The Athletics and the Cost of a Bad Extension
The A's have seen mixed results from the recent extensions they've handed out. Will it change their approach to offering these deals?
“Here comes the runner Donaldson! He’s safe, he’s safe! The ball game is over! The Blue Jays are moving on to the ALCS!”
That was the call of Brian Anderson to cap Game 3 of the 2016 ALDS matchup between the Toronto Blue Jays and Texas Rangers as the reigning AL MVP, Josh Donaldson, slid into home to advance the Jays to the pennant.
It also serves as one of the countless examples of emotional scarring that Athletics fans have endured while watching their former players go on to have immense success with other teams when their organization decides they have been priced out of the players’ services.
Throughout the 21st century, the Oakland Athletics were infamous for cutting bait on their stars once free agency nears rather than opting to extend their services.
From Josh Donaldson’s Blue Jays MVP, to Marcus Semien’s Texas Rangers World Series ring, to Matt Olson’s Atlanta Braves 54-home-run season, acquiring ex-Athletics has seemed to be a tried-and-true method for general managers across the league to get impact players in their prime. As the ownership group cried poor, the rest of Major League Baseball treated them as a farm team.
This was until the Oakland Athletics were no longer the Oakland Athletics.
A’s owner John Fisher announced in April 2023 that the club would be relocating to Las Vegas due to its booming economy in contrast to Oakland. And with this move came promises. Promises such as increased spending, an improved roster, and a plan for a long-term sustainable winner that retains its stars throughout their careers.
Soon after the move was announced, the front office leaped into action, locking up blossoming stars such as Tyler Soderstrom, Brent Rooker, Lawrence Butler, and Jacob Wilson with pre-arbitration extensions. But with the start of 2026 yielding mixed results in terms of performance from these four members of the A’s lineup, the question has quickly become: Did the Athletics lock up the right young talent?
Stats updated prior to games on July 4.
The Art of the Pre-Arb Extension
Pre-arbitration extensions have become one of the buzziest and most popular approaches to building a sustainable winner for major league franchises throughout the 21st century, specifically for small-market teams like the Athletics.
The advantages are obvious. The organization is able to extend an elite talent before they hit the peak of their success for a discounted price, and the player is contractually guaranteed generational wealth at a young age rather than waiting until they hit free agency.
A few of the many examples of this being mutually beneficial for player and team are the Kansas City Royals locking up star shortstop Bobby Witt Jr., the Seattle Mariners securing the services of stud center fielder Julio Rodríguez, and even, to a lesser extent, the Tampa Bay Rays guaranteeing themselves above-average play at second base with Brandon Lowe for nearly a decade.
However, nothing good in life comes without risk.
For every example of a phenomenal extension, there are several that fail dramatically. Scott Kingery, Evan White, and David Bote are among the names that the average baseball fan has forgotten but who still cashed out for millions of dollars. These failures are often due to a player’s performance floundering after being extended and not living up to the hopes of the organization.
This is where the art of the pre-arb contract extension comes into play.
The ability to identify and develop young talent is at the nucleus of any well-run organization in baseball. Many often believe that identifying talent is simply an external tool that scouting departments utilize as they discover talent to acquire in the draft, internationally, or from other franchises.
However, the importance of identifying what an organization has in its own house is just as important as scouting what’s outside of it.
Pinpointing an elite talent that has not fully blossomed yet within your own organization is at the core of what pre-arbitration extensions are meant to be. An internal scouting department observing its young talent closely, while also using analytics and projection models, offers a front office the ability to take a well-educated guess on which players will improve upon current performance and provide more value to the team than their salary would indicate.
Essentially, the art of a pre-arb extension is to buy low on a player before they explode and the cost of securing their talent skyrockets. This is exactly where the Athletics need to improve.
The Good
Jacob Wilson was selected sixth overall in the 2023 MLB Draft by the A’s out of Grand Canyon University. Wilson boasts an elite-level hit tool that has should lead him to consistently be a threat to eclipse the .300 average threshold and lead the league in hitting. He has fared adequately at shortstop defensively through his first year and change in MLB and finished second in AL Rookie of the Year voting in 2025.
The Athletics rewarded this early success by inking him to a seven-year, $70 million contract extension in February 2026.
Wilson was a reasonably safe extension candidate, as he turned only 24 this spring, and his hit tool is likely to carry him to being a top-of-the-order bat at the plate. If he can extrapolate his success at shortstop early this season, then he can be a well-above-average player for the entirety of his prime.
Despite all of this, he is most certainly not an exceptional extension candidate and was potentially not even a wise one for an organization like the Athletics.
Wilson has several glaring red flags in his game that are worth noting. He’s chasing at a 40.6% rate, has an unbelievably low walk rate of 4.7%, is a subpar runner on the bases, and does not hit the ball hard consistently.
These tendencies will prevent him from ever being a true five-tool player and star in this league, and they also cap his overall value quite significantly. For a player that a small-market team like the Athletics allocated tens of millions of dollars to, there just is not a lot to dream on with Wilson.
The deficiencies of Wilson’s game should not overshadow the outlier-level hit tool he provides and the potential plus glove. However, it is wildly unlikely that a player of his archetype ever makes an extension of this nature look like a bargain for the A’s, which will likely leave fans scratching their heads as to its necessity.
The Bad
Lawrence Butler was a high school draft pick by the A’s in the 2018 MLB Draft. He spent nearly half a decade in the farm system and debuted for the big club in 2023. While his cup of coffee in the big leagues was quite tame, his sophomore season provided Athletics fans a great deal of excitement.
In 2024, Butler slashed .262/.317/.490 for an .807 OPS. He crushed 22 homers and swiped 18 bags while he was at it, flirting with a 20/20 season. In a bleak final year at Rickey Henderson Field in Oakland, Butler offered one of the few glimmers of hope.
So naturally, in the offseason following this breakout season, the Athletics extended Butler on a seven-year, $65.5 million contract in March.
Since that extension date, the A’s right fielder has regressed mightily. Last year, his OPS dropped an alarming .097. And this year, he has absolutely fallen off a cliff in terms of offensive production. Currently, FanGraphs ranks him as one of the least valuable players in baseball this season, as he possesses a -1.0 fWAR and a .589 OPS, all while being a below-average defender in the outfield.
Butler has become borderline unplayable for the Athletics in 2026 and still has five years remaining on his contract extension.
The burden of responsibility for a potential albatross of an extension like this must fall on the internal scouting department and player development staff. The hope for Butler and his contract is derived from his age, however. He is only 25, which points toward optimism, as he has an immense amount of physical talent that is unlikely to diminish anytime soon.
It is paramount that the Athletics help him harness this talent and remedy the collapse so they can salvage what was once meant to be a cornerstone of the franchise.
Butler is an excellent case study and example of the cost of misidentifying young talent that has a breakout year, and A’s fans, along with baseball fans everywhere, hope he is able to course-correct and avoid becoming a black hole of a contract for the club.
The Ugly
Brent Rooker took a much different path to the A’s starting lineup than Wilson, Soderstrom, and Butler. He spent time with the Twins, Padres, and Royals, eventually making his way to the Athletics after being claimed on waivers following being DFA’d by Kansas City.
However, once Rooker touched down in Oakland in 2023, he wasted no time making his former employers look foolish for cutting ties with him. The A’s slotted him into the middle of their order in the DH spot, and he rewarded them with an .817 OPS and 30 bombs, becoming their sole representative in the Midsummer Classic.
In 2024, he built on his success and swatted 39 homers while accumulating a .927 OPS, putting together what was a career year for Rooker.
Following the trend they started with Wilson and Butler, the Athletics locked up the slugger to a five-year, $60 million contract extension the following winter.
Subsequent to his breakout year, Rooker had a very similar encore to Butler’s. In 2025, he quickly returned to his 2023 form, slashing .262/.335/.479 for an .814 OPS.
Rooker was still a valuable piece in the order but did not showcase the top-of-the-line, elite-level offensive numbers that he did in 2024. And again, similar to Butler, this year his performance got off to an alarmingly poor start. He produced a .670 OPS and negative fWAR through 48 games before a knee injury ended his season.
A massive element of why this contract extension looked so troubling for the Athletics, even before Rooker’s injury, is the lack of positional versatility that he offers.
Rooker has spent the majority of his tenure with the A’s being a stalwart in the designated hitter role, a role that is tasked only with concerning itself with one side of the game of baseball and providing value through mashing offensively.
To have a player filling that position day in and day out who is performing as a below-average hitter handcuffs the manager and clogs the lineup. In short, if a player like Rooker is not accumulating value offensively, then it makes it incredibly challenging for the A’s to utilize him, making this quite the dangerous profile to extend if the front office is not 100% certain his bat will produce for the next half-decade.
Additionally, another dangerous and questionable component of this extension is Rooker’s age. Due to his nonlinear path to an everyday big-league role, he is quite a bit older than his aforementioned teammates, as he turned 31 years old in November of this past year.
In fact, when Rooker was inked to his five-year extension, he was already 30 years old and had accumulated only about two years of big league service time. Therefore, the Athletics extending him an additional five years bought out his age-34 and age-35 seasons from free agency.
This is a very questionable strategy considering that, for the general big leaguer, ages 34 and 35 are when regression often arrives and performance begins to dip due to diminishing physical talent.
Other than cost certainty and rewarding a player for previous performance, it is very difficult to see the reasoning behind identifying a designated hitter on the wrong side of 30 as an extension candidate, especially when they already held the rights to his services for the duration of his physical prime.
The Right Approach
Tyler Soderstrom was selected at the tail end of the first round in the COVID-shortened 2020 MLB Draft. He was chosen 26th overall and rose through the farm system as a slugging catcher in the following years, eventually getting the call-up in 2023.
The start of his big league career was mired in poor performance and bus trips back and forth between the A’s Triple-A affiliate and Oakland until 2025, when he finally found his footing.
Soderstrom proved to be a massive factor in the Athletics lineup during their first season in Sacramento. He cemented himself as a middle-of-the-order bat for them, hammering 25 home runs and achieving an .820 OPS. He even provided the A’s with defensive versatility, as they repositioned him to left field in order to get him more everyday at-bats.
The Athletics then quickly decided to make Soderstrom a part of the long-term future for the ballclub and signed him to a seven-year, $86 million contract.
This extension was different, though. Soderstrom did not come with glaring red flags in his offensive profile, as he provided a well-rounded game that is likely only to improve.
He did not sign on the dotted line while already battling Father Time, as he is only 24 years old for the duration of the 2026 season. He did not sign with limited positional versatility, as he has the ability to play catcher, first base, and left field, and even provided the A’s with average left-field play in 2025 even though it was his first year at the position.
Most importantly, Soderstrom has not regressed immediately after signing his extension.
Through his first 80 games in 2026, he has hit 13 home runs and has an .803 OPS, putting him in an excellent position to at least match his 2025 breakout campaign.
All signs indicate that the A’s front office correctly identified Soderstrom as an ascending asset that needed to be a mainstay in their lineup for years to come. He provides by far the least amount of risk of the four extended players because he can provide the Athletics value in so many different ways. And all the while, there is still room for Soderstrom to grow, as he evidently possesses an incredibly exciting ceiling to build toward.
Soderstrom is an excellent example of the profile that the A’s and teams like them should be targeting and trying to identify when they pursue a pre-arbitration extension: a talent with potential for high reward and a floor that will at least result in the organization getting some form of return on its investment.
Soderstrom’s teammates Shea Langeliers and Nick Kurtz fit the bill as players within this archetype who, if the A’s had the foresight to extend them this past offseason or prior, would already make the front office look like geniuses.
However, due to Langeliers’ and Kurtz’s overwhelming success so far this season, it is incredibly likely that they have priced themselves out of being career Athletics. These power bats have built on promising 2025 seasons and have blown past expectations to become two of the most feared hitters in the game this season.
As Langeliers, Kurtz, and potentially Soderstrom suit up for what will likely be the first of many All-Star Games, it is fair to wonder whether the Athletics front office will be having buyer’s remorse regarding its allocation of payroll for years to come.
As the Athletics are finally opening up their bank account to roster payroll and indicating that they are looking to build a competitive winner, they are quickly learning that who they send their checks to is just as important as the newfound ability to write them.
The roller coaster-like results of these extensions will undoubtedly have an impact on the Athletics front office. It is just a question of whether it will lead them to become gun-shy about locking up young talent in the future or to reform how they approach the process of identifying extension candidates.
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