On Wednesday night, Alex Bregman and the Red Sox reached agreement on a three-year, $120 million contract that included both deferrals and the ability for the infielder to opt out after the 2025 or 2026 season — a structure that potentially adds value for Bregman while dampening costs for the Sox.
Bregman will receive a $5 million signing bonus with a $35 million salary for 2025 and, if he doesn’t opt out, $40 million salaries for 2026 and 2027. The deferrals in each season are expected to be significant.
The deferrals, in turn, lower the average annual value (AAV) to $31.9 million as calculated by MLB for luxury-tax purposes, lowering the impact on the Red Sox payroll. They also mean that the present-day value for Bregman is less than $40 million.
However, the player opt-outs carry enormous value for Bregman, arguably tens of millions of dollars.
Bregman’s market was impacted to some degree by the fact that the Astros gave him a qualifying offer — meaning that a signing team had to part with a draft pick in order to add him — and that 2024 represented something of an offensive down year. He hit .260/.315/.453 with 26 homers, numbers that were dampened by poor performance in April and May, but recovered over the season’s final four months.
In signing with the Red Sox, Bregman is going to a park where he’s excelled (seven homers in 21 career games and a 1.240 OPS, highest in Fenway history for a player with at least 75 plate appearances) and where his ability to pull the ball in the air plays perfectly. Comerica Park and Wrigley Field — homes of the Tigers and Cubs, two of the other teams that most aggressively pursued Bregman — are less hospitable to righthanded pull hitters.
So, it’s possible Bregman, at age 31, could post improved numbers, particularly if his elevated chase rate last season (23.6 percent, up from 18.5 in 2023) proves an aberration. If that happens, then after a very valuable season for the Red Sox, he could opt out of his deal and return to the market off a better year and without a qualifying offer.
How valuable might that be? In the winter of 2023-24, Matt Chapman — coming off a .240/.330/.424, 17-homer season with the Blue Jays that, at age 30, fell short of his career norms — signed a three-year, $54 million deal with the Giants that included opt-outs after the first two seasons. (According to a major league source, he encountered offers as high as five years, $85 million.) Chapman had a power resurgence in San Francisco (.247/.328/.463, 27 homers) that positioned him to retest the market.
The Giants headed off that possibility with a six-year, $151 million extension during the season. In the first two years of that deal alone, he will make $15 million more than he was set to make on the original three-year deal. And between his one-year salary in 2024 and the six-year deal, he’ll make a guaranteed $169 million — nearly double the $85 million top-end guarantee that he had for five years during the 2023-24 offseason.
In short, the Red Sox and Bregman found a structure that made sense for both sides. The Sox made a huge investment — the $31.9 million represents the highest AAV in team history — but somewhat mitigated their luxury-tax hit. (As of now, they still project to have a payroll as calculated for luxury-tax purposes of roughly $245 million, which would be the largest in franchise history, and take them past the $241 million threshold.)
Bregman, meanwhile, gets to go to a park where he could thrive, and gets three chances to pick the best opportunity to return to free agency while still in his early 30s, where long-term deals should still be within reach.
Alex Speier can be reached at alex.speier@globe.com. Follow him @alexspeier.
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