Would you rather have a guaranteed $140 million today or a chance at $1 billion six years from now? That very well may have been the decision facing Konnor Griffin earlier this month, and we know which path he chose.

The vast majority of us probably would have made the same decision as Griffin, who signed a nine-year, $140 million deal with the Pirates less than a week into his major league career. Lots of things can go wrong in six years that could eliminate that potential billion-dollar payout, let alone the many millions of dollars currently on the table. Griffin is far from the only young star in recent years to take the money. Bobby Witt Jr., Corbin Carroll, Julio Rodríguez, and fellow 2026 rookie Kevin McGonigle, among others, have made the same choice.

Michael Baumann recently looked into whether baseball has gone too far with all of these early extensions, so I won’t wade into that discussion here. Instead, I’d encourage you to read his piece. The thing to understand is that this is happening because both the teams and the players are incentivized to come to an early extension agreement, even if it might not be in their best long-term interest.

Still, Griffin’s combination of youth and ability set him up to be an even more attractive free agent target than any of the players who’ve signed early extensions in recent years. And had he not been so risk averse, he might have been worthy of baseball’s first 10-figure contract. How? It’s pretty simple, but far from easy. Just become the next Juan Soto.

Sure, comparing these two ballplayers makes little sense in some ways. Despite leading the National League in stolen bases in 2025, Soto is relatively slow. He also walks more than he strikes out, and is a defensively limited outfielder who is likely to shift to first base or designated hitter not too many years from now.

Griffin, on the other hand, is a top-tier speedster built like a football safety. He strikes out roughly twice as often as he walks, and is a reasonable bet to play shortstop for at least the first half of his career before perhaps sliding over to third base at some point in his 30s, not unlike Cal Ripken Jr. or Alex Rodriguez. (Hey, if we’re going to cite Soto, why not also invite comparisons to a first-ballot Hall of Famer and a guy with 696 home runs?)

Soto broke into the big leagues in 2018 at age 19, playing over two-thirds of the Washington Nationals’ game that season, reaching 494 plate appearances with a stellar .292/.406/.517 triple-slash line that overcame already weak defense to lead to 3.7 WAR.

He continued to pile up fantastic batting lines (and display poor glovework) during the next six seasons, spending three and a half more with the Nationals, then bouncing to the Padres for a year and a half and the Yankees in his walk year before becoming a free agent ahead of his age-26 season. If you consider his 116-game rookie campaign and the COVID-shortened 2020 as the equivalent of one season, Soto posted 36.6 WAR during what were essentially six full seasons prior to his pre-free agency tenure.

Betting on himself year after year (famously turning down a 15-year, $440 million offer from the Nats) allowed Soto to reach new benchmarks in arbitration, as he eventually hauled in over $80 million total before hitting the open market. And then Soto obliterated every prior free agent sports contract, signing with the New York Mets for the same 15-year term offered by Washington, but this time for $765 million. That was a $315 million winning bet, an incredibly savvy move by the precocious superstar.

That’s the rather straightforward benchmark for which Griffin needed to shoot. Stay healthy, compile a half-dozen 6-WAR seasons, and then sit back and wait for the gargantuan offers to come his way. So, how could he accumulate all of those 6-WAR seasons? Clearly, it’s a lofty expectation, but Griffin has a couple of immediate advantages that Soto lacked.

First, he’s a shortstop, while Soto is a corner outfielder, so the positional adjustment alone gains Griffin 15 runs, or roughly 1.5 WAR. On top of that inherent advantage, the fact is, Soto has never been a good fielder, averaging roughly -10 runs per year. Conversely, Griffin is viewed as an above-average defender, so +5 runs per season seems reasonable, doubling the defensive separation between the two players to 3.0 WAR.

Second, Soto has been a below-average baserunner in his career, averaging about -1.0 run per season. Meanwhile, Griffin has 70-grade speed and has achieved 98th-percentile sprint speed in early 2026 action. An average of 4.0 runs per year seems reasonable — conservative, even — and gives Griffin another 0.5 WAR edge on Soto. Given the significant variability of defensive and baserunning values, let’s tame our wild expectations somewhat by blending and smoothing those two advantages and yielding a 2.5-WAR edge for Griffin from those factors.

Building on that sizable head start achieved before stepping into the batter’s box, all Griffin would have to do is produce another 3.5 WAR per season with his bat. Shouldn’t be a problem, right? There are myriad of ways for hitters to be successful, but based on the type of player Griffin was in the minors, we can patch together an estimated batting line. We won’t use the projection systems stored at FanGraphs, which are designed to be conservative, and instead go with an approximation of what his ceiling could reasonably be over his first six seasons.

Griffin’s approach is unlikely to lead to the .400-plus on-base percentages that Soto posts, but his speed should allow him to get to first base often when he puts the ball in play. And at 6-foot-3 and 222 pounds, Griffin should also display significant power as he gains more big league experience. Indeed, the FanGraphs prospect analyst team of Eric Longenhagen, Brendan Gawlowski, and James Fegan gave Griffin future values of 70 for both his raw power and his game power when ranking him no. 1 on their preseason Top 100 Prospects list. (For what it’s worth, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel assigned Soto a 60 FV for raw power and a 55 for game power when they evaluated him ahead of the 2018 season.) Again, we’re making a case for a massive payout, so let’s skew toward generosity and give Griffin a .280/.360/.490 triple-slash line on average for the six seasons, something akin to a Soto-Carroll mash-up, just on the infield dirt instead of the outfield grass. Offensive environment certainly matters, and in the reduced hitting environment of the last several seasons, those standout numbers should easily be worth at least 3.5 WAR per season.

Voila, we’ve done it! Somebody give Griffin one of those giant checks that lottery winners receive, because we’ve morphed him into the modern-day equivalent of turn-of-the-millennium A-Rod, another young superstar shortstop who obliterated the prior record for largest contract. But wait, $765 million is a far cry from $1 billion, right? It certainly is, but inflation is an inevitability for all of us, and a few years of compounding adds up quickly.

Soto signed his megadeal prior to the 2025 season, while Griffin would have been a free agent heading into 2032, assuming he receives a full year of service credit this season by finishing in the top two in the NL Rookie of the Year voting. If baseball salaries experience just a 4% average annual increase during that seven-year time period, the result is a 31.6% gain. Multiply $765 million by 1.316, and you get a bit more than $1.006 billion.

If you’re Griffin, and you’ve just achieved an equivalent performance to one of the best young players the game has ever seen, stayed healthy over the last six years, and are in line to continue playing a more premium defensive position than Soto, a contract of that magnitude would be justifiable, though maybe you’d be magnanimous and round it down to an even $1 billion.

Of course, now that he’s locked up through his age-28 season, Griffin’s situation mirrors that of so many of his contemporaries. Having just turned 20 years old, he’s set for life — and well beyond — while Pittsburgh fans have assurance that he’ll be playing in a Pirates uniform at least into the mid-2030s. In return, Griffin’s free agency has been postponed three seasons — three prime performance (and earning) seasons. Unless he significantly outperforms what we’ve estimated above and baseball inflation sours, we’ll have to continue waiting for MLB’s first billion-dollar superstar. And who knows how long that wait will be?

I imagine most people reading this have a favorite team. And over time, you’ve likely had numerous players on that team whom you particularly enjoyed watching play. But when push comes to shove, who receives your greatest loyalty, the team or the players?

I’m a Cardinals fan, and I greatly enjoyed Albert Pujols‘ contributions to the Redbirds’ success during his 11 years wearing the birds on the bat. Since he’s left St. Louis? Sure, I’ve been happy for him when he’s done well — getting his 3,000th hit as well as his 500th and 600th home runs — but it’s not the same. He’s an Angel now, not a Cardinal, so I’m simply not as invested in his accomplishments.

This stance is probably understandably similar for most of you. Teams are (mostly) eternal, while players are ephemeral. Can I name the starting eight position players for the 2011 Cardinals? Probably not, but I still know they won the World Series that year.

When it gets flipped, however, is when we go off the playing field and into the negotiating room. When the owners and players are battling over matters of the game — particularly the divvying up of the loot — I largely stand behind the players. The owners become the faceless, monolithic corporations that extort billion-dollar ballparks from their communities and work extremely hard to give the players as small a portion of the pot as possible, while the players have short careers and are positioning themselves to take care of their families as much as possible before their careers end.

Of course, it’s not that cut-and-dried. Both sides have their virtuous and unseemly characteristics. Each group is willing to put their interests before others.

But regardless of who sticks it to whom for their own benefit, it’s largely the players who suffer the vitriol of the fans and media when the two sides clash. The question is, why is that? The answers actually make a lot of sense — even if they really don’t. Read the rest of this entry »