The case for and against giving a massive contract to Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

When the Toronto Blue Jays‘ longshot bid for Juan Soto failed, there was no equivalent player in the free agent market they could pivot to.

Although that opportunity may not exist in free agency, the Blue Jays roster contains a 25-year-old hitter with a year of team control left who just produced the sixth-best offensive season in franchise history by wRC+. If Toronto and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. agree on a contract extension before the 2025 season opens, it will be dwarfed by Soto’s deal but significantly larger than any other free-agent contract. 

That’s a significant “if” though. While Guerrero has expressed an interest in staying, and the team undoubtedly wants to keep its offensive centrepiece, there are no indications that a deal is imminent.

On the surface that seems odd. The Blue Jays are low on foundational pieces like Guerrero, and they can — if their pursuits of Soto and Shohei Ohtani tell us anything — afford him. So what’s the holdup?

To understand that, let’s zoom in on the case for and against a massive contract for the slugger. To get a little more specific, for the purposes of this contract, a “mega deal” means $400 million or more.

That may seem aggressive based on common comparables like Rafael Devers. Still, players have been shattering contract projections this off-season, and Soto’s contract will have a knock-on effect on a Guerrero deal, even if the outfielder is a better player. 

THE CASE FOR GIVING GUERRERO THE MEGA DEAL

To give Guerrero the type of contract he’s seeking, you need to believe two things:

1. The player he’s been in 2021 and 2024 is more or less the player he’ll be through his prime.

2. He makes contributions to the Blue Jays that cannot be captured entirely by overall value metrics.

Qualitative Reasons to Sign Guerrero

• He is a “face of the franchise” player who engages fans and moves merchandise. In a league where individual star power is hard to come by, Guerrero has it.

• The Blue Jays are dealing with a consumer-confidence crisis and failure to re-sign Guerrero would be a devastating blow to an already-sour fanbase that could genuinely affect ticket sales, ratings, etc.

• Andrés Giménez is the only established major-league player under team control past 2026 due to the opt-out in the José Berríos contract. Having a player to build a lineup around could help clarify the team’s future competitive prospects.

• If Guerrero stays, he is likely to shatter numerous team records and become the sort of Blue Jays legend that brings prestige to the franchise. A Hall of Fame plaque is no guarantee, but another name for the Level of Excellence is almost a given.

Quantitative Reasons to Sign Guerrero

This is where things can arguably get a little bit hairy. 

Because Guerrero has experienced some year-to-year volatility, his career averages aren’t in line with the contract he will command — even if you consider his first two seasons development years that aren’t predictive of what he’ll do next.

If you were representing Guerrero, you might not be able to get away with making the case that only his 2021 and 2024 seasons really count, but it would be fair to base your ask on a 2025 projection that closely mirrors those seasons and the slugger’s youth. 

This is what Steamer has Guerrero producing next year:

Because of Guerrero’s youth, let’s say it’s fair to expect this production level for a while, perhaps through his 20s — or until the end of the 2028 season. Then we can project out the rest of a deal in two more four-season chunks, his early 30s (30-33) and true decline phase (34-37) for a 12-year contract. There has been no firm confirmation that’s a term Guerrero is specifically looking for but it’s in the ballpark.

Last time we did an exercise like this, we projected the value of fWAR to rise approximately with the recent history of inflation. Because that estimate of a fair contract fell about 13 per cent short of what Juan Soto got, we’ll boost the yearly jumps in the cost of fWAR by approximately 13 per cent more to course correct. 

That means the value of a win is going up 3.48 per cent per season this time around — and away we go on our first four years:

At this point, Guerrero would be outpacing his contract and for the next chunk of his career, we will find an appropriate comp for how his early 30s might go. 

There’s no perfect one-to-one, but Paul Goldschmidt stands out due to his extreme similarity to Guerrero on rate stats from the beginning of his career through his age-25 season.

Goldschmidt debuted later than Guerrero, but those numbers line up well and it’s good that he’s a modern-era player who had advanced nutritional and training resources available to mitigate the effects of aging.

Between Goldschmidt’s age-30 and age-33 seasons, his fWAR/600 declined 10.8 per cent from the previous four years. If we apply that to Guerrero’s same age range and keep the price of a fWAR ticking up, you get this:

There are a few holes you could poke in this section as Goldschmidt arguably aged better than average, and it’s possible we are overcorrecting on the increasing value of one fWAR, but this is the bull case for Guerrero. 

It’s also notable that there aren’t many comps to draw on for Guerrero. 

Just seven qualified first basemen have posted a wRC+ above 130 through their age-25 season since 2000:

• Albert Pujols (164) — Significantly too good.
• Paul Goldschmidt (139) — Our pick.
• Joey Votto (138) — Radical stylistic differences from Guerrero.
• Prince Fielder (137) — Career ended abruptly.
• Freddie Freeman (131) — Got significantly better in his early 30s, which isn’t a fair expectation.
• Matt Olson (130) — The story is yet to be written.

When we get to our last four-year period, it seems like the best move would be to go for a full-time DH because that’s what Guerrero projects to be late in his career. Let’s go with a name familiar to Blue Jays fans whose career in Toronto looks similar to Guerrero’s offensively: Edwin Encarnacion.

Between age 34 and 37, Encarnacion’s fWAR per 600 plate appearances (1.8) dropped from what he had managed between age 30 and 33 (3.8) by 52.6 per cent. If we apply that decline to Guerrero — while incorporating the positional adjustment from 1B to DH, we get something like this.

That gets you to $442.46 million in on-field value over 12 years though an actual contract based on this would be slightly lower, considering he’s still under team control through 2025 rather than a free agent. 

The inflation adjustment may be aggressive, and the decline in the early 30s may not be significant enough — particularly if Guerrero becomes a full-time DH earlier than age 34. 

All of this is a look at Guerrero through rose-coloured glasses, but it’s a feasible interpretation of his value — not a best-case scenario. The star and his camp have legitimate reason to believe they can get a deal north of $400 million, even if there are reasonable arguments against shelling out a contract of that magnitude for him.

THE CASE AGAINST GIVING GUERRERO THE MEGA DEAL

Many Blue Jays fans find the argument against giving Guerrero the type of extension he hopes to earn a tough sell. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, it is worth understanding the team’s potential holdups.

Qualitative Reasons Not to Sign Guerrero

Honestly, there isn’t anything notable here. 

Guerrero doesn’t have known off-field negatives associated with him, and there are many positives related to extending him that can’t be captured in overall value metrics.

Quantitative Reasons Not to Sign Guerrero 

We won’t mock out a whole other alternative timeline for Guerrero, but there are reasons to doubt the purposely positive outlook outlined above.

Guerrero’s 2025 Steamer projection may be strong, but he’s arguably only been a star-level player in two of his six MLB seasons. As recently as 2023, his 1.3 fWAR ranked 185th among position players. Over the past three seasons, FanGraphs estimates his average on-field value at $26.9 million per year. 

It’s exceedingly rare for a player to land a long-term deal at a price point where replicating his recent seasons would make the deal an overpay early on. Players generally get an AAV that makes them good value for their team in the first few years of their deals while they project to outearn their production later. 

To nitpick the projection, it also gives Guerrero a defensive value (-13.0 runs) better than his full-season average (-17.0) runs. Same with base running, where Steamer sees him as only slightly below average (-2.3 runs) when his full-season average sits at -2.9 by FanGraphs’ baserunning metric. Meanwhile, Baseball Savant just launched a “Baserunning Run Value” stat that identified Guerrero as the worst runner in the majors (-6 runs), two worse than anyone else.

That might seem like small potatoes, but If you assume his base running and defence in 2025 will match his career averages, suddenly you’re looking at closer to a 4.5 fWAR projection. If we used that in the case for Guerrero above, it would knock nearly $18 million off his value in the first four years of a new deal alone.

Even if you fully believe in Guerrero’s bat, it’s possible the other aspects of his game drag him down even more than other first basemen.

In discussions of Guerrero’s future prospects, it’s often assumed that 2021 and 2024 represent his true talent, while 2022 and 2023 are unrepresentative. The Gold Glove on his mantel and his penchant for making dramatic stretches in the field also tell the story of a player who may be better defensively than advanced metrics suggest.

Those ideas aren’t unreasonable, but they aren’t ironclad truths either. If Guerrero’s work from 2022 to 2023 still has something to say about what he is going forward, the kind of deal he’s seeking will be an overpay. If his defence and base running are as much of a problem as the cold, hard numbers suggest, that has a meaningful impact on how to value him.

The goal here is not to make a statement about what should happen with Guerrero but rather to show that he’s a player who is up for interpretation even after his fantastic 2024. There are intellectually honest arguments for and against handing him the type of deal his seeking.

For the Blue Jays to pull the trigger on an extension, they’ll need to believe that Guerrero truly is the guy he was this year or that the qualitative reasons for keeping him are worth millions. Probably both. 

They might need to be the kind of team willing to go out on a limb and overshoot their own internal valuations out of faith in a player — a description that’s seldom fit them in the past.

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