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Ozzie Albies’s New Deal Could Be the Worst an MLB Player Has Ever Signed

The 22-year-old All-Star just signed the rest of his 20s over to the Atlanta Braves for a relative pittance



Contract extensions are coming thick and fast this spring, everyone’s signing extensions. Wednesday it was Matt Carpenter, Thursday it’s Ozzie Albies—blink and you’ll miss the next deal.

Albies is a 22-year-old power hitter at an up-the-middle position who was worth 3.8 bWAR in his first full big league season last year. Albies is a special talent, and if the Braves hadn’t thrown him some money up front, he’d have become very expensive soon, starting after the 2020 season when he hits arbitration.

Albies, for his part, is a key part of a winning team, playing alongside his friend, Ronald Acuña Jr., who just inked a contract extension of his own. If Albies likes the Braves, and the Braves like Albies, then clearly both sides would want to hammer out an extension. But while the idea of an extension is so obvious it’s boring, the terms are nothing short of shocking.

Albies’s contract is for seven years, $35 million guaranteed, with two team options for $7 million each and a $4 million buyout, taking the contract’s maximum length and value to nine years, $45 million.

It’s a bracingly low sum. Even within the confines of the game’s current economic structure, Albies got taken to the cleaners. According to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, it might be the worst contract a player has ever signed.

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Albies will now, in all likelihood, not reach free agency until he’s almost 31, which makes him part of an undesirable caste. In the past three offseasons, only two position players, J.D. Martinez and Yoenis Céspedes, have tested the free agent market after turning 30 and come back with a nine-figure contract.

Usually, when a player delays his free agency as much as Albies will, he gets more money up front. But that probably won’t be the case for Albies. Of course, Albies is hedging against an unrealistic worst-case scenario: What if he gets hurt?

Short of Albies being abducted by aliens, he isn’t getting much of a salary advance or mitigating that much risk by extending his contract.

It is, in short, an inexplicable contract. It’s the product of leaguewide efforts—coordinated or not—to depress player salaries and the Braves’ willingness to leverage Albies’s structural negotiating advantages against him. And even factoring in how infuriatingly the odds were stacked against Albies, it’s astonishing that his agent, SportsMeter, not only failed to work out a better deal, but allowed him to sign this one.