Atlanta Braves now have an extension benchmark for Acuna

A week ago, I was wondering what form a contract extension for Ronald Acuna might look like, but the dollars… were difficult to guess.  Now we have something to go on.

Last week, I looked at the history of some early contract extensions and speculated on what the Atlanta Braves could offer Ronald Acuna in a move to get him to the big leagues early.

In all honesty, that’s probably off the table now (for this season) with the signing of Peter Bourjos, but yesterday the Phillies set a new bar for such deals by agreeing with 2B Scott Kingery on a $24 million guaranteed deal over 6 years – the number of initial years that they would have had him under control had he started the full year in Philadelphia.

All that and Kingery has yet to have a single day of major league service time.

But wait, there’s more:  the club also secured three club option years – 2024/2025/2026 at rates that one agent called “offensive” (i.e., a boon for the Phillies) in a statement to Ken Rosenthal.

Those rates were $13/$14/$15 million dollars, making the maximum value of the contract to be $66 million over 9 seasons.

While this contract deal represents something very close to the kind of framework I suggested last week, but nearly-24-year-old Scott Kingery was ranked as the 35th best prospect in baseball by MLB Pipeline and the second-or-third best Phillies prospect, depending on who you trust for that information.

So the Phils are wagering $24 million for a player that’s a bit lower on the totem pole than Ozzie Albies (never mind Acuna).

So Acuna would require more.  Quite a bit more, in fact.  Maybe as much as double?

Let’s do a breakdown…