few), one might wonder about if the Phillies were interested in doing the same. Where that might end up would depend on a few things.
The first thing to worry about is Miller’s health. They can continue to talk with optimism all they want with regards to his back injury, but those are the ones that scare teams. A lot. Miller would have to prove that he is capable of repeating the kind of season he had in 2025 without the fear that his back was going to give out before the team committed large swaths of money to his future.
The second thing is exactly that: do it again. He had a marvelous season in 2025 that catapulted him to the top of the team’s prospect rankings, yet he also was struggling to begin the season. Maybe seeing him repeat what he did last year, to a certain extent, would help soothe some of the fears that he just rode a hot streak, though scouting reports and under the hood numbers suggest he is more than capable of repeating his 2025 year.
Justin Crawford
Of the three players here, Crawford seems least likely to get an extension offer as it really just doesn’t feel like it would be necessary based on his offensive profile.
Why?
Baseball has been trending to power tools being more highly valued over hit tools for quite a while. The ideal is to find a player that can have both and can be developed and refined at the big league level, but if druthers were to be had, the power would be what teams wanted. We’ve already seen flashes of having both skills from McGonigle, who looks to have a preternatural feel for doing both and doing both quite well. With Crawford, his success at the minor league level is something that cannot be denied. He’s produced at every level he has played at, though maybe missing the power that is desired by major league teams. It’s also simply not his game to have over the fence power, but more of the gap to gap variety. Nothing wrong with that as plenty of players have that same kind of game and have found success. The drumbeats of “Crawford needs to hit the ball in the air more” have gotten louder with each rung climbed on the minor league ladder, yet here he is in the major leagues, performing decently in the early going. No one in the organization was going to expect much this year from him, preferring to lower expectations in his first go ‘round.
Yet for an extension, there has to be some kind of “above and beyond” to his game that we haven’t really seen flashes of just yet. It’s still very, very early in the season and he’s doing pretty much exactly what the team was expecting him to do, yet that isn’t the kind of offensive profile that gets one contract extensions. For those that lean on the negative side, there’s might even be the idea that if he were flashing more in his offensive game (more home run power, more balls in the air), there might even be an idea of “show it more than once” before they even thought of talking about an extension.
So while he’s doing well in his first tour around the majors, there still just isn’t enough there yet that shouts “CONTRACT EXTENSION!” for Crawford.
Andrew Painter
Pitching is expensive. We know this.
Starting pitching is really expensive. We know this as well. So why would an extension for Andrew Painter make sense over the other two? The reason is simple: ceiling and money.
Right now, the ceiling that Painter possesses is greater than anyone in the team’s minor league development system. If he reaches that ceiling, the team is looking at having another top tier starter, most days a #2, some days scraping ace-level performances. There might be a few down ballot Cy Young votes along the way, an All-Star appearance or two, all the makings of a very good pitcher. That kind of performance gets paid, handsomely.
Giving Painter an extension now might mean that the team is avoiding those awkward arbitration hearings where players hear how bad they are, contrary to their performance on the field. It would also mean locking in free agent years, however many would be agreed on, at a below market value rate, allowing the team to use possible savings to shore up different parts of the roster. As mentioned before, it makes sense from a roster standpoint so long as the money saved on one player is in turn spent on another (not necessarily a guarantee).
However…
Painter is a pitcher. Pitchers break, as Painter already has. He has made exactly one career start in the major leagues as of this writing (two by the time you read this). That is something teams rarely do for pitchers that have as little experience as Painter has. It’s not to say that teams haven’t given extensions to pitchers with little time. A list of current pitchers are:
- Brayan Bello: 6 years, $55 million – signed after he had 1+ seasons of experience
- Spencer Strider: 6 years, $75 million – highest AAV at the time for pitchers of 1+ seasons of experience
- Hunter Greene: 6 years, $53 million – signed after one year of experience
The list continues, but the theme is the same. The pitchers all had at least a year of experience pitching in the majors before the team agreed to a deal with them.
Painter, while possessing a ceiling that is on par with at least three of these names, hasn’t shown anything outside of at least one decent start that would make the Phillies want to commit long term just yet. Those talks could happen once the season is over provided Painter shows that he is worthy of the deal. There just isn’t any reason for it happen right now.
The team has received an injection of youth from Crawford and Painter so far this year and may get another if Miller proves his talent and health are worthy of a promotion. For now, though, it just doesn’t make any sense to give them guaranteed money without better (and more of a track record of) results on the field.
