If you’re the sort of person who likes the Red Sox and good baseball players on your favorite baseball team it’s been a rough three or so seasons for you. The Red Sox strategy since winning the World Series in 2018 seems, broadly speaking, to have been, ‘create wins from air.’ Now, to be fair, there are some teams who can pull this off. Have you checked out the Rays roster recently?
But the Red Sox, try as they might, are not the Rays, a point that has been hammered home repeatedly with increasing force over the past few seasons. And so, while it’s not *not* a Rays move, the six year contract extension the Red Sox signed with starting pitcher Brayan Bello qualifies as keeping a good baseball player on the team. And so I say: hooray!
The particulars: a six year, $55 million contract extension with a single one-year team option on the end valued at $21 million. If it’s picked up, the whole thing can be a seven year, $76 million deal. That’s in line with other recent contract extensions signed by young pitchers. Spencer Strider got a six year deal at $75 million from Atlanta and Hunter Greene of the Reds got a six year deal worth $53 million. Bello isn’t Strider, but Greene seems like a decent comp, and apparently the Red Sox thought so as well.
In real world terms this gives the Red Sox two more years of team control. Whereas previously Bello could have been a free agent following the 2028 season, now he’ll be a free agent following the 2029 season and if the Red Sox pick up their option, he won’t hit the market until after the 2030 season, at which point he’ll be 30 years old.
Is this good? From Bello’s perspective, a guy who signed as an international free agent for $28,000, a $55 million guarantee is life-changing money. So, again, hooray! From a Red Sox perspective it’s certainly not bad. Bello isn’t an ace, but he’s good now and still has some upside (which I’ll talk about momentarily), so he’s absolutely worth keeping around and this contract does that for an additional two seasons. I’d have liked a second one year option on the back end of the deal, but it’s not worth scuttling the deal over. Bello is a good pitcher, he’s healthy, and he’s young. Sign him now, and hey, they did.
The downside is the same with Bello as it would be for any other pitcher. As we just saw with Lucas Giolito, a pitcher’s body can give out at any time and with little notice. That’s the argument for not signing Bello to an extension. Previously, due to MLB’s salary structure, Bello was on a series of one-year contracts, meaning the Red Sox could get out of having to pay him almost at any time. Now, they’re obligated to pay him even if he’s bad, or hurt, or bad because he’s hurt. That’s the downside.
However, $55 million isn’t much, and if you believe in Bello, guaranteeing the money is worth the additional seasons of team control.
As for Bello the pitcher, we only have one season in the majors to go off of, but he was fine. He was worth 1.6 fWAR in 157 innings last year, so a two or three win pitcher going forward isn’t out of the question. Bello gets tons of grounders and doesn’t walk guys, but he struggled with giving up homers and generating strikeouts. It’s that last one that is really limiting, as you just can’t be an ace in today’s game if you’re not striking out an above average number of hitters. Can he get there? Maybe. As Jacob Roy pointed out at Over The Monster last September, Bello began throwing a more sweepy slider late last season.
Sweeping sliders or “Sweepers” are all the rage in baseball right now and they’re all the rage because they’re pretty effective punch-out pitches. That’s sort of what Bello is missing: a good punch-out pitch. If he now has one, that’s a game changer. Last season Bello K’d 133 in 157 innings. You’d really like that first number to be at least 160 and honestly more like 180. So far this spring Bello has five strikeouts in five innings, but even if he had 10 or 0, so what? It’s spring training. So who knows? We’ll have to wait until the games count and see if he’s the same guy he was last season, or a better version of that guy in some way.
It’s worth pointing out that Bello worked with Pedro Martinez over the off-season. Bello is never going to be Martinez, but that can’t hurt, and maybe it’ll help as well. And finally, recall that Craig Breslow was hired by the Red Sox with a resume as a pitching guru. Much of the efforts during his first off-season in charge have been spent building out the team’s pitching infrastructure, including hiring Kyle Boddy, the founder of Driveline, Justin Willard as the team’s Director of Pitching, and Andrew Bailey as the new pitching coach. Perhaps this group of pitching experts can make a couple tweaks to Bello’s arsenal to further enhance his effectiveness, especially against lefties. Again, we’ll see how and if that plays out.
Ultimately though, my takeaway is that it’s just great to see the Red Sox investing in their own young players again. With Triston Casas another candidate for a deal in this vein as well as the prospect triumvirate of Kyle Teel, Roman Anthony, and Marcelo Mayer set to begin to make their major league debuts in the coming seasons, it’s good to see that keeping young, good players in the organization long term is still an arrow in this team’s quiver.
Thanks for reading.
Thanks, Matt.
Love the deal. It doesn’t come without risk, of course, and projecting a pitcher’s development is tricky.
But even if Bello is only a solid No. 3 starter, this is well worth it. He is a potential ace, but he isn’t getting anything close to ace money.